Arendt’s Revolutionary Antiquity

Abstract

While ostensibly tracking the distinctiveness of the “physiognomy of the twentieth century,” Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution brings a number of other historical horizons into view. Antiquity, the late eighteenth century and the contemporary condition continually merge in her analysis. Arendt’s discussion thus provides a telling counterpart to Karl Marx’s description of the role of antiquity in the French Revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The chapter argues that it is by coming to terms with the notion of revolution that Arendt defines and refines her concept of the political, a concept which emerges from the confluence between antiquity, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the democratic uprisings of the twentieth century.