Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Revolutionary Consolidation

In her influential book On Revolution,^[187] Hannah Arendt largely avoids the ques­tion of revolutionary consolidation in her treatment of the American Revolution. Somewhat curiously, she seems to adopt that revolution as a kind of norm, against which later revolutions in France, Russia and elsewhere failed, owing mainly to violence.

For Arendt, it is the foundation of a body politic, the polis, which is crucial. Central to her thought is that human beings gain their humanity, their very iden­tity as human, only to the extent that they are political. She was inspired by the ancient Greeks, for whom ‘outside the body politic man’s life was not only and not even primarily insecure... it was without meaning and dignity because under no circumstances could it leave any trace behind it’. ^[189] It is only through action (as opposed to labour and work) that humans can be free, can exercise their unique capacity to initiate, to found, to begin something new. Hence, ‘the raison detre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action’. ^[190] Action is never possible except in the polis, in the presence of others in a public space: ‘to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act’ ^[191] Indeed, ‘without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt’^[192] This space of appearance, of speech and action, where humans may come together has endurance and stability only because of the human capacity for fabrication.

Working against action and fabrication, in danger of destroying them, is the endless cycle of nature, which must, as far as possible, be kept out of the polis or at least be marginalised to protect action and fabrication. Humans of course never escape nature. They may act and fabricate, but they also must engage in the third element of the human condition - labour - and they must consume the fruits of labour to survive, since we are always subject to the demands of biological necessity. Labouring and consuming are life processes, the most futile of human endeavours because they leave nothing behind. Labour is opposed to freedom, for labour ‘despite its futility is born of great urgency and motivated by a more powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends upon it’ ^[194] For Arendt, ‘the activity corresponding to the status of poverty was laboring’ ^[195] Poverty, then, which ‘forces free men to act like a slave’,^[196] can have no place in the polis owing to the threat it poses both to freedom and to the very stability of the public realm.

Arendt attributes the relative success of the American Revolution and ‘the fail­ure of the men of the French Revolution’ to ‘the predicament of poverty [that] was absent from the American scene but present everywhere else in the world’ ^[197] The poor, even with some assurance of self-preservation, are bound by the necessity of labouring and consuming, so that even after ‘their self-preservation has been assured. their lives are without consequence, and. they remain excluded from the light of the public realm’ ^[198] For Arendt, the French Revolution failed owing to the intrusion of poverty - of necessity - into the public realm. There the insidious pressures of compassion demanded not only that the people be liberated from tyranny, as in America, but that the poor ‘had to be liberated once more, and compared to this liberation from the yolk of necessity, the original liberation from tyranny must have looked like child's play'.^[199]

Arendt’s view of the success of the American Revolution has what one writer calls a curious unreality.^[200] Arendt does note the role of institutional frameworks and constitutionalism, that is, what might be considered consolidation of the revolution, but, as another writer puts it, she is ‘not as concrete as one would like’.^[201] In On Revolution, ‘the American Revolution is rendered in deceptively pure tones...

The problem is twofold. First, Arendt's concept of action foregrounds its unpredictable nature and celebrates the human capacity of beginning, witness and testimony to the human capacity for freedom. ‘It is the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. the begin­ning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to.'^[204] A revolution for Arendt occurs only ‘ when change occurs in a sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic’^[205] This valorising of new beginnings, of ‘initiatory action with all of its inherent spontaneity, uncontrollability, and unpredictability',^[206] effectively prevents Arendt from coming to terms with the

mundane goals and the mechanics of their actual operation in the public realm.

Arendt pays little attention to the question - central to explaining the success of the American Revolution - of how this new beginning was consolidated, and how it developed into a stable and legitimate constitutional system and so avoided the chaos, violence and instability of revolutionary governments in France. She notes in passing, and somewhat inconsistently, that America’s success can be attributed to ‘t he relatively nonviolent character of the American Revolution’, though she acknowledges only that the stability of the resulting political structures is ‘surprising’.^[209] The closest she comes, as Jurgen Habermas notes, is to place ‘more trust in the venerable figure of the contract than in her own concept of a praxis. She retreats... into the contract theory of natural law’^[210]

Arendt, then, is a thinker of contingency, of revolutionary foundings. Consoli­dation is simply not a central concern either in her thought on revolution, or for that matter in her thinking about human action and speech and their role in creat­ing a political realm. In one sense, she does not differ from many major writers on revolution. The Marxist analysis of revolution, which Arendt did not accept, has in common with her a lack of interest in consolidation, focusing instead on historical inevitability, so that human action and its capacity for founding play no role. In the Marxist view, consolidation warrants little if any attention because, as Jacques Barzun said, it is almost ‘automatic’: ‘The revolution over, Marx’s commu­nist society gets itself established by sheer historic necessity.

Marx acknowledges the violence necessary to revolution, speaking of the ‘point where war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat’^[212] The next step, the dictatorship of the proletariat, continues the revolutionary violence: the prole­tariat, now supreme, will ‘wrest... all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state’. The coercion and suppression of liberty are ‘of course' a requirement: ‘Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads into bourgeois rights'^[213] Afterwards, the post-revolutionary state will famously wither away, apparently automatically, leaving what he calls ‘free development for all’ ^[214] Lenin reveals the same pattern. Suppression, he writes, is ‘still necessary’ during the transition from capitalism to communism, after which the new era will simply arrive. With the state’s wither­ing away, the people will somehow ‘ b ecome accustomed to the observance of the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries’, people observ­ing these rules ‘without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state’^[215]

II.