The Revolution Will Not Be Institutionalized

“The failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revolutionary spirit and to understand it conceptually was preceded by the failure of the revolution to provide it with a lasting institution. The revolution, unless it ended in the disaster of terror, had come to an end with the establishment of a republic which, according to the men of the revolutions, was ‘the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.’ But in this republic, as it presently turned out, there was no space reserved, no room left for the exercise of precisely those qualities which had been instrumental in building it…. The revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised.”

--Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Hannah Arendt concludes her book on the revolutionary tradition in Europe and North America with a lament for its “lost treasure”: the public freedom of citizens to participate directly in the activity of government. The people who had given shape to the revolutions in America, France, Germany, Russia, and Hungary had sought not only to tear down existing autocratic orders but also to establish, on their own efforts, altogether new modes of political existence. In other words, they were concerned not merely with liberating themselves from tyranny but with founding institutions that would secure for future generations the freedom to act in the political realm that they had realized for themselves. Unfortunately, Arendt asserts, the republics which so often followed revolutionary upheaval failed to enshrine those forms of direct engagement that had animated the republics’ very creation. Rather than assuring the people’s immediate participation in government and public affairs, they merely created ways and means by which the people would be represented. Ultimately, such systems of representation denied most citizens the capacity and opportunity to be substantive political actors.

[caption id="attachment_14705" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Pericles' Funeral Oration (Source: A Digital Public Library of America and the Transformation of the Humanities, Tufts University)[/caption]

For Arendt, Thomas Jefferson was one of the most discerning critics of republican government because he grasped this defining and corrosive paradox. She accordingly highlighted his call, late in his life, for the formation of ward councils, local “elementary republics” that might allow for “the voice of the whole people [to be] fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed.” Indeed, Jefferson imagined the ward system as the one means to secure citizens’ firsthand engagement in political life that did not entail the violence of “recurring revolutions.” As Arendt notes, the ward councils that Jefferson had in mind bore a striking resemblance to the communes, societies, and soviets that had repeatedly emerged during the throes of revolution in France, Germany, and Russia. These popular bodies did not simply mark “a swift disintegration of the old power” but rather “the amazing formation of a new power structure which owed its existence to nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”

Unfortunately, Arendt contends, these novel institutions were misapprehended by “professional revolutionists” at the time as well as a host of statesmen, historians, and political theorists in the years that followed. All of these observers failed to understand that the popular councils were not “temporary organs in the revolutionary struggle” but embodiments of a popular “aspiration to lay down the new order.” In fact, these councils were commonly disbanded if not actively repressed by the political parties that ascended to dominance in the wake of revolution (as when, for instance, Lenin crushed the soviets when they questioned Bolshevik hegemony). For Arendt, such parties may have offered republican governments the necessary means to secure popular consent, but they spelled the death of full citizenly engagement in the world of politics.

[caption id="attachment_14632" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Thomas Jefferson (Source: JRBenjamin.org)[/caption]

Arendt’s analysis did not extend beyond the mid-twentieth century and the Euro-American sphere, but it remains highly relevant for more recent revolutionary conjunctures, including the Arab Spring in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. The protests in Tahrir Square and other locales displayed ordinary citizens’ remarkable capacity to channel their contempt for autocratic rule into rapidly crystallizing organizational forms and articulate demands for change. They also underscored the degree to which such spontaneous organization could transcend divisions of party membership and ideological conviction. As Arendt notes, these revolutionary bodies did not merely “cross all party lines” in terms of their popular participation; they underscored the degree to which party membership might become secondary, or even irrelevant, to direct political action.

And yet the forces of opposition that emerged during the Arab Spring also illustrate the immense difficulty of institutionalizing the revolution and the exercise of public freedom on which it builds. As with their historical predecessors, these oppositional assemblies were singularly unable to manage the tasks of day-to-day administration on which all modern polities depend. And they had few resources with which to resist the political parties, military forces, and other agencies that sought to contain, co-opt, and preempt their active participation. At best, the Arab Spring has given way to governments that are republican in name only, and in all too many instances it has succumbed to one or another form of autocracy. Given the decidedly wintry course that recent events in the region have taken, the pessimistic strains in Arendt’s thought are, unfortunately, all too prescient.

-- Jeffrey Jurgens

(Featured Image: "Freedom/Break the Mould," a sculpture by Zenos Frudakis; Source: aranyló)