What do you think about when you hear the term revolution? Likely, you think of the French Revolution and things like the Storm of the Bastille, the Guillotine or Louis XVI’s execution. It is on the forefront of our minds, because the French Revolution escalated so quickly and so violently that it left a permanent mark on the world. It left us with the idea that once you start a revolution, it is a torrent that takes everything with it. This shaped what we expect of a revolution and provided us with a script on how to conduct one. Revolutionaries ever since have taken up this script again and again. Especially, the October Revolution took strong inspirations from the French one. This includes: the revolution having to devour its own children, the unmasking of a hidden enemy of the people, and the split into two extreme factions. The fact that everybody only thinks about the French Revolution annoyed Hannah Arendt to no end. She argued that there is a revolution which was actually (mostly) successful, which we could get inspired by instead: the American Revolution. To set everybody straight, she took it upon herself to lay out in detail, how these two revolutions happened, the dynamics inherent in them, the failure of the French Revolution, the success of the American Revolution and what the latter should have done to make democratic government worthy of that term.

What even is a revolution?

The ultimate aim of revolutions is freedom—specifically, public freedom, which means the ability to shape one’s political environment. To achieve this, liberation must come first, freeing people from economic or political constraints. Yet liberation alone is insufficient. To have public freedom you need a republic, meaning a state where the citizens decide the trajectory of their nation. This is in contrast to private freedom, meaning being left alone from state intervention in your private life. This kind of freedom is also possible for many in authoritarian regimes.

Revolutions are a force that has shaped our history, especially in the 20th century. They are different from the rest of politics, because they have to include at least some violence. If you want to change the overall makeup of a state, there is no chance that everybody in your society will be alright with this. So, from the beginning if a revolution happens, it really shakes things up. This does not have to be done via physical violence, but it can also involve violence in other spheres. For example, a revolution in norms can mean violence to existing social structures, traditions, and hierarchies. The key insight is that revolutions fundamentally reorganize power - whether through physical force, institutional change, or cultural transformation.

Revolutions are a relatively recent phenomenon, they did not exist before the 18th century. Before this, revolution was inconceivable. To even think about a revolution, you have to understand that time is not cyclical and especially that who is rich and powerful in a society and who is poor and oppressed are not the only state a society could take. This shift in perspective was powered by the Enlightenment and secularization. If it becomes clear that the shape of the society you live in is not ordained by God, this means you actually have the chance to mold your society into something different from what it currently is.

The Enlightenment thinkers were not the first to think more deeply about public freedom. The idea of public freedom is quite old and was already discussed in ancient Athens. The main idea was and is that to be free you have to create a political framework which allows people to meet on equal terms. This means in such a framework everybody starts with the same, equal rank. The assumption was that you can only be free if you interact with people who are neither above nor below you. This also means that you are not free if you rule above others, because you have no one equal to you.

We also have to distinguish a revolution from a rebellion. A rebellion is aimed to replace the person in power, like a king being replaced by another, more successful king. However, this is quite different to a revolution. A revolution aims at creating a completely new societal system, which allows people to be free. While we still have rebellions today, revolutions could only start once you realized that structural change is possible.

Revolutions have the problem that they want to destroy the old order, while also creating and stabilizing a new one. This means they need to use violence, but at the same time try to constrain the violence, so it does not destroy themselves. Both the French and the American revolution did not start out as revolutions. Both simply wanted to reconstruct rights they thought the monarchy had deprived them of. The upcoming revolutionaries were quite convinced that they would just restore an already agreed upon contract that the monarch failed to comply with. However, they ended up creating something new. They saw it as self-evident that every human has inherent political rights. However, this was a completely new idea, which had not existed before. Once they took power, they realized that being able to shape your society and what you can do within it is something very powerful and alluring. This made them push further and introduced the self-reinforcing nature of the revolutions.

