Hannah Arendt's On Revolution Revisited

 I'm a huge fan of Hannah Arendt and think there's nothing finer than her Origins of Totalitarianism in particular.  But for some reason, I wasn't thrilled with her book, On Revolution, the first time around. I was confused by the extensive discussion of the so-called American Revolution, which hardly seems like a revolution at all when set alongside of the French or Russian Revolutions.  But in preparation for a class, I gave the book another read and liked it much better this time.  I particularly like the way she explains why revolutions are inherently modern phenomena.  An expert in Greek history, she admits that previous epochs knew regime change.  However, she asserts that regime change, or even the eruption of religious mass hysteria, is quite different than revolution in the modern sense of the word.  Revolutions, she argues, involve rectilinear time. They demand revolutionary calendars that begin in Year One.  The idea of novelty is essential to the revolutionary experience.  People need to know that the future is wide-open, almost unpredictable.  

In the 18th century, people moved closer to the idea of overturning the world to create something brand new, or even utopian.  But they weren't searching for freedom, or at least the freedom to do something unprecedented.  In pre-modern eras, discontents might search to recover lost liberties, but they didn't do so to create a unique, open-ended future.  They didn't even call for liberty for all male members of society, or citizens.  They also made no pretensions to speaking on behalf of the world. They required the return of lost liberties, and these liberties were generally very specific to particular places, or particular classes or even nobles.  According to Arendt, pre-modern people didn't seek comprehensive, total, terrifying, change.  Slaves sought freedom, palace elites sought a new leader, sections of an empire sought independence; but no one sought global freedom for all citizens.  

Like Goldstone, Arendt does some historical work.  But here she notes that nobody even used the word revolution until quite recently.  And when like Machiavelli does identify a secular realm of politics, he's looking to the past, to Polybius.  Indeed, medieval thinkers couldn't even conceive of anything other than a rebellion in order to exchange rulers.  Medieval thinkers made no claim whatsoever that the people should gain any share in government.  You were born a ruler, a noble, and that was that.  The English levellers did finally demand something new:  a constitution.  Still, they were primarily concerned to get their ancient rights restored to them.  To use the scientific term, they demanded a complete revolution of the social order, or, in other words, a return to the ancient status quo.  

Arendt even includes the US revolution in a pre-modern rebellion, in the sense that the revolutionaries were demanding their rights as Englishmen restored to them.  The French Revolution, by contrast, called for the execution of the king and queen, and then the radical unfolding of new knowledge about politics, a new society, a new future.  And at first, they wanted radical decentralization, and later, and as a response to the threat of counterrevolution and invasion, the reverse:  radical centralization.  Of course, the French Revolution also added an economic dimension to the notion of radical freedom.  From 1789 onward, revolutionaries would also be thinking of social and political freedom.  

Jack Goldstone's Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction

 As will be evident, I've taken a long break from my Soviet reading list.  The general Covid situation made switch to other readings.  Even so, I have recently decided to teach a short course on the Russian Revolution and so I'm reading a few books that I thought might help me with this task.  The first book I read was Jack Goldstone's Revolutions, part of the Very Short Introductions series.  I thought my class should start with some reflections on the nature of revolution, and the history of the concept, so I appreciated Goldstone's first chapters on the subject.  Goldstone's first couple of chapters raise a number of interesting questions. After reading these chapters, I thought my class could begin by discussing questions such as the following:  How should we define the word, revolution?  What is the difference between a revolution and a revolt or rebellion or civil war or insurrection or guerilla warfare? Are revolutions common or rare in world history?  Why do they really matter?  Are they essentially violent?  Do they often or even usually lead to dictatorship?  Are they varied in their expression or a unified phenomenon? Why and when do people think they can revolt, or that they should revolt, or that they simply have no choice but to revolt?  Do revolutions occur because the people are optimistic or pessimistic about the future?  Do revolutions always contain a democratic element, or are they almost by definition democratic?  Do revolutions occur only when leaders are isolated or weak?  Do they occur only when the military waivers?   Are revolutions essentially political by nature, or are they mainly an economic occurrence?  Can a revolution be an elite affair, or is it always a matter of the masses revolting?  Are the reasons revolutionaries give for rebelling the real reasons revolutions occur, or are there more important reasons they occur?  Does inequality help or hurt the cause of revolution? What's the role of religion in revolution?  Does modernization prevent revolution or cause it?  How do we judge the results of a revolution?  Should we use a short-term or long-term standard of its effects on society?  Do elites need to be divided for a revolution to be successful?  When do revolutions have a global impact?  Is there a science of revolution?  Can they be predicted to any degree?  How have revolutions change over time?  What's the relationship between war and revolution?  Can revolutions be coopted by bringing rebels into the ruling establishment?  Are revolutions moral by nature?  Do revolutions require foreign assistance?  How do revolutions draw on past rebellions or revolutions to make their case for radical change?  Do revolutions require charismatic leaders?  Why do they attempt to adopt new language, new rituals, new religions?  Must revolutionaries be conspiratorial? Do revolutions have to lead to post-revolutionary power struggles?  How can revolutionary regimes best be stabilized?   How can they deal with external threats?  Do they do best to adopt constitutions?  Can revolutionary regimes remain democratic?  (Is the US Revolution truly a revolution?)  Do revolutionary regimes always adopt purges as a technique of government? Do the radicals always win in post-revolutionary power struggles?  What are the benefits and costs of revolutions?  Why do some revolutions have ethnic or nationalist overtones, or do they always have to have them?   How did revolutions change between 1688, 1776, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1917, etc.?  How did non-European revolutions incorporate anti-colonialism into ideologies?  What do the Iranian Revolution and Arab Revolt say about revolutions?   

