Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) — a comparative study of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions — is usually read and interpreted as a critical rebuttal of Marxist thinking on revolution by way of pitting what she believed to be the success of the American Revolution against the failure of the French Revolution. Arendt’s criticism of the French Revolution is that the economic plight of the French masses distracted the revolutionaries from the more pertinent (to Arendt) legal stability and political purpose of the revolution. Those economic needs, she thought, were in fact regenerative and insatiable and thus derailed the revolutionary course from its political purpose, the opening of the public space for a wider, more effective, more inclusive, participation of citizens. Arendt (1906–1975) was not that sanguine about American Revolution either. She thought that it had stayed the course of constitutional guarantees of political rights but that it had become so ossified that the majority of Americans did not in fact participate in the political process.
Arendt’s primary concern was to posit the political possibility of maximum public participation, minus the chaotic anarchy that she associated with socialist revolutions — revolutions that thought of themselves as recommencing the advent of history. Arendt argued that the modern conception of revolution as ‘the course of history suddenly begins anew’ was entirely unknown before the French and American revolutions. Instead, she made a crucial distinction, in her reading of revolution, between liberty and freedom. Liberty she defined as freedom from unjustified restraint, freedom as the ability to participate in public affairs, a purposeful expansion of the public space for political participation. Using the French and the American revolutions as her model, she proposed that initially revolutions had a restorative force to them but that in the course of events something of an epistemic violence occurs in the revolutionary uprising. It was in the aftermath of the French Revolution in particular, she thought, that the very idea of ‘revolution’ assumed its radical, contemporary, and enduring, disposition. It was wrong for the French revolutionaries to forget, she thought, that their task was merely to liberate people from oppression so that they could find freedom, and not to address the unending (as she saw it) economic scarcity and poverty. It was futile and even dangerous for the revolutionaries to imagine they could find a political solution to economic deprivation. The advantage of the American Revolution, she believed, was that it left the economic issues at the door of the constitutional assembly. In a chapter titled ‘Constitution Libertatis’ she praises American revolutionaries for their consensus view that the principal aim of the revolution was the constitution of freedom and the foundation of a republic.
...
My reading of the Arab Spring offers the idea of an ‘open-ended’ revolt as a way of coming to terms with the dynamics of these unfolding dramatic events — reading them more as a novel than an epic. No national hero such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, or Mohammad Mosaddegh will emerge from these revolutions — and how fortunate that is, for it was precisely in the shadow of those heroes that tyrants like Muammar Gaddafi, Hafiz al-Assad, and Ayatollah Khomeini grew. To see the events as an open-ended course of revolutionary uprisings, we need to decipher the new revolutionary language — concepts, ideas, aspirations, imagination — with which people talk about their revolutions, so that events are not assimilated retrogressively to the false assumptions of Islamism, nationalism, or socialism, or even, conversely, translated into the tired old clichés of Orientalism, as we have understood these to date. The task we face is to recognize the inaugural moment of these revolutionary uprisings and thus be able to read them in the language that they exude and not in the vocabularies we have inherited. Even the sacrosanct idea of ‘democracy’ now needs to be rethought, and if need be reinvented. No justification is required for such reconsideration. The world has many democracies, but both within and outside those democracies misery abounds — and the fragile peace and prosperity enjoyed by some living within these democracies is very much contingent on conditions that entail and indeed sustain others’ misery.
~~The Arab Spring -by- Hamid Dabashi
No comments:
Post a Comment