18
HANNAH ARENDT
in complete political neutrality; in other words economic factors
need not interfere with political developments one way or another.
This means for our political future that the wreckage of freedom on
the rock of necessity which we have witnessed over and over again
since Robespierre's "despotism of liberty"
is
no longer unavoidable.
Short of war and short of total annihilation, both of which I
fear will remain actual dangers, the position of the West in general
and of the United States in particular will depend to a considerable
extent upon a clear understanding of these two factors involved in
revolution: freedom and the conquest of poverty. Technically and
economically, the West
is
in an excellent position to help in the
struggle against poverty and misery which is now going on all over
the world.
If
we fail to do our part in this struggle, I am afraid, we
shall have occasion to learn by bitter experience how right the men
of the French Revolution were when they exclaimed:
«Les malheu–
reux sont la puissance de la terre."
What we seem to fail to under–
stand-in the West in general and in the United States in particular
-is the enormous power inherent in wretchedness, once this
malheur
has come out into the open and has made its voice heard in public.
This happened for the first time in the French Revolution, and it
has happened time and again ever since.
In
a sense, the fight against
poverty, though to be conducted by technical, non-political means,
must also be understood as a power struggle, namely, as the struggle
against the force of necessity to prepare the way for the forces of
freedom.
In
the United States the failure to understand the political
relevance of the social question may have its roots in the history of
the country, and especially in the history of the revolution which
gave birth to the country's form of government. By the same token,
the people of this republic should be in the best possible position to
set an example for the whole world-and particularly to those new
ethnic groups and peoples who in rapid succession are now rising to
nationhood-when it comes to questions of founding new political
bodies and establishing lasting institutions of liberty. There are, I
think, two chief reasons why we have been found wanting even
there, the one being our failure to remember and to articulate con–
ceptually what was at stake in the American Revolution, and this
to such an extent that the denial that a revolution ever had taken
place here could become, for a long time, a cherished tenet of public
