A Forgotten Legacy

In her essay On Violence Arendt made a striking claim: Americans have forgotten the legacy of the American Revolutionaries. “The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten.”Footnote ¹ What was the heritage of the Revolution? How has it been forgotten?

For Arendt this forgetting was not a matter of knowledge but of understanding. What has been lost is not the factual history but the meaning of events. The factual record is a text that we have to interpret to understand the meaning of the story, the nature of revolution, the experience of the revolutionaries, the principles that guided them, and the spirit that inspired their acts. We know a great deal about the Revolution, but we fail to fully understand it, and this failure of understanding is at the heart of our failure to remember.

Arendt explained this loss in two ways.

First, she claimed the revolutionaries themselves failed to fully grasp the meaning of the Revolution. This failure was not a lapse they could have avoided, but the inevitable result of their limited perspective. The actors in a historical drama can never fully understand the meaning of events as they live through them, since events always exceed the intentions and expectations of those who participate in them. People do not “make” history in the same way they make products or stories: “In contradistinction to fabrication, where the light by which to judge the finished product is provided by the image or model perceived beforehand by the craftsman’s eye, the light that illuminates processes of action, and therefore all historical processes, appears only at their end, frequently when all the participants are dead.”Footnote ² Events are never wholly determined by the goals and motives of the actors, but are always the result of developments no one could foresee or control. The meaning of events can only become clear in retrospect.

But this limited perspective does not fully explain the loss of understanding. After the War of Independence and the framing of the Constitution, the revolutionaries had the rest of their lives to reflect on what had happened. How could they have failed to fully grasp the meaning of the Revolution?

Arendt made a second argument: the colonists in America had been led by force of circumstances to develop relatively democratic practices of self-government. The town meetings and colonial assemblies had opened up a limited public realm and made possible the reemergence of a somewhat inclusive political sphere. The rebirth of a democratic political life in the colonies was a radical innovation that marked “a new beginning in the very midst of the history of Western mankind.”Footnote ³ These practical innovations and political experiences allowed the colonists to understand the realities of political life better than the British and European theorists from whom they inherited their conceptual language. But despite their innovations in political practice, in their political theories the colonists remained bound to the conceptual framework of the European tradition: “The novelty of the New World’s political development was nowhere matched by an adequate development of new thought.”Footnote ⁴ Instead of rethinking inherited concepts in light of their own experiences, the colonists interpreted their experiences in terms of inherited concepts. There was a gap between the colonists’ theoretical language and their nontheoretical understanding of politics. When the Revolution forced the colonists to justify their actions in theoretical terms, they fell back on formulas that had the authority of tradition but that failed to do justice to their real insights. So their practical understanding of politics remained theoretically inarticulate: “whenever they thought in general or in theoretical terms, that is, not in terms of action and the foundation of political institutions, their thought would remain shallow and the depth of their experience would remain inarticulate.”Footnote ⁵ When the Revolution was over, and the revolutionaries tried in retrospect to articulate the truth of their experiences, their thinking was guided or misguided by the limits of traditional political philosophy.

The revolutionaries failed to fully articulate the meaning of the Revolution because they interpreted it in traditional terms rather than revising and refining traditional terms in light of their actual experience.

This failure of thought led to a failure of public memory. Since the revolutionaries did not conceive of their experiences in terms that could fully grasp the meaning of events, they died without leaving behind a conceptual language that articulated and preserved their deepest insights. The truth of their experience remained largely unspoken.

The colonists had broken with traditional practices of government, so the meaning of the Revolution could not be grasped in the terms of traditional political theory. But the revolutionaries failed to translate their experiences into a lasting conceptual framework, so that what was unprecedented in the revolution was obscured by the false clarity of received ideas. “The American failure to remember” is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of understanding. This lack of understanding has generated superficial interpretations of the past, which distort and conceal the meaning of the Revolution even as they claim to preserve and explain it.

Interpretations of the Revolution

Arendt specifically criticized three interpretations of the American Revolution.

1. 1. Classic liberal interpretations of the Revolution. The American revolutionaries inherited from British political theory the language of liberalism. Classic liberals assume that each human being is endowed with natural rights; that the purpose of government is to protect those rights; that laws are instituted to establish a sphere of private life in which individuals can freely pursue their own ends as long as they do not violate the rights and liberties of others. Civil laws are just insofar as they rest on natural laws, and they are legitimate insofar as they have the consent of the governed. The consent of the governed is best achieved through representative government, in which the rights and interests of the governed are safeguarded by their representatives.

For the most part, the Revolutionaries interpreted their history in these terms. Most historians have followed their lead – the American Revolution has largely been interpreted as a triumph of classic liberalism: the colonists rebelled against an unrepresentative government that trampled their rights, and they successfully established a limited government based on human rights, legal equality, rule of law, and the consent of the governed.

The problem with this interpretation, Arendt argued, is that it does not quite explain why the revolutionaries founded a republic rather than a monarchy. One can have a liberal government under an enlightened monarch, and there is no reason why a constitutional monarchy cannot be a limited government based on human rights, legal equality, rule of law, and the consent of the governed. In some cases, a constitutional monarchy is actually more likely to protect civil rights and civil liberties than a republic, which is always liable to degenerate into a tyranny of the majority. The revolutionaries eventually decided a republic would most likely secure the ends of liberal government, but it seems implausible that liberal ideals were the only factor in that decision. Arendt argued that more was at stake in the American Revolution than liberal ideals.

