AMMAN — A unique and fascinating look at
violent political change by one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth
century and the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
اضافة اعلان
Hannah Arendt’s penetrating observations on
the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been
fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape.
On Revolution is her classic exploration of
a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the eighteenth-century
rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the twentieth
century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to
war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future.
Illuminating and prescient, this timeless work will fascinate anyone who seeks
to decipher the forces that shape our tumultuous age.
Tracing the gradual evolution of
revolutions, Arendt predicts the changing relationship between war and revolution
and the crucial role such combustive movements will play in the future of
international relations. She looks at the principles which underlie all
revolutions, starting with the first great examples in America and France, and
showing how both the theory and practice of revolution have since developed.
Finally, she foresees the changing
relationship between war and revolution and the crucial changes in
international relations, with revolution becoming the key tactic.
The overriding theme of the book is participation
in the political life as the touchstone of the life worth living. Arendt begins with the ancient Greek focus on
such life, the life of free men taking part in making decisions in the public
sphere, which was for the Greeks the point of life.
A private life, or the life of a man not
free (either directly unfree, like a slave, or without independent means), was
far inferior to such public life, which brought happiness, “public
happiness.” For Arendt, this is the
“actual content of freedom,” no other civil rights, which are “essentially
negative: they are the results of
liberation.”
Arendt claims that such public freedom is
not possible under a monarchy or other non-republican form of non-tyrannical
government (though she is wrong), and even though civil rights are possible
under non-republican government, that is not enough. She therefore defines a revolution as the
novelty, new since Rome, of rediscovering the critical importance of public
freedom so defined. Violence is not the
key; that is incidental.
The goal of participating in political life,
where one had not done so before is what characterizes a revolution, which
means the original meaning, of a restoration, a “revolving back,” (the meaning,
in fact, that Thomas Paine ascribed to revolution) is not applicable, and the
Glorious Revolution, for example, was not a revolution at all in Arendt’s
sense.
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany,
in 1906, and fled to Paris in 1933. She came to the United States after the
outbreak of World War II and was the editorial director of Schocken Books from
1946 to 1948. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and
the New School for Social Research. Among her other books are
The Human Condition, On Revolution, and The Life of the Mind. She died in 1975.
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