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How could Hannah Arendt glorify the American Revolution and revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the historiography of the French and American Revolutions
This article situates Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution in the traditions of French and American revolutionary historiography to demonstrate that Arendt’s ‘fable’ of the American Revolution was at odds with her argument about the council form. I argue that had Arendt really wanted to inspire a resurrection of the council form in the present, she would have done better to orient her readers to the French Revolution, specifically to the experiments in democratic republicanism of the group known as the Girondins.
To cite just two examples, George Kateb chides Arendt for relegating ‘representative democracy to a status radically severed from direct democracy, and nearly assimilates it to all non-tyrannical systems, even if they are non-democratic systems: especially to limited monarchy’. See George Kateb (2006) ‘Arendt and Representative Democracy’, in Garrath Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, vol. 2, pp. 95-129, 106. New York: Routledge. Albrecht Wellmer regards her as a champion of direct democracy with an aversion for political representation that is ‘deeply problematic if not simply naïve’. See Albrecht Wellmer (2000) ‘Arendt on Revolution’, in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, pp. 220-41, 232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl ( 1982) Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, p. 403. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
3.
Hannah Arendt ( 1984) [1963] On Revolution., p. 267. New York: Penguin Books.
4.
Lloyd Kramer ( 1992) ‘Habermas, History, and Critical Theory’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 236-54, 238. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5.
Arendt (n. 3), pp. 61, 216. All references for On Revolution are taken from this 1984 Penguin edn.
6.
Jason Frank ( 2010) Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America., pp. 42, 39. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7.
Lynn Hunt ( 2004) Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Twentieth Anniversary Edition, p. 222. Berkeley: CA: University of California Press.
8.
Even Rudi Visker, who recognizes that Arendt wants to move ‘beyond representation and participation’, nonetheless charges Arendt with inheriting ‘the legacy of the metaphysics of presence’ in what he views as her ‘organic’ conception of representation. Rudi Visker (2009) ‘Beyond Representation and Participation’, Philosophy and Social Criticism35(4): 420.
9.
Arendt’s polemics get in the way of her argument e.g. when she claims that the ‘conflict’ between the party and council systems pitted ‘representation versus action and participation’, a formulation that forgets that representation is on her own account central to the council form (p. 273).
10.
Andreas Kalyvas (2008) Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, p. 282. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11.
John F. Sitton (1994) ‘Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy’, in L. Hnchmann and S. Hinchmann (eds) Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, pp. 307-329, 308. New York: SUNY Press .
12.
Kalyvas (n. 10), p. 277.
13.
Sitton (n. 11), p. 313.
14.
Kalyvas (n. 10), p. 280.
15.
Although I agree with Kalyvas as to the importance of these omissions, his assertion that she regarded the council system as ‘‘an essentially authoritarian government’’ quotes her out of context. Kalyvas (n. 10), p. 282.
16.
David A. Weir (2005) Early New England: A Covenanted Society, p. 82. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Erdmans.
17.
Arendt is so intent on setting up the Mayflower Compact as emblematic of the novelty of the ‘New World’ that she goes so far as to assert that ‘the colonial covenants had originally been made without any reference to king or prince’ - even though that document opens with reference to both (p. 168).
18.
Weir (n. 16), p. 16.
19.
Ibid. p. 8; emphasis added.
20.
Ibid. p. 10.
21.
Ibid. pp. 9-10.
22.
David A. Weir documents a steady progression from civil covenanting as an inaugural and communal act towards a scripted, representative practice. From 1620 to 1640, 90% of civil covenants were made by local combination rather than by charter or patent from above, and 81% were entered into by the entire community. Between 1641 and 1660, self-scripted communal covenants account for just 60% of town foundings. This total drops to just under 40% over the next 20 years, and by 1681-1700, fewer than 5% of civil covenants are locally generated, and just 10% of these are entered into by the entire community. See Weir (n. 16), pp. 131, 133.
23.
Frank (n. 6), p. 55. Arendt had ‘passing familiarity’ with the Anti-Federalists at best. Storing was only beginning work on his Complete Anti-Federalist in 1963, the year On Revolution was published; it would not come out for another twenty years. None of the sources she relies on for accounts of the Federalists put them into dialogue with their opponents. Two articles she cites defend the Federalists as ‘partisans of democracy’, and portray the American Revolution as a ‘democratic movement’. See Martin Diamond (1959) ‘Democracy and the Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Framers’ Intent’, American Political Science Review 53 (1): 60, and Merrill Jenson (1957) ‘Democracy and the American Revolution’, Huntington Library Quarterly 20(4): 341, respectively.