Liberal interpretations cannot fully explain several aspects of the Revolution: why events led the revolutionaries from the rejection of a particular monarch to a rejection of monarchy in general; why (in Jefferson’s words) “the contests of that day were contests of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government;”Footnote ⁹ why many Americans came to regard monarchy as a form of government fit for slaves;Footnote ¹⁰ and why most of the revolutionaries came to believe (in Jefferson’s words) that freedom depended on a citizen’s right to be “a participator in the government of affairs.”Footnote ¹¹

1. 2. Christian interpretations of the Revolution. In the traditional language of Christian political theories, human authority is valid insofar as it derives from divine authority; civil rights are legitimate insofar as they protect God-given rights; civil laws are just only to the extent that they conform to divine law. Governments are just and legitimate only as long as they represent the will of God.

The language of Christian political theory was sometimes explicit in the discourse of the revolutionaries. The Articles of Confederation of 1776 invoked “the Great Governor of the World.” The Declaration of Independence declared that the principles of American government are based on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and the rights enumerated in the Declaration are said to be those with which all men have been “endowed by their Creator.” Christian interpretations of American history tend to focus on this strand of revolutionary discourse, and sometimes even see the Revolution as an attempt to found a Christian nation.

Such interpretations rely on a selective reading of history. The belief that the revolutionaries meant to found a Christian nation is not supported by the facts. Arendt noted that the Constitution of 1787 never refers to God, and prohibits the use of religious tests to disqualify candidates for public office. The original opponents of the Constitution denounced it as an irreligious and Godless document, and yet it was ratified by a majority of state conventions. A treaty ratified by the Senate in 1797 made this explicit: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”Footnote ¹² Christian interpretations of American history focus on only one strand of colonial thought, and overlook the secular dimension of the Revolution.

1. 3. Social interpretations of the Revolution. Arendt argued that, after 1776, freedom and revolution came to be understood less in political than in social terms. During the French Revolution it appeared that political liberties were meaningless in certain social conditions. Citizens with political rights were not free in a meaningful sense if they were utterly destitute, exploited, and oppressed. Real freedom required radical social change, and social change seemed less likely to be effected through political means than through government by decree or force. So the political questions that obsessed the American Revolutionaries were displaced by what French Revolutionaries called “the social question”:

   From the later stages of the French Revolution up to the revolutions of our own time it appeared to revolutionary men more important to change the fabric of society, as it had been changed in America prior to its Revolution, than to change the structure of the political realm.Footnote ¹³

   The shift from political to social aims was explicitly recognized by Robespierre: “Republic? Monarchy? I know only the social question.”Footnote ¹⁴ In the nineteenth century, Arendt argued, revolution came to be understood as essentially a social phenomenon – not the founding of a new political order but a radical transformation of society. Historians who approach the Revolution with the tools of social science have shifted attention from the actions of the revolutionaries to the underlying social and economic conditions that determined the course of events.

From this point of view, the American Revolution hardly seems like a revolution at all. The superficial shift from monarchy to a republic seems to hide an underlying continuity in social and economic structures. In Arendt’s time the most famous proponent of this view was Charles Beard, whose history of the Revolution concluded that “The Constitution was essentially an economic document” designed to protect the class interests of the ruling elite.Footnote ¹⁵ In this account, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was not the culmination of the Revolution, but a betrayal of the possibilities of social change opened up by the upheaval of 1776.Footnote ¹⁶

For Arendt, social interpretations of history are problematic in several ways. They tend to underemphasize the political dimension of the Revolution. They tend to approach the ideas of the revolutionaries not as a possible source of insight but as ideologies to be critiqued from the ostensibly superior perspective of social science or critical theory. And they tend to interpret the revolution in America in light of later revolutions and in terms of concepts grounded in experiences foreign to the experience of the American revolutionaries. Her deepest objection to these interpretations of American history is that they understand the Revolution in terms of inadequate concepts of politics and freedom.

These three failures of interpretation are not arbitrary mistakes, according to Arendt. They are grounded in the failures of post-revolutionary thought: “The result of the ‘American’ aversion from conceptual thought has been that the interpretation of American history, ever since Tocqueville, succumbed to theories whose roots of experience lay elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁷ Liberal, Christian, and social interpretations of Revolutionary history are inadequate because they conceal and forget the meaning of the Revolution under the guise of remembering it.

But the heritage of the Revolution has not vanished without a trace. The insights of the revolutionaries are preserved not in their theories, Arendt argued, but in their practical political documents and their nontheoretical writings.

While the revolutionaries failed to articulate their practical understanding of politics in theoretical terms, their testimonies contain implicit insights that are far more incisive and illuminating than their explicit theories. A gap between explicit theory and implicit insight runs through all of their writings, including the Declaration of Independence. Arendt aimed to reinterpret the American Revolution in light of the authentic political insights implicit in the revolutionaries’ nontheoretical writings.

How then did Arendt interpret the American Revolution? How did she read the writings of the revolutionaries?

Tasks of Interpretation

Arendt’s approach to the Declaration was complex. She distinguished between theory and nontheoretical understanding, and between theoretical discourse (which uses precise and definite concepts) and ordinary language (which articulates our nontheoretical understanding). In her view, the task of theory is to refine our nontheoretical understanding of beings, and so theoretical language should explicate and clarify the nontheoretical insights implicit in the ordinary senses of words. But Arendt recognized that thinkers may work out theoretical concepts by abstracting words from everyday language while ignoring the insights implicit in their ordinary sense. And she recognized that writers may also borrow theoretical terms to try to articulate nontheoretical insights for which they have no other words. In both cases, a word may have at least two senses: a theoretical sense and a nontheoretical sense; and these two senses may actually conflict with one another. So there may be a tension in any text between explicit theory and implicit understanding, between the theoretical sense of words (the concepts they designate) and their nontheoretical sense (the insights they express). Such a tension is bound to produce ambiguities or inconsistencies in a text.

