 2006 edition | |
| Author | Hannah Arendt |
|---|---|
| Subject | Politics, revolution |
| Genre | Political theory |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
Publication date | 1963 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Part of the Politics series |
| Republicanism |
|---|
 Politicsportal |
On Revolution is a 1963 book by the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who presents a comparison of two of the main 18th-century revolutions: the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Twelve years after the publication of her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), [1] which looked at what she considered failed revolutions, Arendt optimistically turned her attention to predict nonviolent movements to restore democratic governments around the world. Her predictions turned out to be largely true since those revolutions have been largely, though unconsciously, based on the principles she laid out. [2]
In On Revolution, [3] Arendt argues that the French Revolution, while well studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely-ignored American Revolution was a success, an argument that runs counter to common Marxist and leftist views. The turning point in the French Revolution came when the revolution's leaders abandoned their goal of freedom in focus on compassion for the masses. During the American Revolution, on the other hand, the Founding Fathers never betrayed the goal of Constitutio Libertatis, the attempt to establish a public realm in which political freedom would be guaranteed for all. However, Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men was later lost and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate institution to regain it. [4]
In an earlier book, The Human Condition , Arendt argued that there were three states of human activity: labor, work, and action. "Labor" is, essentially, a state of subsistence: doing what it takes to stay alive. For Arendt, that was the lowest form of human activity (all living creatures are capable of this). "Work" is the process of creating: a painter may create a great work of art, a writer may create a great work of fiction, etc. For Arendt, "working" is a worthwhile endeavor. Through works, people may remember someone, and if one's work is great enough, one may be remembered for thousands of years. Arendt notes that people still read the Iliad , and Homer will be remembered for as long as people keep telling his stories. However, Arendt argues the Iliad is still read only because of its protagonist, Achilles. For Arendt, Achilles embodies "action." Only by interacting with others in some sort of public forum can your legacy be passed down through the generations; only by doing something truly memorable can a person achieve immortality.
Arendt believed that the leaders of the American Revolution were true "actors" (in the Arendtian sense) and that the US Constitution created "publics" that were conducive to action. The leaders of the French Revolution, on the other hand, were too focused on subsistence (what Arendt called their "demands for bread"), as opposed to "action." For a revolution to be truly successful, it must allow for, if not demand, that these publics be created. The leaders of the American Revolution created "a public" and acted within that space; their names will be remembered. The leaders of the French Revolution got their bread; their names have been forgotten.
Critics of On Revolution include Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that Arendt's approach was selective in terms of cases and the evidence drawn from them. For example, he claimed that Arendt unjustifiably excludes revolutions that did not occur in the West, such as the Chinese Revolution of 1911, and that her description of the Russian Revolution is a mischaracterization. That made Hobsbawm find the link between Arendtian revolutions and history to be "as incidental as that of medieval theologians and astronomers." He found further fault with how normative Arendt's conception of revolution is, describing its basis as "explicit old-fashioned philosophical idealism." [5]
Political freedom is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom has been described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
The Speenhamland system was a form of outdoor relief intended to mitigate rural poverty in England and Wales at the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century. The law was an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Law. It was created as an indirect result of Britain's involvements in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815).
Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire, Murray Rothbard, and many others. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.
Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.
The Panama scandals was a corruption affair that broke out in the French Third Republic in 1892, linked to a French company's failed attempt at constructing a Panama Canal. Close to half a billion francs were lost and members of the French government had taken bribes to keep quiet about the Panama Canal Company's financial troubles in what is regarded as the largest monetary corruption scandal of the 19th century.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century.
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon, and director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and communist states.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
The Iliad is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. Set towards the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the siege's final weeks. In particular, it depicts a fierce quarrel between King Agamemnon and a celebrated warrior, Achilles. It is a central part of the Epic Cycle. The Iliad is often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature.
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and The Will of the People is a book on the power of nonviolence by Jonathan Schell published in 2003.
Between Past and Future is a book written by the German-born Jewish American political theorist, Hannah Arendt, and first published in 1961, dealing with eight topics in political thinking.
Miguel Abensour was a French philosopher specializing in political philosophy.
Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two regimes, and why both came to prominence simultaneously. During the 20th century, comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism were made on totalitarianism, ideology, and personality cult. Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal democratic Western world, emphasising the similarities between the two.
The Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies is a research institute hosted by Dresden University of Technology and devoted to the comparative analysis of dictatorships. The institute focusses particularly on the structures of Nazism and Communism as well as on the presuppositions and consequences of the two ideological dictatorships. The institute is named after the German-American philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt, whose magnum opus The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is considered across disciplines as one of the most influential works of the 20th century and continues to shape in particular scholarly discussions of totalitarian systems of political domination.
The YES! Association is an art collective based in Sweden. The collective was founded in 2005 and continues to be active today. The collective creates art through the use of enactments and performances. The YES! Association is known primarily for art exhibitions that deal with themes of gender, sexuality, race, and capitalism.
The onion metaphor is a metaphor used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It is used to provide an example of the underlying structure that characterizes the organization of totalitarianism.