Word: arendt
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When Hannah Arendt's On Revolution was published a month ago, Time Magazine clucked its approval. A renowned political philosopher with impeccable anti-communist credentials had decided all revolutions--except the American Revolution--are unprofitable. What more could Time ask? In a review entitled "The Fools of History," the glossy weekly assured its readers that they now had on the highest authority what Time had been telling them all along: revolutions are nasty, and really shouldn't happen...
...Revolution, by Hannah Arendt. In a shrewd study, Historian Arendt examines the long-held notion that revolutions cure social ills, concludes that most of them do more harm than good...
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...
...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...
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...