Arendt terms these experiences public freedom and public happiness. With this she means the opportunity to partake in politics and the joy gained from shaping your own environment. In both the French and American Revolution, the experience of public happiness and public freedom was something completely new for everyone involved. Up until then, you simply had no opportunity to shape your environment politically. This gave the revolutionaries an additional motivation to push for more self-governance. They wanted to maintain this opportunity to govern their own fate.

Why did the French and American Revolution take such different paths?

Liberation versus freedom (aka the social question)

Very poor people are often pro revolution, because their current state sucks and every change is better than staying as it is. However, if your life is so harsh that every change is good, this also means that there is a lot of desperation going on, which pushes the revolution to just focus on liberation, to bring as many people out of poverty as quickly as possible. However, if you only focus on liberation, freedom is often sacrificed, because it can come into conflict with liberation, e.g. by complicating political processes. This conflict between balancing liberation and freedom is what Arendt calls “the social question”.

The overall focus on liberation during revolutions can be traced back to Karl Marx. He assumed that as long as people are poor, they cannot be free. Therefore, to make people free, you have to liberate them. His idea was that a small group of elites owns the means of production and keeps the surplus that the workers produce for themselves. In a feudal society, it was hard to get out of this trap, but after the industrial revolution a new working class formed which had a stronger bargaining power, as they were more concentrated spatially, which allowed them more effective resistance.

Liberation was a larger topic in France than in the American colonies. In France, you had a very unequal society, with the vast majority of people being desperately poor. This was less the case in America, where misery was much less common. However, this is only partly true, because the Americans still maintained slavery at that time. This meant that there was maybe a similar amount of misery in America as in France, but it was more hidden from the overall society. Nonetheless, this more equal situation between the white population in the American colonies allowed them to focus less on liberation and more on freedom.

The Americans saw freedom as the higher good, because they saw it as essential for having a good life. On the one hand, living in a free society allows you to more easily follow your private happiness (e.g. starting a family), because when you are in a free society, if the state does something that inhibits your private happiness, you can get involved and change it. A free state also allows you to get public happiness, the joy from shaping your own political environment in the free deliberation of equals. This is what the founding fathers in America saw as the ultimate source of meaning and the basis for a life well lived.

The general will

As established above, liberty and freedom can come into conflict, especially if a majority of the population lives in misery. This was especially strong in the French Revolution, as in pre-revolution France the gap between the rich and the poor was so vast. Generally, the rich were seen as morally corrupt, as they did not change the misery of the masses, even though they would have had the means to do so. From this moral failure, the French revolutionaries concluded that wealth corrupts humans and as the poor have no wealth, they are therefore uncorrupted and morally superior to the rich. Building on this the French revolutionary thinkers came up with the concept of the general will. The idea is that the general will is the sum of all individual wills of the population. As this is dominated by the poor, it should give superior direction on where to aim the revolution. The problem with this theoretical idea is that you cannot really know the general will, as this would require a hive mind. This is obviously impossible, especially in a feudal society before the industrial revolution. Therefore, the general will needed an interpreter in the form of the revolutionary. As they could not really know what the general will was, they just intuited it and their intuition was that they had to relieve the poor of their misery right now and everybody who stood against this aim was a traitor to the revolution. The problem was that you cannot simply abolish misery in a whole country in a month. Large scale changes like these need careful planning and years or even decades to implement. The revolutionaries did not grasp this and so they thought their failure to end misery in France was only possible due to treason. These traitors to the revolution had to be purged, which led to the reign of terror and our view of the French revolution as brutal and failed.

So, why did the same not happen in the USA? As mentioned above, the white population in the USA did not face as much misery as the poor in France, as they had outsourced this misery to the slaves. This made wealth redistribution a less urgent topic to the white population in America. Additionally, as most white citizens had their basic necessities taken care of, they had the time to think about higher goals, like public freedom. Finally, as the distance between the rich and the poor was much smaller, they had more opportunities to engage in discussion and so there was a wider knowledge of what people actually thought. This led to a structure in the USA that was much more based on deliberate discussion on different levels of government and less to the centralized idea of the general will.

