Arendt and America by Richard H. King

Author:Richard H. King [King, Richard H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226311524
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Against the Liberal Grain

Among Hannah Arendt’s major works, On Revolution (1963) has received the most uneven treatment.1 Perhaps because Arendt scholars have tended to be historians of political thought or philosophers and most lack grounding in American history or thought, they have missed the drastic interpretive-historiographical shift Arendt’s book proposed. It called into question historian Richard Hofstadter’s contention that the American political tradition had always been a “democracy in cupidity,” challenged Louis Hartz’s claim about the exclusively Lockean nature of American political culture, scuttled historian Charles Beard’s emphasis on the economic motivations of the Framers, and largely ignored the nascent New Left (to be) emphasis on the “from the bottom up” sources of colonial revolt against British rule. In fact, her challenge came before American historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood advanced their own interpretation of the Radical Whig, Country versus Court, republican and/or civic humanism origins of American political institutions.2

The concerns of Arendt’s book were also strikingly echoed in the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the New Left generally. Uniting these phenomena was the idea of participatory democracy, a contemporary expression of the “public freedom” and “public happiness” she made central to On Revolution. While figures such as Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and Herbert Marcuse are generally regarded as intellectual progenitors of 1960s radicalism, Arendt’s On Revolution provided the political insurgency of the 1960s with a historical pedigree.3 As Straussian political philosopher Harvey Mansfield later observed: “I would say it is because of her that the Left in America no longer attacks the American Revolution.”4

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