The possibility of this tension complicates the task of the historian. Arendt did not reject the tasks that commonly govern the interpretation of historical documents. It is necessary to learn the original language of a text, to read it in context, and to try to discern the intentions of the writer. But in her reading of the Declaration she tried to refine and supplement these principles. Her aim was not just to reconstruct the revolutionaries’ self-interpretation, but also to show the tensions and blind spots in this self-interpretation in order to bring to light and make explicit the deeper understanding of politics implicit in their actions and words.

So Arendt’s reading of revolutionary documents was guided by several tasks: (1) to understand the practical context in which the revolutionaries acted; (2) to learn the theoretical languages in which they thought and spoke; (3) to understand the testimonies of the revolutionaries in their own terms; (4) to look for tensions, ambiguities, or inconsistencies in their writings; (5) to read these tensions as symptoms of a gap between the theoretical concepts and the nontheoretical insights of the revolutionaries; (6) to show the limitations of their theoretical concepts by pointing out what they fail to grasp in the revolutionaries’ testimony and in the unfolding of events; (7) to make explicit the nontheoretical political insights implicit in the words and actions of the revolutionaries; (8) to theoretically articulate these insights by rethinking inherited concepts; and (9) to clarify the meaning of the Revolution by reinterpreting events in light of this critical rethinking of traditional political theory.

These tasks of reading are part of the larger task of thought and remembrance. If the heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, if this forgetting occurred because the revolutionary generation failed to rethink inherited concepts on the basis of their own experiences, if they did not do justice to their own experiences and insights when they interpreted them in terms of traditional theories, then we perpetuate this forgetting if we simply reconstruct the political theories of the founders. To recover the heritage of the Revolution, to understand the meaning of our history, we have to critically reread the testimony of the revolutionaries and critically rethink the concepts in which they thought. This is not to impose contemporary concepts on history, but to bring to light what has remained invisible and unthought in the American political tradition. The task of remembrance is a task of thinking.

Colonial Experiences

Arendt’s interpretation of the Revolution started with a few simple arguments. The demands of emigration pushed the colonists to organize themselves into self-governing bodies through charters, covenants, and compacts. Through the practice of self-government the colonists developed a practical understanding of politics that diverged from traditional theories. This nontheoretical understanding of politics was handed down to the American revolutionaries and the writers of the Declaration of Independence. So the political principles implicit in the Declaration of Independence are not primarily derived from inherited theories, but were rooted in the practical experiences of the colonists.

The early colonists had little theoretical interest in politics in general or democracy in particular. If anything, they were proudly anti-political and anti-democratic. John Cotton, a leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, conceived of “Theocracy … as the best form of government,” and dismissed democracy with the question “if the people be governors, who shall be governed?”Footnote ¹⁹ Despite their aversion to democracy in theory, in practice the early settlers quickly developed relatively democratic forms of self-government. Their indifference to politics vanished in the face of dire circumstances – their mutual dependence, their need for effective group action, and the absence of any outside authorities. Arendt argued that the force of circumstances led the colonists to set up institutions of self-government, and that the experience of self-government led them to a few basic insights into the nature of political action.

The theories of the colonists were less important to Arendt than the nontheoretical understanding of political matters implicit in their actions and words. Her task as an interpreter of the revolution was not to reconstruct the colonists’ political theories but to retrieve their nontheoretical insights:

She aimed to translate the colonists’ practical insights into theoretical terms.

Arendt focused in particular on the contracts by which the colonists organized themselves into self-governing communities. These contracts were economic and religious as well as political. They included the charters with which investors formed joint stock companies to finance the new settlements, the covenants with which the Puritans established new churches, and the compacts with which the settlers founded new towns. To follow her argument, it helps to look closely at three such contracts.

1. 1. The Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company made the company a self-governing body. It gave the stockholders the right to elect their leaders, and gave these leaders the “full Power and authoritie” to appoint officers, to hold assemblies, and to make and enforce laws within the company. It promised that “all such Orders, Lawes, Statuts and ordinances, Instructions and Directions … shalbe carefullie and dulie observed.” And it proclaimed that all members of the colony and their descendants would enjoy “all liberties and Immunities of free and natural subjects … as if they and everie of them were borne within the Realme of England.”Footnote ²²

2. 2. The covenant of the first church of Boston actually preceded the incorporation of Boston itself. In the covenant, the settlers formed a congregation by promising to each other to live a Christian life:

   Wee whose names are hereunder written, being by His most wise, & good Providence brought together into this part of America in the Bay of Massachusetts, & desirous to unite our selves into one Congregation, or Church, under the Lord Jesus Christ our Head, in such sort as becometh all those whom he hath Redeemed, & Sanctifyed to Himselfe, do hereby solemnly, and religiously (as in His most Holy Proesence) Promisse, & bind o’selves, to walke in all our wayes according to the Rule of the Gospell, & in all sincere Conformity to His holy Ordinance, & in mutuall love, & respect each to other, so neere as God shall give us grace.Footnote ²³

   In the churches established by such covenants, it was customary for congregations to decide the criteria for membership, and to appoint their ministers by vote. The first written ballot in America was actually used by the Salem congregation to elect a new minister.Footnote ²⁴

3. 3. The Mayflower Compact, which the Pilgrims wrote at sea and signed the day they arrived in America, created a “civill Body Politick” on the basis of mutual promises.