Compassion versus solidarity

This different approach to the general will versus the deliberate discussions can also be found in which values were upheld in the different revolutions. During the French Revolution the value which was seen as most important was compassion. This was based on the idea that compassion is the opposite of reason, which was seen as being too much inward focussed and leading to egoism. Therefore, you should foster compassion, as it is focussed on the suffering of your fellow humans and motivates you to take actions that will make the lives of others better. The problem with compassion is that it can only ever be focussed on a single person, you cannot have compassion for a whole nation. Also, as it is focussed on the suffering right here, right now, it aims to alleviate this suffering without delay. This meant that the focus on compassion, also led to a focus on liberation.

Arendt thinks that a much better concept to focus on is solidarity, as it is the more abstract version of compassion. It allows you to employ reason better and also allows an easier focus on a large class of people, instead of focusing on the individual. Also, it allows you to treat others more as equals to yourself, as in contrast to compassion, which always implies a power difference. This kind of solidarity was the focus in the American Revolution, as their colonial experience had taught them that they have to be able to rely on each other to survive.

Self-governance

The colonial experience of the Americans also led to another factor that shaped the revolution. They had much more experience in self-governance. The American settlers traveled across a whole ocean to start their project in the Americas. This meant that they were far away from the British government and had to make most decisions on their own. Additionally, in the colonies, you had to rely much more on others than in the United Kingdom. Creating new towns in an uncharted continent meant that you had to trust others to keep up their end of the bargain. If everybody is on their own, you will not make it. Another factor was that people cannot be forced to participate in your endeavors. If they don’t like what you do, they can easily leave. All these factors coming together meant that many decisions in the American colonies were done via negotiation on a local level. Due to these discussions many people were already familiar with democratic procedures before the revolution even happened. Therefore, the Americans had a much easier time than the French to adapt to this new form of government.

The French in contrast lived in a steeply hierarchical feudal society where the king had massive influence in every domain that caught his attention. This strict hierarchy meant that almost no one in France had the opportunity to practice open deliberation and consent in decision-making before the revolution broke out. As it turned out, leading a revolution, while also learning how to do democracy was too much at the same time and contributed to the failure of the French Revolution.

Absolutism versus constitutional monarchy

Revolutionary ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by the society they are developed in. This can be seen in the way both the Americans and the French developed their revolutionary ideas. Both looked at the kind of governments they were accustomed to: absolutism and constitutional monarchy. The French oriented a lot around absolutism, because this had been the kind of government in France for a long time. This meant that when they thought of power, they thought of strict hierarchies and centralized power. In this image, they created many of their revolutionary institutions. Essentially, they removed the king and tried to replace him with the people, but kept everything else in a similar power structure. This meant that they also did not think much about separation of powers, because such a separation had never been present before in France. Their removal of the king left a king-shaped hole in their state structure and so they tried to create structures that centralized power, because this is what had been necessary for absolutism.

While the Americans also focussed at some ideas of absolutism (mostly because much of the theories around at that time had been developed under absolutism), they also took up many ideas from the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom. This meant that they thought much more about separating powers and introducing checks and balances, because this is what the constitution in the United Kingdom had done.

Arendt argues that we got really lucky that a revolution happened in America. Otherwise, we would have only seen revolutions in previously absolutist states like Russia and France and their failure to always end up in a centralized dictatorship, because they oriented around absolutism too much.

Founding a new nation

The role and structure of a constitution

A major step of a revolution is writing a constitution. You start a revolution because you want to change the status quo. However, once you have overthrown the old regime and started to implement new rules, you somehow have to keep those new rules in place, to make sure that you don’t get overthrown yourself. Most successful constitutions have a deep distrust of centralized power and focus on checks and balances. They have to strike the balance between constraining the government from having too much influence on the life of its citizens, while also being strong enough to stop one part of society from dominating other parts.

