On Revolution

The “social question,” in 18th-century parlance, referred to the existence of poverty. It was abject poverty that brought masses of commoners into the streets in France, leading the revolutionary leader, Maximilien Robespierre (See: Key Figures), to prioritize satisfying the material needs of the poor above establishing new political institutions. The goal of the revolution was no longer “freedom” but “the happiness of the people” (51) and this shift is what ultimately “unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom” (51).

Not only was this shift the turning point of the French Revolution, it also inspired every subsequent revolution, largely because Marx focused his own revolutionary conceptions on historical necessity and the social question. Concluding that the French Revolution had failed because it failed to solve the problem of mass poverty, he was the first to argue that “poverty can be a political force of the first order” (52). His own theory held that poverty is the product of exploitation by a “ruling class” and is therefore “a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than scarcity” (53). Instead of pursuing freedom for its own sake, subsequent revolutionists made eliminating exploitation and scarcity their chief aim.

Thomas Jefferson and other American revolutionists believed that the extent of poverty in Europe would doom any revolution there to failure, whereas it was the absence of mass poverty in the American colonies—at least among the white colonists—that allowed the American Revolution to succeed. In those days, even enlightened whites in Europe and America entirely ignored the issue of enslavement; thus the American Revolution would prove to be the only revolution that was not motivated by “the passion of compassion” (61), since people like Jefferson expressed no compassion for non-whites. The French revolutionists, on the other hand, embraced the social question and were fueled by compassion for the poor. For them, “compassion became the driving force” and was considered “the highest political virtue” (65).

In their fixation on the suffering masses, the revolutionists were drawn to 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the volonté générale (“general will”), which imagined the people as an indivisible and unanimous force. The revolutionists simply replaced the unitary will of the monarch (raison d’état) with the unitary will of the people. In reality, Arendt points out, the “national interest” is typically unified only in response to a common external enemy, and thus exists only in the realm of foreign affairs. To identify a common enemy within the domestic realm, Rousseau pointed to the combined force of individual citizens’ particular wills and interests; an individual became a member of the body politic only by renouncing his particular will to serve the general will (69). Arendt argues that this idea underpins “the theory of terror from Robespierre to Lenin and Stalin” (69): Anyone could be condemned as an “enemy” simply for existing in his or her individuality.

Believing firmly in the goodness of man in the “state of nature” (71), Rousseau and his revolutionary followers championed the virtue of compassion or selflessness against the vice of selfishness, rather than upholding any standard of absolute good and evil. Arendt argues that people motivated by compassion tend to eschew politics—“the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise”—in favor of “swift and direct action” to end suffering, including through violent means (77). This emphasis on compassion led the French revolutionists to reject any legal limitations on their revolutionary actions, because “the impartiality of justice and law” was outweighed by “the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people” (81).

For the American revolutionists, by contrast, the word “people” retained “the meaning of manyness, of the endless variety of a multitude whose majesty resided in its very plurality” (83). Politics was therefore about the “exchange of opinions between equals” (84) not the pursuit of unanimity, which they regarded as a form of tyranny.

The Bolshevik Party of the Russian Revolution (See: Index of Terms) pioneered the use of political terror, with their intra-party purges modelled on the French Revolution; but in France the terror was “enacted in good faith” while in Russia it was motivated largely by ideology and consciously targeted innocent people for imagined “crimes against the revolution” (90). Robespierre’s Terror was inspired by the egregious hypocrisy and corruption of the French aristocracy, which was contrasted with the innate goodness of the “low people.”

Subsequent generations compared the revolutionary terror to the “birth-pangs” of the old order dying and a new “organism” being born, but the revolutionists at the time preferred the theatrical metaphor of unmasking. Arendt explores the history of the Latin word persona, which initially referred to a stage-actor’s mask. The word was later used to denote the legal personhood of a Roman citizen; an individual without a persona had no rights or duties within the polis.

During the Terror, the French revolutionists stripped individuals of their legal personhood and civil rights because they believed they had liberated the “natural man in all men, and given him the Rights of Man” (98, emphasis added). State-based civil rights were thus irrelevant as long as universal natural rights were preserved. Although it was modeled on the American Bill of Rights, which sought to limit the exercise of government power, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man differed in that it focused on “primary positive rights, inherent in man’s nature, as distinguished from his political status” (99, emphasis added)—what today we would call human rights.

Arendt argues that the unmasking of hypocrisy and exposure of mass suffering transformed the malheureux (the “unfortunate ones”) into the enragés (the “enraged ones”), who believed in vengeance at all costs. Arendt blames Robespierre and like-minded revolutionaries for seeking to liberate the people in their capacity as malheureux rather than as prospective citizens (101-02). She notes that “uprisings of the poor against the rich tend to be more intense than uprisings against political oppression” (102). All subsequent revolutions—excluding the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (See: Index of Terms)—have likewise used the suffering of the masses in their struggle against oppression, but this is regrettable, in Arendt’s view, since “the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom” (102).