   We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereigne Lord, King James … Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first colony in the Northerne Parts of Virginia; doe, by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civill Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equall Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the Generall Good of the Colonie; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.Footnote ²⁵

   It is worth noting that the Pilgrims landed several hundred miles north of their land grant in Virginia, and were not authorized by the king to settle in Plymouth. Nevertheless, they authorized themselves to settle there, and gave themselves the right to elect their own governor.

These three contracts share certain features. All gave full members an equal say in electing leaders. All were based on the unanimous consent of the founding members, and all were guaranteed by mutual promises of support.

Arendt noted that these charters, covenants, and compacts became precedents for the founding of new communities. “This deed quickly became a precedent, and when, less than twenty years later [1639], colonists from Massachusetts emigrated to Connecticut, they framed their own ‘Fundamental Orders’ and ‘plantation covenant’ in a still uncharted wilderness, so that when the royal charter finally arrived to unite the new settlements into the colony of Connecticut it sanctioned and confirmed an already existing system of government.”Footnote ²⁶ Arendt also noted that these civil bodies quickly became more democratic. This was especially the case in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Less than a year after the colonists arrived in America they turned the company charter into a kind of constitution. In 1631 the company gave almost 120 settlers the rights of the original stockholders. By 1641 all men in the colony were free to attend meetings in their towns, and by 1647 all men had the right to vote in town meetings. Despite their distrust of democracy in theory, in practice they quickly moved towards relatively inclusive and egalitarian forms of self-government.

Arendt claimed the colonists’ use of contracts to form self-governing bodies was rooted not in theory but in a practical understanding of the nature of action and power. “Nothing but the simple and obvious insight into the elementary structure of joint enterprise as such … caused these men to become obsessed with the notion of compact and prompted them again and again ‘to promise and bind’ themselves to one another.”Footnote ²⁷ This claim requires some qualification.

It is true that the colonists worked out their forms of government in response to the practical demands of their situation. Once they found themselves cut off from established political powers and authorities, it quickly became clear that people were not going to follow leaders or obey laws they did not support. In the absence of traditional means of coercion and enforcement, there was no way to make people obey laws or leaders imposed on them from above. The most effective way to ensure that people supported the authorities was to give every full member of the community a say in the deliberations by which leaders were chosen and laws were made, in exchange for a promise to abide by whatever decisions the community reached. Town governments had to be inclusive in order to be effective. In practice this meant that all men who were independent enough to flout the authorities with impunity had to be included in the deliberations by which leaders were chosen and laws were established, since it was only when men had the opportunity to participate in the group’s deliberations that they felt obliged to respect its decisions. Conversely, the colonists felt free to exclude from their meetings all those who were physically weak enough, or dependent enough on others, that they could be forced or coerced into obedience in other ways. It was also for practical reasons that town meetings were typically governed by the principle of consensus rather than of majority decision. In practice, a bare majority was rarely sufficient to make decisions authoritative; people in the minority could simply disregard majority decisions they disagreed with. Town meetings aimed at consensus because decisions were usually respected only when they had the support of all free men. (This view of colonial history is not confined to Arendt. Others have also argued that it was not theories but practical considerations that drove the first settlers to proto-democratic forms of self-government: “Not the principled notions of the New Englanders but the stern necessities of enforcement sustained town-meeting democracy in Massachusetts.”)Footnote ²⁸

Arendt’s claim is slightly misleading. It implies that the colonists’ contracts were simply a natural solution to a practical problem. But there is no reason the contracts had to be horizontal (between equals) rather than vertical (between each member of a group and a single leader). If the king had financed the colonists and had appointed representatives to rule them–to be responsible for their safety and welfare in exchange for their absolute obedience, then the contracts uniting the settlers would have been radically different. The colonists’ decisions to organize themselves by means of horizontal contracts drew on a number of customs: as members of joint stock companies they were accustomed to an equal say in company business; as members of Puritan congregations they were accustomed to appointing their own ministers; and as Britons they were accustomed to the “liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subjects.” It was only in the context of these customs that it might have seemed “natural” to found communities on the principles of equality, common deliberation, and mutual promises.

What did the experience of self-government teach the colonists about the realities of politics? What were the insights they derived from their experiences?

Arendt argued that the colonists learned from experience two insights into the nature of action. First, that action requires plurality – individuals can initiate projects, but they need others to help carry them out. And second, that to act effectively a group does not have to be united by a common ancestry, similar motives, or shared beliefs; they only have to be united by a common interest:

What united the colonists from the start was not a shared ancestry, language, religion, or nationality, but a practical commitment to the common good made necessary by the solidarity and mutual reliance required for concerted action.

The experience of concerted action led the colonists to a practical insight into the nature of power – that political power is generated and sustained by mutual promises. Arendt wrote that the demands of action taught the colonists:

This practical understanding of power was essential to what happened in America:

Arendt’s formulation here is not quite precise: what the colonists discovered was not that the power to act was sustained by mutual promises, but that these promises could constitute a purely horizontal contract among equals, rather than a vertical contract of allegiance between ruler and subjects.

Most importantly, Arendt argued, the effectiveness of these horizontal contracts led to an insight into the nature of politics. The colonists learned it is possible to form political communities that exclude any form of rule.

This does not mean that rule was absent in colonial America. There were obviously relations of domination between men and women, parents and children, masters and slaves, Europeans and Indians. What mattered to Arendt was that the colonists effectively founded polities based on the principle of equality among qualified “citizens,” and that within these polities there were elected leaders but no constitutive hierarchy between rulers entitled to command and subjects obliged to obey.

