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Abstract
This paper reviews the contribution of Hannah Arendt's Citation1963 monograph, On Revolution, to the theme of this collection: “contestatory cosmopolitanism.” I am critical of normative interpretations of the text that treat it as a wholesale rejection of the French revolutionary tradition and as a tribute either to American constitutionalism, in more liberal readings, or to the council system of direct democracy, in more radical readings. I read it against this doctrinal grain as a dialectical analysis of the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole. I argue that it is more productive for our own purposes and more faithful to Arendt's own approach to read the book as an exploration of the developmental forms of the modern revolutionary tradition, beginning with the “perplexities” present in the modern concept of revolution and then moving on to the more applied and practical “perplexities” involved in the realization of the concept: first in the French Revolution, then in the American Revolution and finally in the forms of council communism Arendt termed the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition. Clearly, the order of presentation which Arendt employs cannot be historical, because historically the American Revolution preceded the French and the “lost treasure” has existed coevally with every modern revolution. I propose that the order of presentation is better understood dialectically, in the sense that each stage of development constitutes an attempt to resolve the contradictions of the previous stage but ends up recreating its contradictions in new forms. And I suggest that, in this logic of development, there is no telos, no final synthesis and no moment of reconciliation. Thus, the last chapter of the book on the “lost treasure” should not be read as a statement of Arendt's own political position or philosophy. Rather, it should be read as a critical analysis of revolutionary endeavours to resolve the contradictions of the French “general will” and American constitutionalism in ways that can only create new perplexities and problems in relation to key democratic, national and social questions. Finally, I suggest that, if we take forward Arendt's dialectical form of argument beyond the covers of her book, we would have to address the cosmopolitan turn in revolutionary thought. This would enable, I believe, bold resistance to the isolation of the cosmopolitan and revolutionary traditions from each other, re-integration of these traditions with reference back to their original unity and a turn to the paradoxical conceptions of “revolutionary moderation” which we find pronounced but not yet articulated on the existential margins of the revolutionary tradition.
Notes
1 H. Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, [1963] 1990).
2 G. W. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §2. See also R. Fine, Political Investigations (London: Routledge, 2001), 29–32, 79–80.
3 H. Arendt, “The Eggs Speak Up,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 270–84.
4 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1951] 1979), 442.
5 For a fuller account of this dialectical reading, see R. Fine, “The Evolution of the Modern Revolutionary Tradition: A Phenomenological Reading of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution,” in Special Issue on the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, ed. R. Cordero et al., European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1.3 (2014), 216-233.
6 The phrase “cosmopolitan existence” is drawn from H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1970] 1989), 75.
7 Arendt, On Revolution, 34.
8 Arendt, On Revolution, 40.
9 Arendt, On Revolution, 34.
10 Arendt, On Revolution, 38.
11 The imagery was drawn from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, [1940] 1968), 257–8. Arendt discusses it in the “Introduction” to Benjamin, Illuminations, 1–55 and in H. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, [1955] 1983), 153–206.
12 H. Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 58.
13 See S. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
14 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt contrasted the Revolution's spirit of universality with Edmund Burke's opposition to the “inalienable rights of man” in the name of the “entailed inheritance” of national rights. She found a “curious touch of race feeling” in Burke's treatment of law as “an outgrowth of a unique national substance” and of the “rights of Englishmen” as superior to the “rights of men” (Arendt, Origins, 130). She went on to contrast Burke's “imperial” consciousness with the “practical attempts” of the European Enlightenment to “include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity” (Arendt, Origins, 175–6).
15 Arendt, On Revolution, 222.
16 Arendt, On Revolution, 114. See also B. Moore, Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
17 Arendt, On Revolution, 76–81.
18 Arendt, On Revolution, 53, 77, 158. See also Origins, 298.
19 Arendt, On Revolution, 136–9. See also J. Habermas, “Natural Law and Revolution,” in Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, [1963] 1974), 82–120.
20 Arendt, On Revolution, 235.
21 Arendt, On Revolution, 269.
22 For discussion of this distinction, see H. Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and P. Blokker, “Constitutions and Democracy in Post-National Times: A Political-Sociological Approach,” Irish Journal of Sociology 20.2 (2013): 68–90.
23 Arendt, On Revolution, 255. See W. Totschnig, “Arendt's Argument for the Council System: A Defence,” in ed. R. Cordero et al., 266–82.
24 The dilemmas of the social question have been investigated in S. Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. L. and S. Hinchman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 289–306.
25 Arendt, On Revolution, 273–80. See also B. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 124–5.
26 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199.
27 H. Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic, trans. D. Lindley (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1970] 1972), 105–98 (139).
28 H. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1970] 1972), 199–233 (229).
29 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 230.
30 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 230.
31 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 233.
32 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 233.
33 See for example, C. Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience (London: Verso, 1982).
34 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 202, 207.
35 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 209–10.
36 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 214–15.
37 Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 220–1.
38 Arendt, Origins, ix. For Kant's cosmopolitanism, see I. Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–130.
39 See R. Fine, “Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Western or Universal?,” in Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, ed. D. Adams and G. Tihanov (London: Legenda, 2011), 153–70.
40 Arendt, Origins, 298.
41 H. Arendt and K. Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 51–6.
42 Arendt, Origins, 298. See R. Fine “Debating Rights, Law and Subjectivity: Arendt, Adorno and Critical Theory,” in Arendt and Adorno, ed. L. Rensmann and S. Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 154–73.
43 H. Arendt, “The ‘Rights of Man:’ What Are They?,” Modern Review 3.1 (1949): 24–36.
44 See P. Spencer, Genocide Since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2012).
45 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 75–6.
46 See H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1963] 1992), esp. “postscript,” 280–98.
47 H. Arendt, “Letter from Arendt to Scholem,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. J. Kohn and R. H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 466–7.
48 Arendt, “Letter from Arendt to Scholem,” 467.
49 Cited by Kohn and Feldman in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, x.
50 Arendt, Origins, 299.
51 H. Arendt, “Enlightenment and the Jewish Question,” in The Jewish Writings, 3–18. See also D. Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature and the French Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).
52 Arendt, Origins, 297.
53 See G. Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (London: Saqi Books, 2013).
54 See also R. Cordero, “It Happens In-Between: On the Spatial Birth of Politics in Arendt's On Revolution,” and L. Arese, “Tragedy, Comedy and History in On Revolution,” both in ed. Cordero et al., respectively 249–65 and 234–48.
55 See R. Fine, “Hauke Brunkhorst: Reflections on the Idea of Normative Progress,” Social and Legal Studies 23.4 (2014): 547–63.
56 Arendt's On Revolution may usefully be compared with Albert Camus's The Rebel, where Camus writes: “Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it demands, defends and recreates it throughout history … Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion.” See A. Camus, The Rebel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 301.
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Notes on contributors
Robert Fine
Robert Fine is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. His work has been published on the jurisprudence and politics of critical theory, the cosmopolitan turn in contemporary social theory, and racism, antisemitism and nationalism in various historical contexts. His books include Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), Democracy and the Rule of Law (2nd ed., Caldwell: Blackburn, 2002) and Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001). He recently co-edited special issues on “The Legacy of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution” (European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014) and “Natural Law and Social Theory” (Journal of Classical Sociology, 2013). He is co-authoring a monograph on The Myth of the Jewish Question, Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2016.