This special issue began with a conference dedicated to Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication, held at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago (Chile), in September 2013. The articles that make up this collection explore the legacy of On Revolution and assess its continuing relevance for contemporary social and political thought. While the book never excited the notoriety of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, published a year earlier in 1962, its attempt to come to terms with the perplexities of modern revolutions has provoked a significant amount of controversy.
A number of critics, most famously the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, have questioned the historical accuracy of Arendt's treatment of the American and the French Revolution; in particular, Arendt's apparent celebration of the success of the American in constituting a new political body and her corresponding condemnation of the French for its descent into violence and authoritarianism. Other critics, such as Sheldon Wolin, have maintained that Arendt failed to provide adequate institutional answers to the political, economic or social problems of modern democracy or indeed convincing normative arguments concerning the aims of revolutionary practice. Some more sympathetic readers, including Jürgen Habermas, have still struggled to find in the book an articulated political theory, given the apparent absence of systematic definitions of the key notions it deploys: power, authority, law, freedom and revolution itself.
Overall, On Revolution has been relatively neglected. While The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition are recognised as fundamental contributions to the critique of the pathologies of modern societies and to the defence of politics as the realm of freedom and action, On Revolution tends to be seen as a rather minor contribution to reflection on the experiences of revolution in modern political life. The papers in this special issue offer a re-reading of On Revolution that, in different ways, re-affirms both its centrality to Arendt's political thought and its substantive contribution to our understanding of the modern revolutionary tradition. Indeed, were it not for this shared conviction, the papers you see here would not have been brought together. They engage with different themes to be found in the text – its sociological contributions, its historical analyses, its literary forms and its political conclusions – in the critical spirit of recovering what we might call, using an expression from the book, On Revolution’s own lost treasure.
One major theme running through the papers is Arendt's relationship to modern sociology and more specifically to a sociological understanding of modern political life. It is true that Arendt's strong criticisms of scientific representations of social life put her work at odds with positivist sociology's objectifying gaze, yet this does not mean that she is at odds with sociology as a whole. As some of the papers in this issue highlight, Arendt's understanding of the dilemmas, perplexities and contradictions of modern politics is actually quite close to and certainly engages with the tradition of ‘philosophical sociology’, as Karl Löwith termed it, inaugurated by Marx and Weber. This is not to say that Arendt should be admitted into the core of the sociological canon but that a critical reading of her approach to political modernity may appeal to the developmental concerns of sociology in new ways.
A second thematic you will find here concerns Arendt's theory of political foundation. This is perhaps the most discussed – and arguably least understood – issue in the secondary literature. On Revolution’s basic thesis is that the phenomenon of revolution has been divorced from its fundamental political promise: that of founding durable spaces for the exercise of political freedom and self-government. Arendt criticizes the dominant liberal and Marxist approaches to revolution, which, she argues, subject politics to basically non-political means and ends, such as class interests, material needs and the exercise of violence. She contends that what defines a revolution is the aim to begin something radically new in the world, but that this aim cannot be dissociated from the quest to construct a framework of lasting relations and institutions based on laws. Both are defining elements of modern revolutionary experience, but they are also potentially conflicting elements. The key problem then becomes one of preserving the freedom of constituent power in a durable constitutional order.
This leads us to a third and closely related thematic – that of finding a political form appropriate to the concept and experiences of modern revolutions. Arendt holds that neither constitutional democracies (which trace their origins back to the American Revolution) nor orthodox Marxist movements (which trace their origins back to the French revolution) have been able to solve the ‘riddle of all constitutions’, despite the formality of giving all power to the people on paper. In this context, Arendt looks for a solution to the problem of realising political freedom in the popular participatory bodies – ‘sections’, ‘councils’, ‘communes’, ‘soviets’ or ‘factory committees’ – that have emerged on the margins of every modern revolution. She describes them as an emergent political form with the capacity to preserve the ‘revolutionary spirit’ of self-government. Some of the papers address the question of how far Arendt thinks the riddle of all constitutions can be solved through this ‘lost treasure’ of the revolutionary tradition, how far it can actually be solved through this political medium, and indeed whether the riddle can be solved at all.
This in turn brings us to a fourth thematic – that of the distinctive hermeneutics Arendt develops to account for the perplexities of revolutionary events and political action. It raises the question not only of how to read On Revolution as a book but also of the style in which it is written. Arendt is a thinker aware of the difficulties involved in grasping the periodically catastrophic political experiences of modern times and of the difficulties of finding a style of writing that will enable her to engage in the activity of understanding such phenomena. The problem for her consists in how to address this challenge without depriving historical events of their moral texture, that is, without resorting to the abstract models of the social sciences and their cult of scientific ‘objectivity’. Arendt's return to the revolutionary experiences that have shaped the modern age employs literary devices of tragedy, comedy, irony and moral drama that bring the reader closer to experience. They are designed to work against the ‘failure of memory’, that is, the failure to retain the revolutionary spirit as a living experience. Her understanding of revolutions is, in this sense, one way of establishing ‘guideposts’ to orient our own present thinking and acting in the world.
Our overall ambition is to reveal unexpected dimensions within On Revolution which do not necessarily fit with our preconceptions about what makes this text ‘Arendtian’, and to recover elements of Arendt's work that have endured and matured with the passage of time. In the course of co-editing this volume and bringing together papers that are by no means uniform in their interpretation or assessment, we have discovered a growing common sense that the text can once again speak to us in the here and now.
There are six papers in this volume. Robert Fine offers a ‘phenomenological’ reading of On Revolution that highlights the triadic structure of the work as it moves from the French to the American and thence to the ‘lost treasure’ of the revolutionary tradition. He relates this triadic structure to some of Arendt's other major works and to the developmental experience of contradiction she tries to capture in the book. Laura Arese addresses On Revolution through the prism of tragedy and comedy and compares it with other writings of Arendt. Rodrigo Cordero focuses on the spatial nature of revolutionary phenomena and in particular on the sociological kernel of the notion of the ‘in-between’ which Arendt uses to depict the plural public spaces that both separate and bind people together in political action. Wolfhart Totschnig examines Arendt's enthusiasm for the council system, a bottom-up political structure based on local councils that are open to all citizens, and defends it against the criticism that it is unrealistic or naïve. Hauke Brunkhorst explores the ingenious inversions of Heidegger involved in Arendt's analysis of constitutional revolutions and her solutions to the problem of maintaining the original revolutionary power in a constitutional order. Lars Rensmann's paper, finally, is an exercise in applied social theory. He applies Arendt's approach to revolutionary political action to the 2009 Green Movement in Tehran and to the extraordinary politics of democratic civil disobedience that it expressed. We are deeply indebted to all our contributors, our referees and the editors of the journal for making this volume possible.