24.
Eldbrige Gerry (1981) ‘To the Massachusetts General Court’, in Merrill Jensen (ed.) Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, vol. 13, pp. 548-50; emphasis in original.
25.
Mark L. Sargent (1988) ‘The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth’, New England Quarterly61(2): 239.
26.
Sargent explains that the Mayflower Compact was ‘all but ignored during the early Forefathers Day observances’. Historians of the mid-17th and early 18th century gave preference to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ‘the Puritan settlement that eventually absorbed its struggling neighbor at Plymouth’, judging it to have been the most representative of the political practices of that time. Ibid. pp. 234-5.
27.
Ibid. p. 235; emphasis added.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid. pp 242-3, 251.
30.
Saul Cornell (1999) The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828, p. 107. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press .
31.
Aristocrotis, ‘The Government of Nature Delineated or An Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution’ , in Herbert J. Storing (ed.) ( 1981) The Complete Anti-Federalist, p. 209; punctuation original. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
32.
Wood explains that the struggles of this period must be seen in context of the battles of the 1760s over the Empire’s claim that the colonies did not need a legislature of their own because they were ‘virtually represented in the English House of Commons’ (p. ix). The Federalists accepted the theory of virtual representation, rejecting only the practical premise that the interests of the colonists were sufficiently unified with those of the Mother country for the British Parliament to be representative. By contrast, some of the state constitutions and such Anti-Federalists as Brutus and Aristocrotis opposed the theory of virtual representation, because of its elitism, together with British rule. Gordon Wood (1969) The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-89, pp. ix, 562. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
33.
These reforms included: making the suffrage (rather than property) ‘a basic prerequisite of representation’; extending the right to vote; enlarging their legislatures; equalizing population across voting districts; and imposing both residency requirements and binding instructions on legislators to ensure that they were responsive to ‘no one but the people who elected’ them. Ibid. pp. 387, 163, 182, 186, 189.
34.
Ibid. p. 471.
35.
Ibid. p. 562.
36.
Even as early as the Declaration of Independence, Arendt observes (with evident impatience) that Jefferson ‘could speak of the consent by the people from which governments ‘‘derive their just powers’’ in the same Declaration which he closes on the principle of mutual pledges [i.e. covenant], and neither he nor anybody else became aware of the simple and elementary differences between ‘‘consent’’ and mutual promise’ or compact (pp. 176-7; emphasis added).
37.
Jason Frank aptly characterizes Arendt’s narrative when he writes that she focuses ‘on practical or experiential continuity, on the one hand, and theoretical misapprehension of that experience on the other’. Frank (n. 6), p. 51.
38.
I play here off Giorgio Agamben’s provocative formulation: ‘with the emergence of biopower, every people is doubled by a population; every democratic people is, at the same time, a demographic people’. Giorgio Agamben (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, p. 84. New York: Zone Books.
39.
Albert Soboul ( 1958) Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens, pp. 439-55. Paris : Librairie Clavreuil.
40.
I am indebted to Elizabeth Wingrove for helping me think through Arendt’s relationship to Marx and to the Furet-inspired critique of Marxist French Revolutionary historiography.
41.
T.C.W. Blanning (1996) The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution, p. 11. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 11. For a review essay of this literature see Keith Michael Baker (1981) ‘Review: Enlightenment and Revolution in France: Old Problems, Renewed Approaches’, Journal of Modern History53(2): 281-303.
42.
Lynn Hunt ( 1981) ‘Thinking the French Revolution’, History and Theory20(3): 313.
43.
Ibid. p. 320.
44.
François Furet (1981) Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
45.
Ibid. pp. 27, 46, emphasis added, 48.
46.
Ibid. pp. 38-9.
47.
Ibid. p. 27.
48.
Hunt puts it well: ‘Furet characterizes revolutionary government as in some sense pathological precisely because its politics do not represent social interests in the normal or expected fashion. When politics comes first, the situation is by definition abnormal’. Hunt (n. 7), p. 13.
49.
Ibid. p. 221.
50.
Dena Goodman (1994) The Republic of Letters, pp. 12, 19. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
51.
