ABSTRACT
“Hannah Arendt found in revolution a concept that highlights the potential of an active political life,” a concept that has its source in the republican Machiavelli of the Discourses. While Tony Lang’s work then and since draws on diverse sources, all of which link ethics and politics through agency, no one has figured more centrally in his thinking than Arendt. Arendt’s heroic moment supports a political ideology of self-empowerment all but stripped of its republican character. Arguably this has been the fate of subsequent revolutions – French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese – despite the lingering stink of republican pieties. The properly republican alternative is constitutional change, for all its challenges. Everything hinges on the who and why of the moment. If indeed the Declaration of Independence was an expression of constituent power, then its signers can hardly be claimed to have represented the whole people.
