ABSTRACT
This paper reviews the contribution of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 monograph, On Revolution, to the theme of this collection: “contestatory cosmopolitanism.” I am critical of normative interpretations of the text that treat it as a wholesale rejection of the French revolutionary tradition and as a tribute either to American constitutionalism, in more liberal readings, or to the council system of direct democracy, in more radical readings. I read it against this doctrinal grain as a dialectical analysis of the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole. I argue that it is more productive for our own purposes and more faithful to Arendt’s own approach to read the book as an exploration of the developmental forms of the modern revolutionary tradition, beginning with the “perplexities” present in the modern concept of revolution and then moving on to the more applied and practical “perplexities” involved in the realization of the concept: first in the French Revolution, then in the American Revolution and finally in the forms of council communism Arendt termed the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition. Clearly, the order of presentation which Arendt employs cannot be historical, because historically the American Revolution preceded the French and the “lost treasure” has existed coevally with every modern revolution. I propose that the order of presentation is better understood dialectically, in the sense that each stage of development constitutes an attempt to resolve the contradictions of the previous stage but ends up recreating its contradictions in new forms. And I suggest that, in this logic of development, there is no telos, no final synthesis and no moment of reconciliation. Thus, the last chapter of the book on the “lost treasure” should not be read as a statement of Arendt’s own political position or philosophy. Rather, it should be read as a critical analysis of revolutionary endeavours to resolve the contradictions of the French “general will” and American constitutionalism in ways that can only create new perplexities and problems in relation to key democratic, national and social questions. Finally, I suggest that, if we take forward Arendt’s dialectical form of argument beyond the covers of her9 book, we would have to address the cosmopolitan turn in revolutionary thought. This would enable, I believe, bold resistance to the isolation of the cosmopolitan and revolutionary traditions from each other, re-integration of these traditions with reference back to their original unity and a turn to the paradoxical conceptions of “revolutionary moderation” which we find pronounced but not yet articulated on the existential margins of the revolutionary tradition.
