“Liberty Leading the People”
Realised in 1830 by the painter, draughtsman,
aquarellist and photographer
Chapter I : The Meaning of Revolution
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new drama was going to be. However, once the revolutions had begun to run their course, and long before those who were involved in them could know whether their enterprise would end in victory or disaster, the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike. As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence of freedom: in 1793, four years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, at a time when Robespierre could define his rule as the 'despotism of liberty' without fear of being accused of speaking in paradoxes, Condorcet summed up what everybody knew: 'The word "revolutionary" can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.' That revolutions were about to usher in an entirely new era had been attested even earlier with the establishment of the revolutionary ,calendar in which the year of the execution of the king and the proclamation of the republic was counted as the year one.
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide. And since the current notion of the Free World is that freedom, and neither justice nor greatness, is the highest criterion for judging the constitutions of political bodies, it is not only our understanding of revolution but our conception of freedom, clearly revolutionary in origin, on which may hinge the extent to which we are prepared to accept or reject this coincidence. Even at this point, where we still talk historically, it may therefore be wise to pause and reflect on one of the aspects under which freedom then appeared — if only to avoid the more common misunderstandings and to catch a first glance at the very modernity of revolution as such.
It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom. Yet if these truisms are frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain, if not altogether futile. Freedom, moreover, has played a large and rather controversial role in the history of both philosophic and religious thought, and this throughout those centuries — from the decline of the ancient to the birth of the modern world — when political freedom was non-existent, and when, for reasons which do not interest us here, men were not concerned with it. Thus it has become almost axiomatic even in political theory to understand by political freedom not a political phenomenon, but on the contrary, the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it.
Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood has a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the `archy' from [greek characters] in monarchy and oligarchy, or the `cracy' from [greek characters] in democracy) was entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word 'democracy', expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is `no-rule' is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.
Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights, frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost identical with it. But this equality within the range of the law, which the word isonomy suggested, was not equality of condition — though this equality, to an extent, was the condition for all political activity in the ancient world, where the political realm itself was open only to those who owned property and slaves — but the equality of those who form a body of peers. Isonomy guaranteed [greek characters], equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ([greek characters]) not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its [greek characters] would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not [greek characters], given by nature and growing out by themselves; they were [greek characters], that is, conventional and artificial, the products of human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the master of a household — even though he was fully liberated and was not forced by others — was free. The point of Herodotus's equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived himself of those peers in whose company he could have been free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself, with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together, — the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper.
If we think of this political freedom in modern terms, trying to understand what Condorcet and the men of the revolutions had in mind when they claimed that revolution aimed at freedom and that the birth of freedom spelled the beginning of an entirely new story, we must first notice the rather obvious fact that they could not possibly have had in mind merely those liberties which we today associate with constitutional government and which are properly called civil rights. For none of these rights, not even the right to participate in government because taxation demands representation, was in theory or practice the result of revolution. They were the outcome of the 'three great and primary rights': life, liberty, property, with respect to which all other rights were 'subordinate rights [that is] the remedies or means which must often be employed in order to fully obtain and enjoy the real and substantial liberties' (Blackstone). Not 'life, liberty, and property' as such, but their being inalienable rights of man, was the result of revolution. But even in the new revolutionary extension of these rights to all men, liberty meant no more than freedom from unjustified restraint, and as such was fundamentally identical with freedom of movement — 'the power of locomotion ... without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law' — which Blackstone, in full agreement with ancient political thought, held to be the most important of all civil rights. Even the right of assembly, which has come to be the most important positive political freedom, appears still in the American Bill of Rights as 'the right of people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances' (First Amendment) whereby 'historically the right to petition is the primary right' and the historically correct interpretation must read: the right to assemble in order to petition." All these liberties, to which we
I might add our own claims to be free from want and fear, are of course essentially negative; they are the results of liberation but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, which, as we shall see later, is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm. If revolution had aimed only at the guarantee of civil rights, then it would not have aimed at freedom but at liberation from governments which had over-stepped their powers and infringed upon old and well-established rights.
The difficulty here is that revolution as we know it in the modern age has always been concerned with both liberation and freedom. And since liberation, whose fruits are absence of restraint and possession of 'the power of locomotion', is indeed a condition of freedom — nobody would ever be able to arrive at a place where freedom rules if he could not move without restraint — it is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins. The point of the matter is that while the former, the desire to be free from oppression, could have been fulfilled under monarchical — though not under tyrannical, let alone despotic — rulership, the latter necessitated the formation of a new, or rather rediscovered form of government; it demanded the constitution of a republic. Nothing, indeed, is truer, more clearly borne out by facts which, alas, have been almost totally neglected by the historians of revolutions, than 'that the contests of that day were contests of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government'.
