16
HANNAH ARENDT
now that the West has long since ceased to live and to act
in
ac–
cordance with the tenets of capitalism, just as we can see that the
chief obstacle to rapid progress in countries ruled by Communist
dictatorships is precisely their rigid belief in an ideology. The truth
of the matter is that West and East are now engaged
in
all kinds of
economic experiments, and this is as it should be. The freer these
experiments are from ideological considerations, the better the results
are likely to be; and a competition between different economic sys–
tems, in view of the enormous objective problems involved, may
eventually tum out to be no less healthy than competition has been
within the more restricted framework of national economies. Political–
ly, the only issue at stake between West and East is freedom versus
tyranny; and the only political freedom within the economic realm
concerns the citizens' right to choose their profession and their place
of work.
If
the ideologies of the nineteenth century constitute a severe
handicap in understanding the dangers and the potentialities of the
conflict which divides the world today, the two great revolutions
of the eighteenth century-which politically, though not economical–
ly, are the origin, the birthplace as it were, of the modem world–
may well contain the very principles which are still at stake. Since
I cannot possibly hope to argue this matter at all plausibly within the
framework of these casual remarks, I shall try and make a few
points which seem to me to sum up what came to my mind when
I read your questions. First, I must admit that I immediately inter–
preted or reformulated them until they seemed to be contained in a
single question: What are the prospects of the West in the near
future, provided nuclear war is avoided and provided, as I believe,
revolution will remain the major issue of the century?
My first point would be that every revolution must go through
two stages, the stage of liberation-from poverty (which is a libera–
tion from necessity) , or from political domination, foreign or domestic
(which is a liberation from force)-and the stage of foundation, the
constitution of a new body politic or a new form of government. In
terms of historical processes, these two belong together, but as political
phenomena, they are very different matters and must be kept distinct.
My point here is not merely the truism (theoretically interesting
enough) that liberation is the prerequisite of freedom and hence