The compacts also showed the difference between power, violence, and authority, according to Arendt. The proliferation of new settlements showed that polities could be founded without recourse to violence and without the authority of a higher power:

In the Massachusetts Bay Charter, for example, the “full Power and authoritie” of the elected leaders comes from the support and respect of those who elected them rather than from any claim to represent a higher authority. Arendt noted that when some of the colonists left Massachusetts to found Connecticut, they were able to establish a government by mutual agreement and to govern themselves for twenty three years before a royal charter retrospectively sanctioned their colony. In light of these events, it became clear that the local and colonial governments derived their effective authority not from the king but from the support and respect of the colonists themselves. This insight was not lost on the revolutionaries. John Adams stressed that the first colonial governments did not derive their authority from the British monarchy:

The experience of self-government taught the colonists that political authority did not have to depend on the authority of a sovereign ruler.

The compacts also made it clear that political authority does not have to depend on religious authority. While in theory the Puritans believed that the laws of men had to rest on the commandments of God, Arendt noted, in practice they had discovered a way to make laws whose authority did not depend on any kind of higher law: “the act of mutual promise is by definition enacted ‘in the presence of one another’; it is in principle independent of religious sanction.”Footnote ³⁵

The experience of self-government also led to a new view of law and consent, according to Arendt. In drafting their compacts, the colonists assumed that the legitimacy of the laws rested on the consent of the community. But the consent implied in a horizontal contract among equals is essentially different from the consent implied in a vertical contract between ruler and subjects. In a vertical contract, subjects promise to obey the laws of a ruler, and in return the ruler promises to protect their basic rights and liberties. As long as these rights and liberties are secure, the subjects owe the ruler their unconditional obedience. “Consent” in this case means acquiescence to the will of a ruler. In a horizontal contract among equals, on the other hand, members of a community make laws through common deliberation and mutual promises, and the laws derive their legitimacy from the support of the community. Members are obliged to follow the laws because they had a chance to participate in making them, and because they have the chance to dissent and to try to persuade their peers that the laws should be changed. “Consent” in this case means an active support of communal agreements. The laws created by a horizontal contract are not imperatives but directives, and they rest not on a passive acquiescence to the will of a ruler but on an active fidelity to the mutual promises on which the laws are based. The spirit of American politics, for Arendt, was born of this new understanding of law:

The spirit of American laws is this principle of consent: that laws are agreements; that they are legitimate to the extent that they have the active support of the people; that people are bound to follow the laws because they have the right to participate in the political process by which they are made or rescinded, and also the right to dissent and to alter or abolish the laws.

Arendt thought the notion of consent in politics is often a fiction. It is a fiction to say, for example, that people consent to be ruled by a government in exchange for its protection. “Theoretically, this consent has been construed to be the result of a social contract, which in its more common form – the contract between and people and its government – is indeed easy to denounce as mere fiction.”Footnote ³⁷ It is also a mistake to think that a consent to the basic constitution of a society implies a consent to all its laws: “It is often argued that the consent to the constitution, the consensus universalis, implies consent to statutory laws as well, because in representative government the people have helped to make them. This consent, I think, is indeed entirely fictitious; under the present circumstances, at any rate, it has lost all plausibility.”Footnote ³⁸ It is also a fiction to attribute a kind of voluntary assent to laws by people who are excluded from the political community (e.g. disenfranchised women, children, slaves). Those who are excluded from politics are involuntarily subjected to the laws imposed on them.

But Arendt argued the notion of consent captures something essential to political institutions. We are all born into institutions we have not made or chosen; we have been thrown into them rather than joining them voluntarily. They depend for their existence on our willing or unwilling support. We are responsible for them to the extent that we have some room to act and to the degree that, however unwillingly, we tacitly support them. In this sense, tacit consent is not a matter of voluntary agreement to contracts we may choose to enter; it is a matter of responsibility for the institutions we are born into, institutions we have neither chosen nor made. In her view, this responsibility is a basic trait of human existence:

Her point is that we are responsible not only for what we have voluntarily chosen or done. We all find ourselves in institutions we have not chosen, but which depend for their existence on our (voluntary or involuntary) support.

Arendt thought the experience of self-government made this kind of consent glaringly obvious to the colonists: “the point is that [consent] was no mere fiction in the American pre-Revolutionary experience.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The New England town meetings aimed at consensus precisely because the colonists knew from experience that the effective authority of the laws depended on the consent of the townsmen. The practical need for consensus led to a clear understanding of consent.

In other words, the experience of self-government taught the colonists that the power of political institutions ultimately depends on the willing or unwilling support of those who belong to them. The political principles of consent and dissent help to maintain that support by giving citizens a way to actively take responsibility for inherited institutions, whether that responsibility takes the form of preserving, altering, or abolishing them.

Experience in self-government also showed the basic role of opinion in politics. Precisely because the power of a community depends on the citizens’ consent to its institutions, Arendt argued, these institutions ultimately rest on the citizens’ opinions:

The power of political bodies, for Arendt, rests on the opinions of their members.

The experience of self-government also changed the colonists’ understanding of freedom, in her view. In the British liberal tradition, liberty was conceived as liberation from subjection and independence from the arbitrary will of others. The purpose of government was to protect the right to liberty through laws that secured civil rights and civil liberties. Governments were instituted to establish a sphere of private life in which individuals could freely pursue their own ends as long as they respected the rights and liberties of others. Liberty was supposed to exist outside the political realm, in the sphere of private life. Arendt argued that in town meetings and colonial assemblies the colonists experienced a freedom that exceeded this inherited concept of liberty: not freedom from the power of a ruler, but the freedom that comes from having a share in the power of a self-governing body. Once the colonists had tasted this freedom, they were tempted to retrospectively reinterpret their history by positing this freedom as the end for the sake of which their ancestors had come to America. Arendt laid out this argument in a few sentences worth quoting in full.

