The Fools of History

ON REVOLUTION (343 pp.)--Hannah Arendt--Viking ($6.50).

It used to be democratic dogma that revolutions were a good thing. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," said Jefferson. But the tree of liberty has fared poorly in the blood baths of this century. The grim example of the Bolshevik and other revolutions has caused political theorists to take a second look at revolutions.

Political Philosopher Hannah Arendt, 56, concludes flatly that, when possible, they should be avoided. Violent change plows under more liberties than it produces. "We know to our sorrow," she states, "that freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be, and that there exist more civil liberties even in countries where the revolution was defeated than in those where revolutions have been victorious."

The Need of Terror. Revolutions were usually begun for the right reason: to win political freedom. But they were soon sidetracked by trying to solve the social problem of mass poverty. Poverty, writes Arendt, cannot be eliminated by political upheaval; revolutionary get-rich-quick schemes are bound to founder. In the French Revolution, Robespierre's first efforts were directed toward curing the ills of the masses. When they failed, he turned in rage and frustration to terror--which also did not work. Robespierre was overwhelmed by the masses. "Where the breakdown of traditional authority set the poor of the earth on the march," writes Arendt, "where they left the obscurity of their misfortunes and streamed upon the marketplace, their furor seemed as irresistible as the motion of the stars, a tor rent rushing forward with elemental force and engulfing a whole world." When the torrent receded, the rocky economic facts remained.

Instead of deploring the loss of freedom in revolutionary France, Arendt points out, 19th century political theorists decided that even more terrorism was needed to "liberate" the masses. Marx declared that only violent revolution could free the poor from the yoke of the bourgeois oppressors; Hegel announced that violence was not to be shunned but to be welcomed as an inevitable part of the historical process. In their time, the Bolsheviks solemnly followed the instructions of these teachers down to the last detail, and produced the most ferocious revolution of all, in which the declared end--freedom--was completely swallowed up in the means--terrorism. The Russian revolutionaries considered themselves the agents of history and justified their brutality in the name of history. "There is some grandiose ludicrousness,'' she writes, "in the spectacle of these men--who had dared to defy all powers that be and to challenge all authorities on earth and whose courage was beyond the shadow of a doubt--submitting humbly and without so much as a cry of outrage to the call of historical necessity, no matter how foolish and incongruous the outward appearance of this necessity must have appeared to them . . . They were fooled by history and they have become the fools of history."

The Joy of Politics. Revolution was happily different in the U.S., writes Arendt, because America was free of the mass poverty that corrupted European revolutions. The Negro slaves, to be sure, were impoverished; but at that time they were not considered people and so aroused no compassion. "It is as though the American Revolution was achieved in a kind of ivory tower into which the fearful spectacle of human misery, the haunting voices of abject poverty, never penetrated." Without the masses running amuck in the streets, the Founding Fathers were able to concentrate brilliantly on political freedom and to establish it permanently.

Hannah Arendt is best as historical analyst; her discussion of revolution is occasionally worthy of the Founding Fathers themselves. But as political scientist, she suffers from creeping perfectionism. She complains that even the American Revolution ultimately failed because Americans lost interest in their political condition in order to pursue their private gain. As she sees it, the U.S. citizen has too much affluence and too little civic concern. People should be fully and joyously participating in politics, as the Greeks once did in their city-states or the early American colonists in their town meetings.

But Hannah Arendt's prescription for the good society is not very relevant to a mass society. At the time of the Ameri can Revolution, the U.S. population was 4,000,000, and the electorate a mere 6% of that. In today's complex industrial society, politics is a fulltime, demanding job. Most of the U.S.'s 187 million busy citizens are willing--and occasionally even grateful--to delegate day-to-day political decisions to the politicians, whom they can unseat at election time.

The American Revolution managed to establish and maintain a state of liberty in which a common citizen can usually make himself felt politically if he tries. Most revolutions, as Hannah Arendt points out, have not.

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