Don't Be Afraid to Say "Revolution"? Post is Generating Interesting Feedback

The Arendt Center's, Roger Berkowitz posted a piece yesterday about the Occupy Wall Street protests which is generating some interesting dialogue.

Steve Maslow offers:

"Reading Roger Berkowitiz’s piece saves one the trouble of going down to the protests AND having to re-read ON REVOLUTION by Hannah Arendt. In fact, watching the video clip gives me enough detail so that I can position myself as an authority, when I go back to work and “sell” my story to my colleagues and friends and maybe even seduce lovers who find it dreamy that they might be dating someone “radical” enough to join a protest and still have a table and order a bottle of Stoli Cristal at the club.

Now are you nauseated?

For this idea IS the culture of Wall Street: voyeuristic, full of puffery, semi-literate and non-accountable. Does it really sound so far from that of our own outside of Wall Street? [Full disclosure: the author is the chairman of the board of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard and a Wall Street investment banker by profession]..."

Maslow continues further on:

"As Arendt pointed out in the opening passages of ON REVOLUTION, this is the touchstone of a genuine revolution, the desire to return to where we began, to come full circle(the ‘revolve’ in revolution)–resorting to radical methods (nonviolent street protests) in order to achieve conservative ends (to go back to where we were before.) The spirit of free enterprise tempered by shared sense of purpose (what Roger called ‘the public happiness’) are the substrate of concepts such as unemployment insurance, social security and even class-action law suits, but also, at the other end, things like profit sharing, pay raises, dividends and maternity leave. Attacking the former, while keeping the latter for themselves, Wall Street and its allies have made a mockery of fairness and democracy. The protesters have not articulated this yet, but they know what they do not know: something in rotten in the United States: income inequality, and it is threatening the very foundations of our republic. As Justice Louis Brandeis once said “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Read Maslow's full response here.