In America the colonists discovered a kind of freedom that British subjects did not have – not just the liberty of individuals who are free from the power of government in their private lives, but also the freedom of citizens who have the power to enter public life and to govern themselves. The colonists rediscovered political freedom in the Greek sense of the term: they were free in the sense that they were able to participate in self-government as equals who were willing neither to rule nor to be ruled.

This new experience of freedom led the colonists to a new sense of the dignity and happiness of political life. They were heirs to a philosophical tradition that assumed the active life was lower than the contemplative life, and that the highest happiness lay in philosophy rather than politics. Politics was supposed to be only a means to a higher end, and public life was merely a burden one assumed for the sake of a secure and prosperous private life. Arendt thought the experience of self-government led the colonists to a different estimation of politics. In the town meetings and colonial assemblies they learned that public life liberated them from the isolation and weightlessness of private matters, and that the gravity of political action and the solidarity of political life afforded them a distinct kind of happiness, what they called “public happiness.”

The experience of public life led the colonists to value self-government over any form of rule, and led them to believe it is better to live as a citizen among equals than to live as the subject of even the most enlightened ruler.

Finally, Arendt suggested, these “civil bodies politick” led the colonists to a deep understanding of the ethos of democratic self-government. The town meetings and colonial assemblies were governed by the principles of common deliberation and mutual promises, and so the colonists developed a respect for the virtues of deliberative discourse: civility, judgment, impartiality, mutual respect. They also developed a sense of the sanctity of mutual promises; the obligation to support common agreements was for them a matter of sacred honor. And they developed a sense of public spirit: a concern for the common good; a commitment to public service; and a willingness to subordinate certain private interests to the interests of the community as a whole. The colonists developed a political ethos – a set of principles, virtues, and concerns essential to the success of self-government. In Arendt’s view, politics has an ethical basis in the sense that political life demands of citizens a specific ethos: “Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them. The only strictly moral duty of the citizen is this twofold willingness to give and keep reliable assurance as to his future conduct, which forms the pre-political condition of all other, specifically political virtues.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The demands of self-government pushed them to develop an ethos that supported their political institutions.

In sum: Arendt argued that the practical demands of emigration and settlement led the colonists to develop a distinctive political culture. Pushed by the need for collective order and effective group action, they learned to use covenants and compacts to organize themselves into relatively democratic communities. It quickly became clear that in the absence of official authorities the most practical form of government was self-government. The best way to get people to support town governments was to hold town meetings and to include in the political process all those who could not simply be forced to obey. Democracy was necessary where force did not work. The experience of self-government gave the colonists real insight into the basic realities of political life: action, power, authority, law, consent, and freedom. It also led them to appreciate the happiness of political action and the dignity of political life. The emergence of town meetings and colonial assemblies marked a new birth of politics in the modern age. But despite their innovations in political practice, the colonists remained bound to the conceptual framework of European political theory and their practical insights remained theoretically inarticulate.

Arendt’s interpretation of colonial history framed her view of the Revolution. How then did she interpret the American Revolution?

The Revolution

Arendt distinguished revolutions from similar phenomena, such as rebellions, restorations, civil wars, and coups d’état. “Revolutions are more than successful insurrections and … we are not justified in calling every coup d’état a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In a rebellion, people rise up against an oppressive government. In a restoration, an illegitimate ruler is deposed and replaced with a legitimate heir to power. In a civil war, different factions of a nation engage in open combat. In a coup d’état, a small group seizes power by force. Even in the common sense of the word, “revolution” refers to something distinct – a fundamental change in the form of government and the birth of a new political order.

This concept of revolution is relatively recent: “The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Before the American War of Independence, the word “revolution” had been used to name restorations of monarchical power, such as the return of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, and the overthrow of James II and the coronation of William and Mary in 1688. When “revolution” was first applied to political events, the word still had the sense of cyclical motion. It meant not a new beginning but a return to the old order of things.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the word “revolution” existed in the eighteenth century, eighteenth-century political discourse had no concept for what happened in America between 1776 and 1787. “Although there were enough words in pre-modern political language to describe the uprising of subjects against a ruler, there was none which would describe a change so radical that the subjects became rulers themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Arendt argued that premodern political language lacked a concept of revolution because revolution itself is a distinctly modern phenomenon: “revolutions, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the modern age.”Footnote ⁵⁰ There were of course rebellions before 1776, but these rebellions were not revolutions in the modern sense of the word: “The aim of such rebellions was not a challenge of authority or the established order of things as such; it was always a matter of exchanging the person who happened to be in authority, be it the exchange of a usurper for the legitimate king or the exchange of a tyrant who had abused his power for a lawful ruler.”Footnote ⁵¹ While there had often been revolts in which subjects exchanged a bad ruler for a better one, Arendt thought, there had rarely been popular uprisings that aimed to change the form of government itself.

To grasp what a revolution is we have to understand the events that engendered the modern sense of the word.

What happened in America between 1776 and 1787? What was the nature of the event? What does it mean to call the event a revolution? What is revolution?

Arendt stressed that the American Revolution began as a restoration – an attempt by the colonists to correct abuses of power by the British authorities, and to restore their civil rights and civil liberties as British subjects. The colonists claimed their actions were firmly based on precedent. In particular, they appropriated the language of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in order to claim as a precedent the events that had deposed James II and established William and Mary on the British throne. They called the Continental Congress a “convention” after the illegal meeting of Parliament that presided over the events of 1688. They called their statement of principles a “Bill of Rights,” and modeled it on the Bill of Rights adopted by Parliament in 1689. Above all, by calling themselves “revolutionaries” they claimed to be more faithful to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution than the British authorities.Footnote ⁵³ The colonists at first aimed only to restore the old order of things: “They pleaded in all sincerity that they wanted to revolve back to old times when things had been as they ought to be.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ben Franklin wrote that, at the start of the Revolution, no one wanted independence from Britain: “I never had heard in any Conversation from any Person drunk or sober, the least Expression of a wish for a Separation, or Hint that such a Thing would be advantageous to America.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The initial aim of the revolutionaries was to restore the old order.

