a bonobo humanity?

my mother’s copy

I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and I don’t quite know why, or whether I ever really read it. It was a tedious activity because I mostly had only the vaguest idea of what she was on about, and at times it seemed deliberately obscure. The quotes from classical Greek and Roman, only sometimes translated – didn’t help, nor did the extreme maleness of the language and references – Olympe de Gouges’ headless corpse would be spinning in its grave, if she was ever given one. The book is flooded with male pronouns and references to male predecessors of, commentators on or participants in the two principal revolutions she discusses – the American and the French. Let’s see – Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, Adams, Jefferson, Saint-Juste, Robespierre, Paine, Tocqueville and Marx to name a few (I was excited to find her dropping the name Odysse Barrot at one point. The first woman?!! But no, no, looking her up she turned out to be a male). She did finally, toward the end of the last chapter, give an honourable mention to Rosa Luxemburg – too little too late for me.

The book has been criticised – rightly – for its elitism, which occasionally shone through the murk of its exasperating pedantry. Here’s an example, if I’m able to read her aright:

The most the citizen can hope for [in a two-party system] is to be ‘represented’, whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods – moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former – but no opinion.

On revolution, pp 268-9

The claim that opinions don’t exist outside of public debate is about as preposterous as you can get, and rarely does Arendt write plainly enough for me to detect the absurdity. She seems to be saying that individuals just don’t have the wherewithal to form opinions. And here was me – a bit of an isolated type – thinking I’d been spending much of my time doing just that! Which doesn’t make me particularly clever – even five-year-olds can do it.

So what is the take-away from Arendt’s book? She writes much about the success of the American revolution and the failure of the French, but I’d always thought of the US experience being first a war of independence, and then an attempt to work out a new governmental system which would unite and perhaps incorporate the various systems that the British and European settlers had devised in the century or more before that war. A federal system indeed. The problem with the French revolution, as Arendt certainly realised, but never really spells out in her book, was that there was no agreed-upon replacement plan for its monarchy and its ancien regime. The disagreements, and the power vacuum created by the monarchy’s sudden destruction, led to internecine strife at a level never seen before in Europe, with some believing that everything had to change, including the calendar (which was much easier to deal with than the impoverishment of the people – the true cause of the revolution in the first place). In the following few years, moderates like de Gouges, who proposed a constitutional monarchy, were done away with, leading to the Terror and the execution of Robespierre, and eventually the Napoleonic despotism.

So the French Revolution was a murky, muddled and devastating affair, one that certainly ‘ate its own children’, and I’m not sure that comparing it to the situation a few years earlier in what was to become the USA, where the politically seasoned and not-so-impoverished settlers managed to fight off a common enemy while adopting variants of that enemy’s constitution, is all that helpful.

But that wasn’t so much what irritated me about the book. What most annoyed me was its opacity, and its maleness. It was as if she was trying to be more male than male, in her ‘scholarliness’, her dryness, her emotional distance. It was really quite weird.

Reference

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution 1963