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passion. The American revolutionary model was concerned with the
political question, with problems of politics and the predicaments that
flowed from an elitist theory of mass human nature. Its revolutionary pas–
sion was mediated by norms and hence ended in compassion, or at least a
sense of the worth of the process whatever the success of the policy.
The weaknesses of the classic French model are revealed in the
abortive aspects of the major revolutions of the modern era-the Paris
Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the Hungarian uprising. In each
case there was the rise of two distinctive forces: the party, acting in the
name of the people, and the voluntary associations (workers' councils, sovi–
ets, communes), or the people as a collective. In the betrayal of the
revolution, the force of power over the people came through the conse–
cration of political parties, whereas the council system, because it failed to
realize itself as a new form of government (as in the American
Revolution), tended to be short lived. This fact accounts for the perfidy of
modern revolutionary movements-the breakdown of voluntary associa–
tion and its replacement by a swollen bureaucracy.
These propositions indicate Arendt's morphology of revolution. But a
number of problems arise. There is the relative absence of evidence. How
does one evaluate such speculations? The abundant confidence with which
On Revolution
is written is far from persuasive. The unsystematic prose
style, which keeps the reader hopping about looking for continuing
threads, does not enhance a ready acceptance of her perspectives, even as
one is drawn to her sentiments.
Arendt reveals little knowledge of modern warfare, that is, little about
the ambiguities of modern conflict-counter-insurgency, paramilitary
struggle, police action, guerrilla action-that would show that war is
becoming obsolete. It might be correct to note that thermonuclear warfare
would make total international conflict obsolete--since it is like a gun
with two barrels pointing in opposite directions. But the absence of any
distinction between war and annihilation throws all of the weight of her
discussion on revolution into the questionable assumption that war is
obsolete by reason of self-interest.
The absence of knowledge about contemporary warfare is excusable–
but conceit is no reply. And when she states that "the only discussion of
the war question I know which dares to face the horrors of nuclear
weapons and the threat of totalitarianism, and is therefore entirely free of
mental reservation, is Karl Jaspers' The
Future
if
Mankind,"
she is only
revealing her ignorance of a widespread and valuable empirical literature.
Nor is the definition of revolution particularly enlightening. To see revo–
lution as having everywhere a violent quality is to fail to distinguish
between change in social structure and strategies sometimes used in such