But this difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and freedom in any set of historical circumstances does not mean that liberation and freedom are the same, or that those liberties which are won as the result of liberation tell the whole story of freedom, even though those who tried their hand at both liberation and the foundation of freedom more often than not did not distinguish between these matters very clearly either. The men of the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered their own capacity and desire for the 'charms of liberty', as John Jay once called them, only in the very act of liberation. For the acts and deeds which liberation demanded from them threw them into public business, where, intentionally or more often unexpectedly, they began to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality. Since they were not in the least prepared for these charms, they could hardly be expected to be fully aware of the new phenomenon. It was nothing less than the weight of the entire Christian tradition which prevented them from owning up to the rather obvious fact that they were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.
Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution — no taxation without representation — it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogther different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been 'called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination' discovered that 'it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure'.
What the revolutions brought to the fore was this experience of being free, and this was a new experience, not, to be sure, in the history of Western mankind — it was common enough in both Greek and Roman antiquity — but with regard to the centuries which separate the downfall of the Roman Empire from the rise of the modern age. And this relatively new experience, new to those at any rate who made it, was at the same time the experience of man's faculty to begin something new. These two things together — a new experience which revealed man's capacity for novelty — are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound entirely out of place.
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. This means of course that revolutions are more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified in calling every coup d'état a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war. Oppressed people have often risen in rebellion, and much of ancient legislation can be understood only as safeguards against the ever-feared, though rarely occurring, uprising of the slave population. Civil war and factional strife, moreover, seemed to the ancients the greatest dangers to every body politic, and Aristotle's [greek characters] , that curious friendship he demanded for the relationships between the citizens, was conceived as the most reliable safeguard against them. Coups d'état and palace revolutions, where power changes hands from one man to another, from one clique to another, depending on the form of government in which the coup d'état occurs, have been less feared because the change they bring is circumscribed to the sphere of government and carries a minimum of unquiet to the people at large, but they have been equally well known and described.
All these phenomena have in common with revolution that they are brought about by violence, and this is the reason why they are so frequently identified with it. But violence is no more adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change; only where change occurs in the 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, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution. And the fact is that although history has always known those who, like Alcibiades, wanted power for themselves or those who, like Catiline, were rerum novarum cupidi, eager for new things, the revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, is unprecedented and unequalled in all prior history.
(1798–1863)
From the book "On Revolution" (1963)
by Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Kingsport Press Edition, Penguin Books (1977)
Chapter I : The Meaning of Revolution
Numerical Version (from the Tallinn University)
Part II
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new drama was going to be. However, once the revolutions had begun to run their course, and long before those who were involved in them could know whether their enterprise would end in victory or disaster, the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike. As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence of freedom: in 1793, four years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, at a time when Robespierre could define his rule as the 'despotism of liberty' without fear of being accused of speaking in paradoxes, Condorcet summed up what everybody knew: 'The word "revolutionary" can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.' That revolutions were about to usher in an entirely new era had been attested even earlier with the establishment of the revolutionary ,calendar in which the year of the execution of the king and the proclamation of the republic was counted as the year one.
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide. And since the current notion of the Free World is that freedom, and neither justice nor greatness, is the highest criterion for judging the constitutions of political bodies, it is not only our understanding of revolution but our conception of freedom, clearly revolutionary in origin, on which may hinge the extent to which we are prepared to accept or reject this coincidence. Even at this point, where we still talk historically, it may therefore be wise to pause and reflect on one of the aspects under which freedom then appeared — if only to avoid the more common misunderstandings and to catch a first glance at the very modernity of revolution as such.
It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom. Yet if these truisms are frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain, if not altogether futile. Freedom, moreover, has played a large and rather controversial role in the history of both philosophic and religious thought, and this throughout those centuries — from the decline of the ancient to the birth of the modern world — when political freedom was non-existent, and when, for reasons which do not interest us here, men were not concerned with it. Thus it has become almost axiomatic even in political theory to understand by political freedom not a political phenomenon, but on the contrary, the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it.
Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood has a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the `archy' from [greek characters] in monarchy and oligarchy, or the `cracy' from [greek characters] in democracy) was entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word 'democracy', expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is `no-rule' is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.
Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights, frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost identical with it. But this equality within the range of the law, which the word isonomy suggested, was not equality of condition — though this equality, to an extent, was the condition for all political activity in the ancient world, where the political realm itself was open only to those who owned property and slaves — but the equality of those who form a body of peers. Isonomy guaranteed [greek characters], equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ([greek characters]) not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its [greek characters] would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not [greek characters], given by nature and growing out by themselves; they were [greek characters], that is, conventional and artificial, the products of human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the master of a household — even though he was fully liberated and was not forced by others — was free. The point of Herodotus's equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived himself of those peers in whose company he could have been free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself, with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together, — the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper.
