In the book by Hill on Hannah Arendt, the author notes:
On Revolution is a comparative study of the French and American revolutions. In Arendt’s analysis, the French Revolution failed because it was motivated by the social question of poverty and by the sentiments of pity and empathy.
As the French Revolutionaries found freedom in action in the public sphere, they were unable to establish a permanent space for speech and action, because solidarity with the people had been founded upon poverty, inequality and violence. Arendt did not think that social questions like poverty could be resolved by politics. For her, social questions are questions of economic distribution. In her reading of the French Revolution, the attempt to solve social questions through political means only led to violence. Surveying the French, Cuban and Hungarian Revolutions, it appeared that ‘liberation from necessity, because of its urgency, always takes precedence over the building of freedom.’
As she had laid out in The Human Condition, freedom begins after the necessities of life have been met.
Unlike France, America was not hindered by economic inequality, she argued.
The fathers of the American Revolution were successful because they concerned themselves not with equality, but with the political question of freedom:
‘The word “revolutionary” can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.’ Revolutions establish political spaces for freedom where people can appear before one another as equal citizens. This conception of politics is rooted in Arendt’s understanding of plurality. Plurality is a fact of human existence, the necessary condition for action, and is an experience of equality and distinction.
It is interesting to read Arendt again.
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