These are all great questions.  Goldstone also believes that revolutions require five characteristics:  1) economic or fiscal stress; 2) elite alienation; 3) popular) a narrative of resistance; 5) international support. 

Golstone's book also covers different broad historical epochs and their experiences with revolutions.   I found these chapters less than useful.  I think Hannah Arendt's book, On Revolution, helps to explain why this is the case.  According to her, revolutions are modern by nature.  They demand something brand new, rather than a return to lost privileges, whether real or imagined.  They usually have global pretentions.  They are utopian.  She makes her point by analyzing the Puritan Revolution and the Glorious Revolution.  Both had some modern elements, but neither sought to bring about a millenarian future.  They called for the reestablishment of ancient liberties.  They used the scientific definition of the term, revolution, to call for a return to the way society was supposed to be. Although Goldstone is right to point out that the Greeks and Renaissance princes knew regime change, they aren't quite right to equate this with the French or Russian revolutions, which called for the implementation of modern utopias that would scarcely resemble any past.  

Hannah Arendt

Here a few quotations from Hannah Arendt from The Origins of Totalitarianism.  This book seems to demonstrate the usefulness of theory once and for all.  Without Arendt, one could hardly make sense of the plethora of memoirs concerning the absurdities related to Stalinism.

"Real power begins where secrecy begins."

"..the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination."

"The complete absence of successful or unsuccessful palace revolutions is one of the most remarkable characteristics of totalitarian dictatorships."

"The multiplicity of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence"

"Constant removal, demotion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent the development of experience."

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

"They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential territory."

"For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts."

"...those who rightly understand the terrible efficiency of totalitarian organization and police are likely to overestimate the material force of totalitarian countries, while those who understand the wasteful incompetence of totalitarian economics are likely to underestimate the power potential which can be created in disregard of all material factors."

"Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for 'objective enemies' begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes."

"Multiplication of secret services makes last-minute changes possible, so that one branch may be preparing to bestow the Order of Lenin on the director of a factory while another makes arranges for his arrest."

"Free consent is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition."

Eugenia Ginzburg and Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism

Does the literature of the gulag capture the essence of the Soviet experience during the 1930s? Unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens (as well as many other categories of people) found themselves in a Siberia work camp during this period, and those who escaped the gulag were very likely to spend a considerable amount of energy anticipating execution or arrest.  But can arbitrary imprisonment and twenty year terms of hard labor capture the experience of a whole generation of Soviet citizens, many of whom surely supported Stalin and the Bolshevik project in general?  After all, camp memoirs reveal the extent to which even Soviet prisoners could defend the Soviet leader by claiming that Yezhov or Beria, and not Stalin, were to blame for prosecutorial or prison guard excesses.  If only somebody could get word to Stalin about what was happening in his name, the world would be put right again. 

Anya Bremzen, author of a wonderful memoir entitled Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, recently noted the problem with understanding the second full decade of Bolshevik rule.  The 1930s were a schizophrenic episode. You might well have been swept up in the purges, but if you remained “free” from arrest, you were very likely to be immersed in a state of “totalitarian joy,” i.e., an unending series of Communist festivals to celebrate Soviet achievement.  Understanding this dualism, it’s useful to read a book like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey Into the Whirlwind in the context of a larger book about totalitarianism such as Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism.  On the one hand, Ginzburg’s book details the madness of Stalinism in which a loyal and dedicated Bolshevik leader could find oneself under arrest for no apparent reason at all.  Ginzburg’s classic tale of the Great Terror describes a typical cycle of Soviet justice, including arbitrary arrest, family disgrace (followed by imprisonment of both her husband and parents), psychological and physical torture, summary military trial, extended sentence, prolonged solitary confinement, barbaric transportation to the edges of Siberia, and brutal work conditions in the taiga.  On the other hand, Arendt’s theory of totalitarian government reveals that such a cycle of arbitrary terror was intrinsically linked to the nature of the Bolshevik’s ideology, an ideology that required an unending pool of enemies.