If we think of this political freedom in modern terms, trying to understand what Condorcet and the men of the revolutions had in mind when they claimed that revolution aimed at freedom and that the birth of freedom spelled the beginning of an entirely new story, we must first notice the rather obvious fact that they could not possibly have had in mind merely those liberties which we today associate with constitutional government and which are properly called civil rights. For none of these rights, not even the right to participate in government because taxation demands representation, was in theory or practice the result of revolution. They were the outcome of the 'three great and primary rights': life, liberty, property, with respect to which all other rights were 'subordinate rights [that is] the remedies or means which must often be employed in order to fully obtain and enjoy the real and substantial liberties' (Blackstone). Not 'life, liberty, and property' as such, but their being inalienable rights of man, was the result of revolution. But even in the new revolutionary extension of these rights to all men, liberty meant no more than freedom from unjustified restraint, and as such was fundamentally identical with freedom of movement — 'the power of locomotion ... without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law' — which Blackstone, in full agreement with ancient political thought, held to be the most important of all civil rights. Even the right of assembly, which has come to be the most important positive political freedom, appears still in the American Bill of Rights as 'the right of people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances' (First Amendment) whereby 'historically the right to petition is the primary right' and the historically correct interpretation must read: the right to assemble in order to petition." All these liberties, to which we
I might add our own claims to be free from want and fear, are of course essentially negative; they are the results of liberation but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, which, as we shall see later, is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm. If revolution had aimed only at the guarantee of civil rights, then it would not have aimed at freedom but at liberation from governments which had over-stepped their powers and infringed upon old and well-established rights.
The difficulty here is that revolution as we know it in the modern age has always been concerned with both liberation and freedom. And since liberation, whose fruits are absence of restraint and possession of 'the power of locomotion', is indeed a condition of freedom — nobody would ever be able to arrive at a place where freedom rules if he could not move without restraint — it is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins. The point of the matter is that while the former, the desire to be free from oppression, could have been fulfilled under monarchical — though not under tyrannical, let alone despotic — rulership, the latter necessitated the formation of a new, or rather rediscovered form of government; it demanded the constitution of a republic. Nothing, indeed, is truer, more clearly borne out by facts which, alas, have been almost totally neglected by the historians of revolutions, than 'that the contests of that day were contests of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government'.
But this difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and freedom in any set of historical circumstances does not mean that liberation and freedom are the same, or that those liberties which are won as the result of liberation tell the whole story of freedom, even though those who tried their hand at both liberation and the foundation of freedom more often than not did not distinguish between these matters very clearly either. The men of the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered their own capacity and desire for the 'charms of liberty', as John Jay once called them, only in the very act of liberation. For the acts and deeds which liberation demanded from them threw them into public business, where, intentionally or more often unexpectedly, they began to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality. Since they were not in the least prepared for these charms, they could hardly be expected to be fully aware of the new phenomenon. It was nothing less than the weight of the entire Christian tradition which prevented them from owning up to the rather obvious fact that they were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.
Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution — no taxation without representation — it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogther different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been 'called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination' discovered that 'it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure'.
What the revolutions brought to the fore was this experience of being free, and this was a new experience, not, to be sure, in the history of Western mankind — it was common enough in both Greek and Roman antiquity — but with regard to the centuries which separate the downfall of the Roman Empire from the rise of the modern age. And this relatively new experience, new to those at any rate who made it, was at the same time the experience of man's faculty to begin something new. These two things together — a new experience which revealed man's capacity for novelty — are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound entirely out of place.
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. This means of course that revolutions are more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified in calling every coup d'état a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war. Oppressed people have often risen in rebellion, and much of ancient legislation can be understood only as safeguards against the ever-feared, though rarely occurring, uprising of the slave population. Civil war and factional strife, moreover, seemed to the ancients the greatest dangers to every body politic, and Aristotle's [greek characters] , that curious friendship he demanded for the relationships between the citizens, was conceived as the most reliable safeguard against them. Coups d'état and palace revolutions, where power changes hands from one man to another, from one clique to another, depending on the form of government in which the coup d'état occurs, have been less feared because the change they bring is circumscribed to the sphere of government and carries a minimum of unquiet to the people at large, but they have been equally well known and described.
All these phenomena have in common with revolution that they are brought about by violence, and this is the reason why they are so frequently identified with it. But violence is no more adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change; only where change occurs in the 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, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution. And the fact is that although history has always known those who, like Alcibiades, wanted power for themselves or those who, like Catiline, were rerum novarum cupidi, eager for new things, the revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, is unprecedented and unequalled in all prior history.
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