On Revolution was published by Viking Press in 1963, the same year as Eichmann in Jerusalem, and it is Arendt’s most sustained work of political philosophy proper — her attempt to recover the revolutionary tradition for political thought.
Arendt’s central argument is that the modern concept of revolution — violent overthrow of the existing order in the name of social justice — is a corruption of the original revolutionary impulse, which was the desire for political freedom: the creation of a public space in which citizens could participate in self-government. The American Revolution, in her reading, succeeded because it remained focused on this constitutional question — the founders were concerned with creating institutions of political freedom, not with redistributing wealth. The French Revolution failed because it was captured by “the social question” — the urgency of poverty overwhelmed the political project, leading first to the Terror and then to Napoleon.
This argument was deeply unfashionable in 1963, when revolution was understood primarily as social revolution — the overthrow of class structures, the redistribution of property, the liberation of the oppressed. Arendt’s insistence that political freedom was not the same as social equality, and that the confusion of the two had destroyed every modern revolution after the American one, challenged the dominant understanding on both left and right.
Her rehabilitation of the American founding as a revolutionary act — at a time when American intellectuals were more interested in revolutionary movements elsewhere — was equally provocative. She argued that the American founders had achieved something unprecedented: the constitution of freedom through deliberation rather than violence, the creation of political institutions that preserved the revolutionary spirit in permanent form.
Collecting On Revolution
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Penguin paperback: $8–$15