Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution in the 1960s

Abstract

In my essay I want to explore the issues raised above and then propose that if we look at C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938; 1963), Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Arendt's On Revolution (1963), we have three models of revolution. James emphasises the social and economic dimension; Fanon the psychological; and Arendt the political. From this perspective, Arendt was tone-deaf to the Haitian Revolution because she was pre-disposed to fear revolutions whose main goal was the alleviation of poverty and clearly disliked Fanon's emphasis upon the reconstruction of self aimed for through revolutionary violence. In truth, Fanon's emphasis upon recognition signalled another goal of Third World revolution beyond national liberation--the forging of a new individual and group identity through revolutionary struggle. Finally, I will suggest that in the post-colonial era, Arendt's focus on the importance of a 'constitution of liberty,' implying for her a politics of democratic participation in the context of stable institutions, remains a worthy, if more limited, goal of post-colonial regimes. Hannah Arendt's attitude toward revolutionary upheaval in the non-European world was always ambivalent and her views on it ambiguous. Almost uniquely among (white) European and American thinkers, she underlined the importance of the colonial experience for understanding European fascism, even though it was a widely shared assumption among Black and Third World thinkers such as WEB Du Bois, Aime Ceesaire and Frantz Fanon. Despite this daring claim, which generally received little attention and even less credence, Arendt's depiction of sub-Saharan African cultures in The Origins of Totalitarianism has proven an embarrassment to even her most convinced admirers. A resolute and outspoken critic of racism in Europe, she adopted Eurocentric formulations to describe the African societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century conquered by Europeans. (1) Surprisingly, Arendt all but abandoned this cluster of problems--race and culture, colonialism and imperialism--after Origins. To be sure, she published a controversial, short essay casting doubt on the morality or wisdom of school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas (2) and also wrote essays dealing with aspects of the New Left, the US Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the anti-Viet Nam War protests of the 1960s. Much of this work, primarily in the US, demonstrated relatively little research into, or philosophical depth, about the complex transition, for instance, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. She could also sound awfully dismissive of the political insurgencies in non-European parts of the globe, as when she wrote in 1969 that 'The Third World is not a reality but an ideology'. (3) It's hard not to feel that Ned Curthoys is correct when he underlines Arendt's 'lack of interest in a colonized or subaltern perspective on the racist exclusions and colonialist inheritance of Western liberalism', (4) though most Third World thinkers would have levelled that indictment at the European left in general, not just liberalism. So, was her rather daring boomerang thesis in Origins a fluke and the pertinence of her thought for Third World liberation movements minimal? I don't think so. Much of what she proposed about the effects of colonialism on European culture and politics in Origin still needs study by political, cultural and intellectual historians. For instance, Paul Gilroy's Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Lure of Race (5) refers favourably to Arendt's boomerang thesis at numerous points, while several of the essays in a recent collection of essays, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, point up her relevance for contemporary African Studies. On the subject of revolution per se, which I will explore in what follows, her On Revolution remains one of the most important, even if eccentric, post-1945 texts for rethinking the modern revolutionary tradition of the West and global revolutionary traditions in general. …