Fionnáin reviewed On revolution by Hannah Arendt (Penguin twentieth-century classics)
Always Revolving
3 stars
Arendt is a philosopher who always turns my thoughts upside-down, even when I have read so much of their work. On Revolution focuses on two major events of the past 250 years: The French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1783). By using texts and letters from the time of these events, Arendt shows how much the thinking of the 'revolutionaries' in these events was guided by a very different ontology and way of looking at western politics.
The most striking revelation for me early in the book seems so glaringly obvious now: The word 'revolution'. The word does not imply a new system, it implies that we are revolving back to the same system, with new people in power. Today, we think of things that are 'revolutionary' as somehow counter-cultural or against the norm, but Arendt illustrates very well how this language was co-opted and altered over the last …
Arendt is a philosopher who always turns my thoughts upside-down, even when I have read so much of their work. On Revolution focuses on two major events of the past 250 years: The French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1783). By using texts and letters from the time of these events, Arendt shows how much the thinking of the 'revolutionaries' in these events was guided by a very different ontology and way of looking at western politics.
The most striking revelation for me early in the book seems so glaringly obvious now: The word 'revolution'. The word does not imply a new system, it implies that we are revolving back to the same system, with new people in power. Today, we think of things that are 'revolutionary' as somehow counter-cultural or against the norm, but Arendt illustrates very well how this language was co-opted and altered over the last 250 years to mean something very different than it originally meant. As always with Arendt, this is then opened up into a deep consideration of language, culture and power. I felt the argumentation drags on a little in the middle of the book, but that's mostly because I don't hold a great interest in the finer details of the French Revolution and its protagonists. Yet as always, there are gleaming moments in the brilliant philosophy of one of the 20th Century's most brilliant philosophers.