Like in many other details of the revolution, the French and American Revolution took different paths here. The French laid their emphasis on abstract rights that they saw as inherent in humans by birth. The Americans thought that rights are not something you inherit by birth, but that instead rights are something that humans give each other. In this spirit, they structured their constitutions based on separations of power and checks and balances. Their idea was that only power can keep power in check, and therefore you need separate power bases in the government which keep an eye on each other. The French constitutions, however, never really came off the ground. They were too abstract to be really implemented, as they focussed more on theoretical rights of humans and less on constraining power.

Power and authority

The difficulties of implementing a stable constitution can be traced back to power and authority. Both are necessary for a stable society. Power in this case means giving someone else the opportunity to influence your life. For power to exist, you need at least two people and a relationship between them. Power can be freely given or taken by force. If you want to have a democratic society, you have to find some mechanism that brings people to give away power over them freely. This is where authority comes into play. You have to have some convincing justification on why people should allow you power over them. Before the Enlightenment, this authority was often derived from religion: “I should have power over you because God said so”. However, once you start secularization and people believe less in God, this argument becomes much less convincing.

Another way to get authority is to refer to a more glorious past, which you presumably orient around. This was for example done in the Roman Republic. Rome saw itself as a reincarnation of Troy and thus Greek culture. From this they derived their authority: “I should have power over you, because I adhere to the ideas of a great culture of the past, much better than all of us in the here and now”.

However, if you start a revolution, this also does not really work well, because the whole idea of a revolution is to replace the current system with something new. But if you have something completely new, you cannot link back its authority to what came before. This means after a revolution, you need a new way to derive authority. Arendt argues that in this case, the authority comes from the act of foundation: “I should have power over you, because we both together created the rules that we follow now”. During the American Revolution this was especially powerful, because you had a stepwise process of delegation of power under mutual consent. On the lowest levels you have town halls, which gave everybody the chance to contribute and elect a representative for the writing of the constitution of the state people were living in. These representatives in turn selected those who should write the constitution of the Union of all states. This allowed every citizen in the American colonies to contribute at least somewhat to the constitution and thus experience public freedom and public happiness.

The trade-off between public freedom and stability

This puts you in a bit of a difficult situation. Because as we have established above, one thing the revolutionaries realized is that the big upside of starting a revolution is being able to shape your own political surroundings. Writing a constitution is the ultimate expression of public freedom. The Americans even wrote this striving to shape your own environment in their declaration of independence, where they put the pursuit of happiness as one of the main goals. While this is today often framed as striving for your own private happiness, it seems more likely that at least some of the founding fathers meant public happiness here. This is what their whole revolution had been about. However, if writing a constitution is the best thing ever, you should also make it available to everyone after you. If you also think that the constitution you just wrote is pretty good, you want to prevent it from being changed. This means you either have to be open to your constitution being changed completely, or deny everybody else the public happiness of writing a constitution. If you chose the latter, this also means that you have no authority over everyone who did not participate in the foundation of your state.

The Americans tried several ways to get out of this problem of authority:

• Having a supreme court: The supreme court checks if the rules of the constitution are still upheld and strikes everything down which they think does not follow those rules. While having such an institution grants some authority by making sure the agreed upon rules are upheld by everyone, it does not solve the problem of not being able to change the foundational rules and thus denies newcomers real public freedom.
• Allowing constitutional amendments: This way you can adapt the constitution to a changing environment. However, it still denies you the option to change the underlying rules, you can just add additional rules.
• Recreating your constitution every generation: The founding fathers discussed including the rule that the constitution would have to be rewritten every generation, to make sure that everybody is still on board. However, this idea was never implemented.

This means that the American Revolution was not able to find a solution to the problem of authority beyond the first generation of founders. Thus, it ultimately failed to bring true public freedom and public happiness, but it was still better at this than everything that came before.

How to truly bring public freedom and public happiness?