The controversy concerns whether the ‘Girondins’ actually were a party-style faction during the Revolution or whether the term ‘Girondin’ confers unity of principle, goal and membership on what was in fact only a loose association of friends and politicians. Some have charged that the term is pejorative, invented by the Montagnards during the internecine struggles of the Jacobins in 1793 to discredit their enemies. Frederick de Luna has argued that the term is neither anachronistic nor politically biased: ‘explicit reference to a broad Girondin or Girondist party was conventional among the major historians dating back to 1801, and these terms had been so employed by contemporaries, even before the expulsion of 29 deputies on 2 June 1793’. Yet he cautions that the Girondins displayed neither the voting discipline nor the ideological unity of a party. Frederick de Luna (1988) ‘The ‘‘Girondins’’ were Girondins, After All’, French Historical Studies 15(3): 517-18. See also Michael J. Sydenham (1961) The Girondins. London: Athlone.
52.
Gary Kates ( 1985) The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution, p. 81. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
53.
Goodman (n. 50), pp. 219, 3. Goodman positions Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Cercle founder and architect of the municipal government of Paris, as a hinge-point between the French Revolution and the Republic of Letters. In so doing, she challenges a tradition of historiography defined by the work of Roger Darnton that has 1) dismissed Brissot as a ‘police spy’ and literary ‘hack’, and 2) thereby denied that there is any connection between the ideals and discursive practices of the Enlightenment and those of the Revolutionaries. See Robert C. Darnton (1968) ‘The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J-P Brissot, Police Spy’, Journal of Modern History 40(3): 301-27.
54.
Kates (n. 52), pp. 156, 56-7.
55.
Ibid. pp. 41, 62.
56.
J.P. Brissot (1791) ‘Discours sur les Conventions’ . Prononcé à la Société des Amis de la Constitutions, Senate aux Jacobins. Bibliothèque Nationale (8 Aug.).
57.
Although District membership would be voluntary, it was limited to ‘males who had reached age twenty-five and who paid direct taxes of any amount’. Kates (n. 52), p. 35. See J.-P Brissot (1789) ‘Motifs des commissaries pour adopter le plan de municipalité qu’ils ont présenté à l’assemblée générale des représentants de la Commune de Paris’. Bibliothèque Nationale (20 Aug.), p.9.
58.
Ibid. pp. 9-10.
59.
Kates (n. 52), pp. 54, 52.
60.
Ibid. p. 35. Arendt, of course, would have both favoured and envisioned more activity at the District level.
61.
Keith Michael Baker (1990) Inventing the French Revolution, p. 251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
62.
Patrice Gueniffey (1991) ‘Brissot’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds) La Gironde et les Girondins , p. 454. Paris: Éditions Payot. See also Patrice Gueniffey ( 1994) ‘Cordeliers and Girondins: The Prehistory of the Republic?’ in Bianca Maria Fontana (ed.) The Invention of the Modern Republic, p. 98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63.
Brissot (n. 57), pp. 13, 15.
64.
Jeffrey C. Issac (1998) Democracy in Dark Times, p. 101. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press.
65.
Kates (n. 52), p. 55.
66.
Hunt (n. 7), p. 72.
67.
These journals included the ‘Chronique du mois, [which] was aimed at intellectuals; the Sentinelle [which] was posted in the streets of Paris for the sans-culottes, and the Bulletin des Amis de la Vérité [which] was a daily newspaper’. Kates (n. 52), p. 11.
68.
To permit anonymous letters was revolutionary in the context of 18th-cent. practice where postal fees were paid by the recipient rather than the sender and, hence, authors normally had to identify themselves for the recipient to be willing to pay. See Goodman (n. 50), p. 289.
69.
Kates (n. 52), p. 56.
70.
Michael Saward (2006) ‘The Representative Claim’, Contemporary Political Theory5: 301.
71.
Gueniffey (n. 62), p. 458.
72.
See Saward (n. 70), p. 304.
73.
Hunt (n. 7), pp. 212, 179.
74.
Iris Marion Young (2000) Inclusion and Democracy, p. 125. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Jane J. Mansbridge (2003) ‘Rethinking Representation’, American Political Science Review 97(4): 515-28. Sofia Näsström (2006) ‘Representative Democracy as Tautology’, European Journal of Political Theory 5(3): 321-42. David Plotke (1997) ‘Representation is Democracy’, Constellations 4(1): 19-34. Nadia Urbinati (2006) Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren (2008) ‘The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 11: 387-412.
75.
Frank (n. 6), pp. 3, 32.
76.
See Saward (n. 70).
77.
Just as I have done for Brissot, Christopher Hobson makes a persuasive case for considering Robespierre and Paine as architects of modern democracy. See Christopher Hobson (2008) ‘Revolution, Representation and the Foundations of Modern Democracy’, European Journal of Political Theory 7(4): 449-71.
