Notes on the revolution

It is intriguing that in the debates surrounding the ongoing revolutions in the Arab world, commentators have by and large ignored one of the most controversial post-war works on revolution: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution published in 1963.

Arendt opens the book stating that wars and revolutions determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century and constituted its two central political issues. “[T]he cause of freedom versus tyranny” has, according to Arendt, always determined the existence of politics and freedom has always been the aim of revolution, while the aim of war has only in the rarest of cases been linked to the cause of freedom.

War and revolution do, however, have violence as their common denominator although neither are determined completely by violence. Arendt thought that revolutions confronted us with a problem that is an innate existential problem for man but at the same time also the source of all his achievements. This is the problem of beginning. Arendt writes that man is essentially a beginner. Each birth represents the fact that man is not a fated animal because he has reason which allows him to set purposes for his life and to act in the attempt to realise these purposes.

This means that, as such, the human being embodies the principle of novelty in that he can act in the world in order to bring about radical new beginnings on earth. Not surprisingly, the supreme political manifestation of this existential principle of novelty for Arendt, is revolution. She writes: “Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.”

The connection between novelty and the idea of freedom can only be understood if we understand Arendt’s distinction between liberation and freedom. Arendt equates the term “liberation” essentially with the granting of civil rights — liberation simply means the freedom from unjustified restraint. Liberation by no means represents the actual content of freedom (although Arendt concedes that liberation is a prerequisite for the realisation of a fuller concept of freedom).

Arendt understands freedom as “the participation in public affairs or admission to the public realm”. The reason why freedom (as the political way of life) could be associated closely with the concept of novelty (and therefore revolution) was because it was freedom alone that demanded the constitution of a republic.

As Arendt points out, liberation could, in theory at least, be obtained even under conditions of strict monarchical rule. But freedom could not be achieved without the formation of a new non-monarchical and non-despotic form of government that would create a space where people could come together and, through acting and speaking, participate in the affairs of the body politic.

But Arendt also warns us that not every coup d’etat is a revolution and neither is every insurrection a revolution — change is not the same as revolution. It is only where these phenomena lead to the full actualisation of freedom as the right to be admitted to and participate in the public realm — to be a citizen — that we can say that a revolution has come about. Arendt was not ignorant of the fact that what she called the “social question” — the existence of mass poverty — had come to play a revolutionary role in the modern age in the same way that it has come to play a decisive revolutionary role in our own times.

Arendt mentions precisely that the social question came to play a revolutionary role only when people started questioning whether poverty was “inherent in the human condition”. This was the time when men and women started to realise that the distinction between the rich few and the poverty-stricken multitude was not something that was “inevitable and eternal”.

Arendt knew well that there can be no talk of freedom for those who are economically oppressed to the point of being caused purely by necessity. She defines poverty as “more than deprivation; it is a state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy consists in its dehumanising force”.

It is true that for Arendt a revolution is more than the mere liberation from necessity — a revolution is ultimately about political freedom as she understands it. And it is true that, in this sense, Arendt did not think that the satisfaction of need was a properly political question.

We might disagree with these arguments of Arendt’s — certainly in a country like South Africa the question of need is perhaps the political question. But this is not to say that the whole of Arendt’s thought on revolution has become irrelevant. The events of the last few weeks in the countries that are undergoing revolutions of sorts, have, without a doubt, testified once more to the age-old link between people’s capacity for a new beginning, their ability to act in concert with others in order to bring about this new beginning and the power of action in the name of freedom. It is perhaps these aspects of revolution (so elegantly articulated by Arendt) that have guaranteed its endurance.