What exactly is totalitarianism?  Arendt’s treatise on the subject, groundbreaking at the time of publication, remains acutely perceptive.  In some ways, Arendt made the original argument that you can’t understand Stalinism without looking closely at Hitlerism.  In both cases, the ruling party became almost synonymous with the state.  Beyond that, the party made radical claims to represent all of humanity.  The case for fascism representing a claim to global government is perhaps controversial.  However, Arendt points out that fascist parties sprang up everywhere in Europe even as the Nazi platform clearly called for the conquest of large portions of the globe.  The communist plan for global government is much clearer,  although Arendt must remind us not to take Stalin’s call for “socialism in one country” too seriously.  Once the totalitarian party makes a claim to global suzerainty, it’s not hard to begin to treat its citizens as traitors, and foreign citizens as either natural saboteurs or spies.

The radical nature of totalitarian government expresses itself in another way.  According to both Nazism and Stalinism, the party is a movement rather than a traditional government,  If the party is a movement, it must continuously encounter new categories of enemies.  Arendt’s claim is that Nazism constantly found new enemies, and would have done so long after it had eliminated the last Jew from any of its territories.  The Nazis, after all, had already declared war against Slavic peoples, and indeed various categories of German people, including Communists and the allegedly “un-hygienic.”  So too did Bolshevism continue to identify new opponents long after subduing any hint of opposition from former aristocrats or bourgeois intellectuals.

In fact, Arendt notes that totalitarian regimes thrive on the logic of arbitrary terror as described by Ginzburg in Journey Into the Whirlwind.  According to Arendt, totalitarian governments are politically powerful but economically chaotic and inefficient.    Ginzburg’s memoir proves this rule.  On the one hand, Stalin had turned all Soviet citizens into potential spies, complicit in the country’s perpetual state of terror.  The fact that all citizens could be arrested for no reason whatsoever also meant that the entire country had reason to worry.  Indeed,  Stalinism, like Nazism, had essentially made the very idea of rebellion irrelevant.  In mere despotism, a man or woman might decide to oppose the government and court death as a consequence of his brave act of defiance.  In totalitarianism, rebels were likely to be put to death for their opposition, but so too were perfectly loyal supporters of the system such as Ginzburg, a professor of Leninist history. If Old Bolsheviks suffered and died, what would genuine opposition to Stalinism have really signified? 

Ginzburg’s memoir also illustrates the chronic inefficiency of totalitarianism.  Over and over again, the Bolshevik government sacrificed economic efficiency at the alter of ideology.   Hundreds of thousands of productive and even largely loyal citizens were thrown into the most barbaric and disastrously inefficient work camps system imaginable.  Many died for little or no reason at every stage of the journey between arrest and productive labor.  The parallel with Nazism is obvious.  As Arendt reminds us, the Nazi economy and war effort were repeatedly undermined by the racist ideological aspirations of Hitler. 

On a mundane level, Arendt explains the logic of totalitarianism by discussing a fictitious request from Moscow for more pipes.  In a traditional setting, an economic logic would dictate why more pipes are needed.  Under totalitarianism, nobody but the secret police can really be certain why more pipes have been ordered.  Does the factory need the pipes to increase output?  Yes, perhaps, but even if this is true, why is more output needed?  Does one agency want to embarrass another by increasing production at this factory?  Does someone in Moscow want to blame the factory’s managers for overproduction?  According to Arendt, nobody but the secret police—ultimately controlled by Stalin—can know the answer to questions such as these.  In fact, both Hitler and Stalin created complex, overlapping, and even competing governmental structures.  These structures were always confusing.  The net result was that multiple and often competing policies were proposed simultaneously, which only the will of the supreme leader (expressed through the vehicle of the secret police) could resolve. 