But the aim of the Revolution changed. The goal of reconciliation with Britain gave way to the goal of independence, and the aim of the revolutionaries shifted from the restoration of a constitutional monarchy to the foundation of a republic.

It was not inevitable that the United States would become a republic. Arendt noted that some colonists envisioned a new American monarchy: “even in 1776 a correspondent to Samuel Adams could still write: ‘We now have a fair opportunity of choosing what form of government we think proper, and contract with any nation we please for a king to reign over us’.”Footnote ⁵⁶ A new monarchy would have been consistent with the original aims of the revolutionaries: since the revolutionaries first aimed only to restore their civil rights and civil liberties, these rights and liberties could well have been protected under a constitutional monarchy.

If the aim of the Revolution were only to restore a limited constitutional government, it is not clear why the revolutionaries moved from the condemnation of a particular monarch to a condemnation of monarchy in general, or why they eventually decided that the only form of government worthy of a free people was a republic. Why did the Revolution end in the foundation of a republic?

Arendt answered these questions with a simple thesis: in the course of events the aim of the revolutionaries shifted from liberation to freedom.

Liberation in her view means emancipation from subjection. To be liberated means to be free from any higher power. Liberation aims at negative freedom: to be at liberty means to be free from any form of constraint or compulsion. The civil liberties guaranteed by liberal government are negative freedoms in this sense – freedom of speech means freedom from restraints on speech; freedom of movement means freedom from constraints on movement. The aim of classic political liberalism is to limit the power of government and so to protect these essentially negative liberties.

Freedom, on the other hand, is for Arendt the space of possibilities that are actually open to us. To be free means not simply to be free of constraints, but to have the power to act. The measure of freedom is the range of what we can actually do. Freedom in this sense depends on power. Power is generated when people form communities that can act in concert. The power-to-act generated by political communities increases the range of what citizens can do. Political power in this sense opens a space of freedom.

Civil liberties and political freedom are thus distinct, according to Arendt. Liberty means limits on the power of government; freedom means a share in the power of government. Emancipation from oppression is a matter of liberation; enfranchisement as a citizen is a matter of freedom.

But civil liberties and political freedom are intrinsically related, Arendt argued, since liberty is a condition of political freedom. No political community is possible without the right to free speech, the right to assemble, without the security guaranteed by the right to life, etc. The liberties protected by liberal government are the conditions but not the essence of political freedom: “All these liberties, to which we might add our own claims to be free from want and fear, are of course essentially negative; they are the results of liberation but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, which, as we shall see later, is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm.”Footnote ⁵⁸

What happened during the Revolution was that the struggle for liberation became a fight for political freedom. Before 1776 the practice of self-government had allowed the colonists to experience a certain degree political freedom: “What was a passion and a ‘taste’ in France clearly was an experience in America.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But the Revolution forced them to engage in public life with unprecedented commitment and intensity; from 1765 to 1775, in response to a series of acts by Parliament that interfered with their customary self-government, the colonists learned to organize meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, civic associations, committees of correspondence, committees of public safety, militias, illegal assemblies, and finally Continental Congresses. It was in the course of events that the revolutionaries fully realized the power of concerted action and the happiness of public life.

The struggle for liberation led the revolutionaries to embrace political life. It forced them into “the speechmaking and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that is the gist of politics.Footnote ⁶¹ The life-or-death stakes of their enterprise minimized the factionalism and the power struggles that we today tend to identify with politics. And against the weight of their whole tradition – for which public life was supposed to be a burden, and politics a necessary evil – they discovered that political action gave them an unexpected sense of happiness: “It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been ‘called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination’ discovered that ‘it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure’.”Footnote ⁶² The experience of political action pushed the revolutionaries to shift their aims from a defense of their civil rights and liberties to a fight for political freedom.Footnote ⁶³

This fight for political freedom is essential to revolution. While the end of rebellion is liberation, Arendt wrote, the end of revolution is freedom: “the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The revolutionaries ended up rejecting monarchy and founding a republic, she argued, precisely because the aim of the revolution shifted from liberation to freedom. While a constitutional monarchy could have protected their civil rights and civil liberties, only a republic could provide an institutional space for the practice of politics and the freedom of self-government.

Unlike the British in 1660 and 1688, the American revolutionaries were not content to exchange a bad ruler for a better one while retaining the same form of government. They aimed to found a new form of government.

Founding a new form of government is essential to revolution, for Arendt:

A successful revolution ends in the constitution of a new form of government, a government that abolishes the division between ruler and subjects and that allows citizens to govern themselves.

Arendt thought this experience of political innovation was itself new: “This relatively new experience, new at any rate to those who made it, was at the same time the experience of man’s faculty to begin something new.”Footnote ⁶⁷ And this new experience of political innovation was at the root of the revolutionaries’ “pathos of novelty” – the sense that they were inaugurating a new order of the ages. Thomas Paine articulated this pathos when he wrote that “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again … The birthday of a new world is at hand.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This pathos of novelty distinguished the American Revolution from the restorations of 1660 and 1688. For Arendt, it is an essential trait of revolution: “Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Arendt suggested that one more trait may be essential to revolution. Both the American and the French Revolutions ended up founding secular states, and establishing a clear distinction between politics and religion. Political authority no longer needed the sanction of religious authority. Positive laws no longer had to be grounded on divine law. The realm of politics was no longer included within and subordinated to the realm of religion.