The problems of direct and representative democracy

We now know that the American Revolution ultimately failed to archive its aims of public freedom and public happiness. And in the eyes of Arendt, no state or revolution since then has really achieved this, because she thinks that both direct and representative democracies come with flaws which ultimately deny public freedom. They all default to focus on liberty, and private happiness at best. This creates environments where the best you can hope for is being left alone by the state or maybe being somewhat supported by it, but not having the opportunity to shape your overall kind of government. In addition, many of them even see public happiness and public freedom as obstacles in the way of liberation and private happiness.

This is plausibly rooted in the way many of our modern democracies are organized. You often have either opportunities for direct democracy (mostly implemented as referendums), but this suffers from being strongly coupled with public opinion, and the unorganized public opinion is highly volatile and thus not conducive to good government. It needs to be refined and organized in some way to be productive and produce long term good government. Every human has potentially an opinion on every topic you could ask them, but only in deliberate debate, these opinions can become reasonable policy.

One way to have these discussions is representative democracy. Here, citizens elect those representatives (often around every 4 years) which they think represent their opinions and values best. These representatives can then debate with each other to find the policies which best overall represent what the population wants. While this is less volatile than direct democracy, but it comes with other problems:

• Citizens are essentially powerless except on election day.
• The representatives are also fallible humans and as they are mostly without checks for the four years they are in office, they can easily be captured by special interests.
• It cements the rule of the few. Almost nobody can experience public freedom except the few people who become career politicians.

This means that neither direct nor representative democracy are a valid path if you want to have both stability and public freedom.

Societies, town halls and the dangers of party politics

So, if the common ways to structure a democratic government are ruled out, what is left? We can find some inspiration and cautionary tales in both the American and the French revolution. In the case of the American Revolution, the hints for how to implement continuous public freedom can be found in the role of town halls in the original writing of the constitution. As laid out above, they allowed deliberation on the lowest level of government and a step-wise escalation of power in ever more potent assemblies on state and then Union level. They were not considered in the constitution, but this does not mean that such a structure can never again be implemented again.

Similarly, during the French Revolution all across France so called “societies” formed. These were local clubs which were spontaneously funded all across the republic. They started because people felt both the need to discuss politics and also govern their local administration. They were true places to experience public freedom and public happiness, as they were open to everyone who wanted to discuss and govern on a local level.

However, during both revolutions, these decentralized organs of power came into conflict with the more centralized power of representative government. These fights revolved around three main points:

• How much public freedom can be allowed if it comes into conflict with liberation?
• Should the government represent the general will of the population or the democratic diversity of opinions?
• Should power be monopolized or distributed?

All of these fights were won by the proponents of more centralized power, meaning more focus on liberation, representation of the general will and monopolized power. But why did these two structures even come into such a stark conflict? Here, Arendt thinks the culprit is party politics. If you have political parties, these tend to radicalize over time and start to see things more in an “everybody who is not with us is against us” frame. This process is especially strong in countries with a history of absolutism, as we can see with the French and the Russian Revolution. In both, we had a party system which radicalized itself and fought each other until only one party was left standing, which then assumed centralized and monopolized power.

Another problem of the party system is that it forces private citizens to find alternative ways to get involved, if they want to have more influence than casting a vote every four years. One of the classical pathways to do so is using lobbying to influence the political representatives. However, this process is highly undemocratic and favors those with large amounts of wealth, and ultimately leads to the capture of the parties by special interests.

Council republics as a way to unite stability and public freedom

These dangers inherent in party politics were also very present to the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson. One suggestion he made was to change the United States to a council republic. This would mean keeping a system similar to the foundation of the United States, which would have town hall councils open to everyone, these would then elect representatives for the next higher level, e.g. a county. This process of electing representatives would repeat until it would reach the highest level of the country. Using this approach would produce both a structure which is stable, while also having a very low bar of entry for everyone, thus allowing public freedom and public happiness for everyone who wants it.

