The Freedom to Be Free by Hannah Arendt

Author:Hannah Arendt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

That this is how it turned out—except for Stalin’s totalitarian rule, for which it would be difficult to hold either Lenin or the revolutionary tradition responsible—no one is likely to deny. But what is perhaps less obvious is that one would have to change only a few words to obtain a perfect description of the ills of absolutism prior to the revolutions.

A comparison of the two first revolutions, whose beginnings were so similar and whose ends so tremendously different, demonstrates clearly, I think, not only that the conquest of poverty is a prerequisite for the foundation of freedom, but also that liberation from poverty cannot be dealt with in the same way as liberation from political oppression. For if violence pitted against violence leads to war, foreign or civil, violence pitted against social conditions has always led to terror. Terror rather than mere violence, terror let loose after the old regime has been dissolved and the new regime installed, is what either sends revolutions to their doom, or deforms them so decisively that they lapse into tyranny and despotism.

I said before that the revolution’s original goal was freedom in the sense of the abolition of personal rule and of the admission of all to the public realm and participation in the administration of affairs common to all. Rulership itself had its most legitimate source not in a drive to power but in the human wish to emancipate mankind from the necessities of life, the achievement of which required violence, the means of forcing the many to bear the burdens of the few so that at least some could be free. This, and not the accumulation of wealth, was the core of slavery, at least in antiquity, and it is due only to the rise of modern technology, rather than the rise of any modern political notions, including revolutionary ideas, which has changed this human condition at least in some parts of the world. What America achieved by great good luck, today many other states, though probably not all, may acquire by virtue of calculated effort and organized development. This fact is the measure of our hope. It permits us to take the lessons of the deformed revolutions into account and still hold fast not only to their undeniable grandeur but also to their inherent promise.

Let me, by way of concluding, just indicate one more aspect of freedom which came to the fore during the revolutions, and for which the revolutionaries themselves were least prepared. It is that the idea of freedom and the actual experience of making a new beginning in the historical continuum should coincide. Let me remind you once more of the Novus Ordo Saeclorum. The surprising phrase is based in Virgil, who, in his Fourth Eclogue, speaks of “the great cycle of periods [that] is born anew” in the reign of Augustus: Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. Virgil speaks of a great (magnus) but not a new (novus) order, and it is this change in

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