On Hannah Arendt and revolution
I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book On Revolution, with an occasional irritation – well, not so occasional – I’m trying to suppress. For example, in the very first paragraph of the first chapter, she writes:
Modern revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the [term written in ancient Greek], the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis. We cannot equate them with Plato’s [longer ancient Greek term], the quasi-natural transformation of one form of government into another, or with Polybius’s [very long ancient Greek term], the appointed recurring cycle into which human affairs are bound by reason of their always being driven to extremes.
So mutatio rerum (that’s Latin) means a change in events/systems, as in ‘my, how things have changed’, whereas the Greek terms are more or less explained by Arendt’s subsequent words. In any case what this small section of the first para tells me is that I might be in for a rough ride.
So Arendt goes on to try to define ‘revolutions’ as distinct from, say, uprisings or coups d’etat, all of which, it seems to me, becomes overly technical and abstruse, as well as overly burdened with references to men and male pronouns – scores to a page – so it’s very likely that I won’t have the stomach to read too much further, though I recognise of course that, as a woman, she’s a pioneer in this field.
Then again, is there today a ‘field’ that studies revolutions? Do we have revolutions, apart from revolutionary ‘diets’ or ‘technologies’ or ‘fashions’ these days? Arendt refers to the American revolution and the French revolution, and no doubt in later pages she’ll look at the Russian or Bolshevik revolution, but it seems to me highly unlikely that a bloody, physical, warfare-type revolution will happen in the future, within the WEIRD world, and it’s interesting to reflect on that fact, if fact it is.
There has of course been the occasional coup, or elimination of the leadership, almost entirely emanating from the US and its CIA. For example, Mohammed Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, a democracy-leaning, reforming nationalist, was deposed in 1953 in a coup organised by US and British intelligence operatives. Mossadegh was intending to nationalise his country’s oil stocks, which the Brits had spent a great deal of money in extracting. Other CIA-backed coups have occurred in Chile and various Central American countries, but of course these had nothing to do with revolution. As far as I know (and I don’t know much), the only time ‘revolution’ has been used in a military sense in my lifetime was for the Cuban revolution of 1958-59, which ended the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The ‘revolution’ in this case, and in general, doesn’t involve the ‘bottom’ becoming the new ‘top’, because the bottom are always too powerless. It’s those excluded from the top, but perhaps close to the top, close enough to observe the top’s corruption, or simply close enough to feel they can do a much better job, generally in terms of the class they belong to.
Okay, I’ve just recalled the tragedy, particularly for women, of the Iranian revolution of 1979, resulting in the fall of a despotic but modernising Shah and the installation of the ‘Ayatollas’, ultra-religious Islamists whose attitudes towards women, and treatment of them, makes me forget that I’m supposed to hold humanist values – and that freedom of the will is a myth.
So, returning to Arendt, and the meaning of revolution. To me, it just means an abrupt change in political systems, usually, but not necessarily always, brought about violently. Early on, she makes comparisons between the French and the American revolutions which make me wonder about the usefulness of the term. After all, the American thing is also called the American War of Independence, which is how I think of it. Notoriously, the French affair ‘ate its own people’, not to mention many who were unfortunate enough to be born into the ancien regime, or even to have worked for them or been supported by them. The eventually-to-be United States was an ocean away from its ancien regime. Just as importantly, the soon-to-be United Staters didn’t have any thoughts of starting from year zero, with a new calendar and… well, a whole new, yet-to-be-thought-out world, about which it might be death to disagree. They clearly had their own elites, slave-owners to a man, and they exploited the British Constitution, fragmentary as it was, to build something of their own – unfortunately a Constitutional Presidency, with insufficient checks and balances, to put it mildly. They also had the mercurial and brilliant Thomas Paine, whose career, and especially his early life, I’ll reserve for another post, as he’s fast becoming a hero of mine.
I’m writing this partly as an antidote to Arendt’s barely comprehensible second chapter, which I’m perhaps too lazy get my head around, but as she often refers to Rousseau, a writer I’m very familiar with (I once considered calling my blog The reveries of a solitary wanker in his honour), I feel the need to persist.
So while Arendt persists in comparing what I see as two vastly different events, in France and the future USA, she does make these remarks which I think are key, though not, I think, in the way she intends:
In Rousseau’s construction [of the general will] the nation need not wait for an enemy to threaten its borders in order to rise ‘like one man’ and to bring about the union sacrée; the oneness of the nation is guaranteed in so far as each citizen carries within himself the common enemy as well as the general interest which the common enemy brings into existence; for the common enemy is the particular interest or the particular will of each man.
Wow, looks like I’ll have to read The Social Contract again to see if I agree with Arendt’s interpretation here. Would this be a worthwhile exercise?
In any case I’m torn between continuing with Arendt’s book, knowing that she was a pioneering female political philosopher, and focussing on more comprehensible stuff, like Rovelli, Lucretius, the political horror shows of the day, or maybe, bonobos…
References
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963
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