On Revolution

On Revolution is a 1963 book by the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In it she compares two of the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French, to examine where they failed, where they succeeded and where they diverged. Arendt regards the American Revolution as more successful than the French, but she criticizes modern revolutionaries for modelling their actions on the latter. She also stresses that even the American Revolution fell short of its promise to offer everyone public freedom and public happiness, that is, the chance to take part in politics and the satisfaction of shaping one's own environment. As an alternative she proposes council republics, a revolutionary aim that, in her view, could better secure civic participation and collective self-determination.

The book was written twelve years after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), in which Arendt had studied what she regarded as failed revolutions. Here her outlook is more hopeful, and she anticipates nonviolent movements that, in various parts of the world, would seek to restore democratic governments. For Arendt, public freedom is the proper end of any revolution: it is not enough for the state to leave us alone, since one must be able to take part in shaping the political realm. Reaching it requires first being liberated from economic necessity and political oppression.

Arendt explains the divergence between the two processes through their circumstances. In France widespread poverty made relief from suffering the urgent priority, whereas in the American colonies the white population was relatively prosperous, which allowed attention to turn to founding political freedom, although this ignored the enslaved population. The colonists also had experience of self-government because of their distance from Britain, while France lived under an absolute monarchy. The absolutist tradition led French revolutionaries to centralize power, and the notion of the "general will" ended up justifying purges of supposed enemies. Americans, by contrast, placed solidarity and the division of powers at the centre. Both revolutions had to find a new source of authority, and the American one found it in the founding act itself, though this raised the difficulty of passing that experience on to future generations.

As to the form of government, Arendt holds that neither direct democracy, too volatile, nor representative democracy, which reduces participation to voting, fully realizes public freedom.

The work builds on ideas Arendt had developed in The Human Condition, where she distinguishes labour, work and action, and places shared action in public space as the highest form of activity. The American leaders, in her account, were true actors who created public spaces, while the French became trapped in the demand for bread. The book also drew criticism, such as that of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who accused it of selecting cases arbitrarily and of idealizing the political philosophy it defends.