Hannah Arendt Library: The Age of the Democratic Revolution

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Library at Bard College, we came across this copy of R. R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Volume 1: The Challenge.

In his book, Palmer theorizes that the years between 1760 and 1800 marked a significant advance for democracy, with the American, French, and Polish revolutions, as well as several other political movements, all manifesting the same democratic ideals.

Hannah Arendt inserted several annotations into her copy. On one particular page, (See below.) she used two vertical lines to mark two passages of text.

The first reads: "With the Declaration of Independence, and the new constitution which most of the states gave themselves in 1776 and 1777, the revolutionary colonials began to emerge from the anarchy that followed the collapse or withdrawal of British power."

The second proceeds as follows: "The new lawfulness in America was embodied in the new constitutions, which will be considered shortly. Meanwhile, what happened in America was against the law."

On the opposite page, (See below.) Hannah Arendt wrote the comment "no transition time!" in response to an account of the shortcomings of the French revolutioanry government.

She also used a vertical line to mark a footnote that reads "What the United States has missed by having no returned émigrés, or real counterrevolution within its own borders, may be seen in the work of the Canadian Arthur Johnston, dedicated to the loyalists, the 'true heroes of the Revolution.'"

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