Such council republics seem to regularly arise spontaneously during revolutions. Another example are the societies mentioned earlier. But there are many other examples of council republics:

• Paris Commune in the revolution of 1871.
• Soviets after the February Revolution in Russia in 1917.
• Räte in Germany in 1918/19, especially in the Bavarian Council Republic.
• Soviets in the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 against the party dictatorship in Revolutionary Russia.
• Councils during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In all these cases, the councils were crushed by the power of the party system and military force. Councils just did not fit their view of how a revolution should work. Neither Marx nor the theoreticians of the French Revolution included councils in their thinking, and so they also weren’t part of the revolutionary lore. However, this recurrence of councils again and again in so many revolutions in places not really connected with each other, show that they are something that people naturally flock to and which they enjoy participating in.

A council republic also has the clearest separation of power possible. Essentially, every citizen keeps the power of every other citizen in check. This happens at every level of the council systems, as on each level only individuals of equal power and rank confront each other, always allowing to constrain overly power hungry individuals.

Lesson for today?

So, why haven’t we implemented such a system on a large scale today, if it is so great? One big problem is that all the incentives of an already established party system are against allowing councils. It would require them to both cede power and see the political process less as a “them against us” and more as a collaborative process. Similarly, council republics are seen as a challenge to the status quo, and every such challenge will face headwinds from those profiting from the current systems or seeing it as optimal. For example, one criticism of council republics in this regard is that people don’t actually want public freedom and public happiness, but instead only private happiness and liberation, while not really caring about who is in charge, as long as they face no interference in their private lives. Finally, many of the council republics which have existed in the past have had problems with administration, as they sometimes elected people to administrative roles on political grounds. As none of the council republics mentioned so far existed for a longer period of time, they also did not have the time to sort out these kinks in the systems.

And actually, we kinda have implemented them on a variety of scales and configurations, we usually just don’t call them council republics. A large-scale example would be Switzerland. While not being a council republic, Switzerland is organized in a very federal way, delegating much of its decision power to lower and local levels of government. Another large-scale example is Rojava. This autonomous region in northern Syria has implemented a system of governance that shares similarities with the council republic concept. It employs a bottom-up approach to governance, with local councils playing a significant role in decision-making. An example on a smaller scale would be citizens’ assemblies. Such assemblies are meant to resolve difficult political questions in open discussion and give recommendation to the political entity which instituted them. These have been done on local and regional level, but there are also some nationwide examples or even some that cover the whole European Union.

Besides that, the current times also seem much better soil for the implementation of council republics than before. Arendt argues that some of the main problems included that most people had to focus on liberation instead of public freedom, because otherwise they would just starve. Also, many of the people that participated in the failed revolution lived under absolutist governments, this meant they had no chance to practice public participation. Both of these things are not true anymore for many countries. Especially in Europe, very few people are so poor that they are on the verge of starvation, and there exist many opportunities today to learn how to engage in discussion with others. This means people today are much better prepared for something like a council republic. However, my own main criticism of the book is that it does think too little about the economic circumstances needed to be able to participate in politics. Even today many more people would be interested in doing politics, but are barred from it, because they have to work so hard that at the end of day, they have no energy to still get involved in politics. They might not be starving, but if you have to decide between being able to pay your rent and being active politically, the choice is a difficult one. Therefore, if you had something like a universal basic income, this would be a much more level playing field and I see it as an important component of future democratic systems.

Though following Arendt’s argument means that the establishment of such council republics is still called for. The American Revolution failed in bringing true public freedom, but this does not mean that it has to stay this way forever. Our current democracy is not enough. In addition, in the current world we have additional opportunities due to technology to implement decentralized, deliberative systems. For example, this has been done in Taiwan, where every citizen can bring forward topics into the political process, if they can convince enough others that it is worthwhile.

The question is no longer whether such systems are possible, but rather how we might adapt and implement them to strengthen democratic participation in our own contexts. The tools and knowledge exist—what remains is the political will to experiment with and refine these approaches to build more inclusive and deliberative democratic institutions.