References for Theme: On Revolution [1963]
- Arendt, Hannah
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.121) In the eighteenth century the men prepared for power and eager, among other things, to apply what they had learned by study and thought were called hommes de lettres, and this is still a better name for them than our term 'intellectuals', under which we habitually subsume a class of professional scribes and writers whose labours are needed by the ever-expanding bureaucracies of modern government and business administration as well as by the almost equally fast-growing needs for entertainment in mass society. The growth of this class in modern times was inevitable and automatic; it would have come about under...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.259) In fact, no history of the European leisure classes would be complete without a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists and writers, have become the true heirs of the hommes de lettres in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The artists and writers joined the revolutionists because 'the very word bourgeois came to have a hated significance no less aesthetic than political' ; together they established Bohemia, that island of blessed leisure in the midst of the busy and overbusy century of the Industrial Revolution.
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.260) It is well known that the French Revolution had given rise to an entirely new figure on the political scene, the professional revolutionist, and his life was spent not in revolutionary agitation, for which there existed but few opportunities, but in study and thought, in theory and debate, whose sole object was revolution. In fact, no history of the European leisure classes would be complete with-out a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists and writers, have become the true heirs of the hommes de lettres in the seventeenth and eighteenth...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.262) If we leave aside the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris, where a commission pour les travailleurs, set up by the government itself, was almost exclusively concerned with questions of social legislation, the main dates of appearance of these organs of action and germs of a new state are the following: the year 1870, when the French capital under siege by the Prussian army 'spontaneously reorganized itself into a miniature federal body', which then formed the nucleus for the Parisian Commune government in the spring of 1871; the year 1905, when the wave of spontaneous strikes in Russia suddenly developed...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.274) In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again tried to take over. the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure. 'The wish of the working class', we are told, 'has been fulfilled. The factories will be managed by the councils of the workers.' This so-called wish of the working class sounds much rather like an attempt of the revolutionary party to counteract the councils' political aspirations, to drive their members away from the political realm and back into the factories. And this suspicion is borne out by· two facts: the councils...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.49) In the decades following the French Revolution, this association of a mighty undercurrent sweeping men with it, first to the surface of glorious deeds and then down to peril and infamy, was to become dominant. The various metaphors in which the revolution is seen not as the work of men but as an irresistible process, the metaphors of stream and torrent and current, were still coined by the actors themselves, who, however drunk they might have become with the wine of freedom in the abstract, clearly no longer believed that they were free agents. And -given but a moment of...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.61) The transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culottes was the turning point not only of the French Revolution but of all revolutions that were to follow. This is due in no small measure to the fact that Karl Marx, the greatest theorist the revolutions ever had, was so much more interested in history than in politics and therefore neglected, almost entirely, the original intentions of the men of the revolutions, the foundation of freedom, and concentrated his attention, almost exclusively, on the seemingly objective course of revolutionary events. In other words, it took more than half...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.63) Marx's model of explanation was the ancient institution of slavery, where clearly a 'ruling class', as he was to call it, had possessed itself of the means with which to force a subject class to bear life's toil and burden for it. Marx's hope, expressed with the Hegelian term of class-consciousness, rose from the fact that the modern age had emancipated-this subject class to the point where it might recover its ability to act, while its action at the same time would become irresistible by virtue of the very necessity under which emancipation had put the working class. For the...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.64) While [Marx] had first seen man-made violence and oppression of man by man where others had believed in some necessity inherent in the human condition, he later saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind · every violence, transgression, and violation. And since he, un-like his predecessors in the modern age but very much like his teachers in antiquity, equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than any-body else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life pro-cess of society is...
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.66) The idea that poverty should help men to break the shackles of oppression, because the poor have nothing to lose but their chains, has become so familiar through Marx's teachings that we are tempted to forget that it was unheard of prior to the actual course of the French Revolution.
- On Revolution (1963)
(p.68) What were absent from the American scene were misery and want rather than poverty, for 'the controversy between the rich and the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and the ignorant' was still very much present on the American scene and preoccupied the minds of the founders, who, despite the prosperity of their country, were convinced that these distinctions - 'as old as the creation. and as extensive as the globe' - were eternal. Yet, since the laborious in America were poor but not miserable - the observations of English and Continental travellers are unanimous and unanimously amazed:...
- On Revolution (1963)
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