Americans: Forgotten Revolutionaries

When Hannah Arendt's On Revolution was published a month ago, Time Magazine clucked its approval. A renowned political philosopher with impeccable anti-communist credentials had decided all revolutions--except the American Revolution--are unprofitable. What more could Time ask? In a review entitled "The Fools of History," the glossy weekly assured its readers that they now had on the highest authority what Time had been telling them all along: revolutions are nasty, and really shouldn't happen.

Time created its distortion of Miss Arendt's views by omission. It was glad to quote her saying "We know to our sorrow that freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be." But you won't find in Time equally important statements which are less to its liking: "When we were told that by freedom we meant free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood," or Miss Arendt's observation on the "unchained, unbridled private initiative of capitalism, which in the absence of natural wealth has led everywhere to unhappiness and mass poverty." It is precisely "unhappiness and mass poverty"--partially the child of irresponsible capitalism--which creates the revolutions Time is so piously anxious to avoid.

Part of what Time said, however, is true: Miss Arendt has looked hard at modern revolutions, and decided that they do not do what the revolutions of the eighteenth century tried to do--create an institutional basis within which freedom to participate in government and to enjoy civil liberties will be effectively guaranteed.

Instead, modern revolutions are sidetracked and destroyed, as the French Revolution was, while trying to alleviate the immediate burden of poverty. Faced with populations living in hunger and despair, their leaders decide that the solution of the social problem is more urgent than the constitution of freedom.

Mistake Unavoidable

"Nothing," Miss Arendt says, "could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means.. No revolution has ever solved the 'social problem'... Although the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social problem with political means leads to terror, and it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom, it can hardly be denied that to avoid this fatal mistake is almost impossible under conditions of mass poverty."

Miss Arendt's realistic pessimism about the prospects for revolutions that will "constitute freedom" is the keystone of a world view which postulates the disappearance of war. She thinks that the destructive power of hydrogen bombs precludes their use in "rational" conflicts. When war has disappeared from the political landscape, revolution will remain as the only violent catalyst of social change.

No East-West Detente

One crucial aspect of Miss Arendt's thinking is that, unlike some "peace" thinkers, she does not equate the disappearance of war with an East-West detente. Misunderstanding this point, several members of the Cambridge "peace" community have convinced themselves that Miss Arendt is about to join their ranks. In fact, she emphasizes that although war may become obsolete, the totalitarian-free world struggle "in which so much is at stake" will go on. She suggests that it will probably be won by the side which learns to understand revolution, which, one might add, does not seem to augur well for the West.

In the book's final chapter, Miss Arendt emphasizes the price Americans are paying for having forgotten and having allowed others to forget their revolutionary heritage. "The point is unpleasantly driven home when even revolutions on the American continent speak and act as though they knew by heart the texts of revolutions in France, in Russia, and in China, but had never heard of such a thing as an American Revolution. Less spectacular, perhaps but certainly no less real, are the consequences of the ... American failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States."

The failure to remember is responsible for immense fear Americans have of revolution today, and the fear in turn attests to the rest of the world how right they are "to think of revolution only in terms of the French Revolution," Mis Arendt says. In another quote you won't see in Time she calls "fear of revolution the hidden leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy in its desperate attempt at stabilization of the status quo, with the result that American power and prestige were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political regimes that long since had become the object of hatred and contempt among their own citizens."

Some of the solutions Miss Arendt proposes to the problems she has raised do not seem very helpful, notably her proposal that thousands of little grass-roots councils be started to revitalize political life in the United States. But in the context of the book, where the problems the author has chosen to examine are delineated with great clarity, the answers seem of secondary importance.

Nature of Conflict

One of Miss Arendt's most frequent observations concerns the basis of disagreement between the free world and the Soviet bloc. Repeatedly she insists that "we should remind our opponents that serious conflicts would not arise out of the disparity of economic systems but only out of the conflict between freedom and tyranny, born out of the triumphant victory of a revolution and the various forms of domination which came in the aftermath of a revolutionary defeat."

Perhaps the most basic flaw in On Revolution is contained in the author's premise that the disappearance of world war leaves only revolution. Neither the "bush wars" which Kennedy Administration is presently fighting nor the small-scale wars of nationalistic expansion like Sukarno's venture can be included in either of Miss Arendt's categories. As for the new pattern of military coup d'etats in Latin America, the appearance in Egypt of tactical nuclear weapons, the modern armies of the newly independent states--all factors which seem to signal the end of the epoch of popular revolutions--Miss Arendt ignores their existence entirely.

The important thing about On Revolution is that it is a long step forward in the agonizing reappraisal modern liberalism is making of itself and the various institutions it has always held sacred. Hannah Arendt has chosen to examine critically the act which has been the keystone of liberalism since Locke