Whether outlined by Ginzburg or Arendt, totalitarianism doesn’t seen like a very gratifying system of government.  Yet even totalitarianism has its pleasures.  For one thing, a system of perpetual purges and spectacular falls from grace offers unprecedented opportunities for career advancement.  Arendt argues that the purges inevitably implicated large numbers of new recruits in the original crimes of the Bolsheviks and Nazis.  Thus, while your own lifespan might be cut short at any moment, you might well have had the opportunity to rise to great heights before your inevitable fall from the dizzying heights of power.  These then are the joys of totalitarianism. 

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Role of Terror in Russian History

Recently I've delved into a variety of different books dealing with the subject of terror.  I've looked at Terry Eagelton's Holy Terror, which traces Europe's fascination with violence back to its Greek origins (See my posts on the book);  Hannah Arendt's short study of the subject, On Violence, which opens, appropriately enough, with reference to Lenin's statement that the twentieth century would be a century of wars and revolution;  and Slavoj Zizek's short treatise on the subject, Violence. Obviously, the question of terror is central to the history of twentieth century Europe and, more particularly, Russia.  Stalinism is of course terror personified.  We need only read Robert Conquest's masterwork, The Great Terror:  A Reassessment, to gain a true picture of the extent to which the trajectory of a people can revolve around criminality and violence.

Yet Stalin didn't invent revolutionary violence. Lenin and all other Old Bolsheviks accepted, or rather embraced, the idea of terror as well.  So too did rival socialist and anarchist parties.  The Bolsheviks saw terror as a legitimate vehicle for establishing and maintaining revolutionary gains against all comers.  Although the idea of terror seems to be discredited in modern political discourse, most revolutionary theorists and thinkers believed that real social change required a large measure of violence.  In fact, almost everybody who opposed the status quo, who opposed the worst excesses of either medieval or modern (ie, capitalist) life, believed that violence in defense of liberty was, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, no vice.  People looked back in particular to the model of French Revolution's Reign of Terror.  Who could gainsay the fact that violence had secured the country against its enemies, both internal and external?

Sophie Wahnich's book, In Defence of Terror:  Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, reminds us of the fact that nineteenth century radicals had few qualms about celebrating the Reign of Terror as perhaps the only weapon which could sustain revolution and keep kings and aristocrats at bay.  Of course, knowing that politics was a sterile arena, late nineteenth century Russians radicals openly embraced terror as an engine of change.  By the onset of World War I, certainly men like Lenin were unlikely to regret the use of violence to effect social change.  Could things get any worse than they were in the Great War?  Perhaps Lenin can be forgiven for thinking that they couldn't.  Zizek's contemporary analysis of global inequality illustrates this line of thinking.  Zizek believes in two kinds of violence, subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is revolutionary violence, or any form of popular insurrection.  The other kind of violence is objective violence.  Zizek argues that objective violence is the invisible, structural violence of capitalism and neo-colonialism.  While we tend to focus on seemingly random outbreaks of subjective violence, we seldom see the objective conditions which make these outbreaks inevitable. 

One interesting way of looking at revolutionary violence is found in Antoine de Baecque's book, Glory and Terror:  Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution.  De Baecque's original contribution to the study of violence is to show how violence tells an important story in any revolution, or perhaps competing stories.  For De Baecque, dead bodies are scripts which narrate a revolutionary story of justice.  De Baecque does a close reading of seven different macabre stories from the French Revolution.  The interesting thing about these famous deaths is that in each case the revolutionaries move very far away from the known historical "facts."  That is to say, revolutionaries invented very elaborate and richly told tales of horror that surpassed the events as they occurred.  These collective fantasies (and its interesting to see that counter-revolutionaries also engaged in collective fantasies about dead bodies) tell us a great deal about the importance of violence to the mental act of rebellion. 

Thinking of the literature on revolutionary violence, I'm reminded of a presentation I recently attended on the subject of the academic peculiarities of veterans.  The presenter, an expert on advocating for the veteran population, spoke of their defining traits, almost all of them positive.  Veterans were hard-working, respectful, service-oriented, etc.  They also demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for aggression.  The thought disturbed me.  How could this group of heroes, the embodiment of everything good in our country, also be a group of killers?  On some level, I knew that veterans are, almost by definition, killers.  They are, at least, all potential killers.  If this is so, why did the term veteran sound so innocuous, so friendly, so positive?

I think the term revolutionary must be seen in the same light.  A revolutionary is, almost by definition, a killer.   Inspiring fear in others is part of the job.  In some eras, people have celebrated the positive aspects of the revolutionary, purposefully overlooking the murderous ones, or seeing murder as an aspect of social change.  To some extent, this explains the Great Terror.  We can't understand this tragic phenomenon if we don't see how and why so many former revolutionaries accepted the idea of violence as something positive.