The secularization of politics may perhaps also be an essential trait of revolution. The American Revolution, in this way, marked the rebirth of politics as a distinct sphere of existence with a meaning and a dignity of its own.

What then is the meaning of revolution? What distinguishes revolution from other forms of political upheaval?

Arendt singled out four traits of the American Revolution. It aimed not just at liberation from oppression but at political freedom. It ended with the founding of a new form of government. It was marked by a pathos of novelty rooted in an intense experience of the human capacity for innovative action. And it separated politics from religion, and so marked the rebirth of politics as a distinct sphere of existence. The War for Independence gave the word “revolution” a new sense – revolution as a popular insurrection that aims to establish a sphere of political freedom by founding a new form of government. Arendt did not think this was the only proper sense of the word; but she thought it was a distinct sense, born of a distinct phenomenon of modern politics.

How did the revolutionaries themselves understand revolution?

On a practical level they understood the meaning of revolution, Arendt argued, but in their theorizing they failed to fully grasp and articulate what they were doing. It was clear to them that the aim of the Revolution was freedom: “once the revolutions had begun to run their course … the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike. As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence of freedom.”Footnote ⁷¹ But they did not clearly distinguish between liberation and freedom, civil rights and political rights, freedom from tyranny and the freedom of self-government: “those who tried their hand at both liberation and the foundation of freedom more often than not did not distinguish between these matters very clearly either.”Footnote ⁷² The revolutionaries acted on the practical understanding of politics that had developed from the first compacts among the colonists through decades of town meetings and colonial assemblies, and their actions revealed a new understanding of some of the basic realities of politics. But in their theories the revolutionaries remained indebted to the conceptual framework of British political discourse, and the nontheoretical insights of the revolutionaries were interpreted or misinterpreted in terms of traditional political theory.

Political freedom, for example, was described in terms of civil liberties.

The revolutionaries justified their actions with appeals to the traditional rights to property and to representation for the purposes of taxation. They rejected the British claim that they were “virtually” represented in Parliament, and they argued that only the elected colonial assemblies had the authority to set taxes. In doing so, their defense of traditional rights merged with their claim to a right to self-government. And this claim was entirely new: “Among the rights, the old privileges and liberties of the people, the right to a share in government was conspicuously absent. And such a right to self-government is not even fully present in the famous right of representation for the purposes of taxation.”Footnote ⁷⁴ By conceiving their fight for political freedom as a defense of civil liberties, the revolutionaries obscured the real meaning of what they were doing.

In the same way, for Arendt, the revolutionaries’ practical understanding of power was obscured by inherited concepts of sovereignty and rule. The colonists had learned to generate political power with horizontal contracts of mutual promises, and the Revolution showed how deeply this practice had taken root: “What the American Revolution actually did was to bring the new American experience and the new American concept of power out into the open.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The Revolution unleashed at the state and national level the colonial practice of covenant and compact: “Since the colonial governments had originally been made without any reference to king or prince, it was as though the Revolution liberated the power of covenant and constitution-making as it had showed itself in the earliest days of colonization.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The collapse of royal power in the colonies showed that the power of rulers is always derivative, in the sense that it derives from the support of a group and collapses when that group withdraws its support. The power of citizens acting in concert was shown when the colonists essentially forced the British to repeal unpopular policies (the Stamp Act and the Townsend duties). The Revolution itself showed the difference between power-over-others and the power-to-do, between the power to command generated by a vertical contract between ruler and subjects, and the concerted power generated by horizontal compacts among equals. Despite these experiences, Arendt argued, the revolutionaries continued to think of political power in terms of sovereignty and rule.

The revolutionaries abolished institutions of sovereign rule and established institutions of self-government. But by conceiving of self-government in terms of “self-rule” and “popular sovereignty,” they obscured the nature of republican government and distorted their own practical understanding of political power.

So there was a gap between the revolutionaries’ political theories and their nontheoretical understanding of politics. This gap ran through all revolutionary discourse, including the Declaration of Independence. To understand the Declaration, Arendt suggested, it is not enough to trace its language back to British political theories. We have to focus on tensions and ambiguities within the text of the Declaration, and to read them as symptoms of a tension between implicit insight and explicit theory. How then did Arendt read the Declaration of Independence?

The Declaration of Independence

In 1776 the revolutionaries confronted a fundamental problem: after the British dissolved the colonial assemblies, the revolutionaries had no lawful claim to power. Their lawmaking was illegal and their attempt to constitute a new government was unconstitutional. When they sought to declare independence and to establish a new political order, they could not legitimate their actions within the established order. They had no official authority.

This problem is inherent in all revolutionary action, according to Arendt. Revolutionary action is always caught in a vicious circle: it is legitimate within the order it seeks to found, and illegitimate within the order it seeks to replace.

Ordinary lawmaking may be authorized by the basic laws of a constitution. But revolution – the act of laying down basic laws – cannot be authorized by any prior law.

The fundamental problem was a problem of foundations: What is the source and ground of political authority?

Political authority became a problem only with the emergence of secular politics, according to Arendt. As long as politics was subordinated to religion, the authority of worldly power was unquestionably grounded in the authority of the church. It was the separation of politics and religion that raised questions about the source of political authority: “Secularization, the emancipation of the secular realm from the tutelage of the Church, inevitably posed the problem of how to found and constitute a new authority.”Footnote ⁸¹ The act of foundation made authority a problem.

The problem of authority is different from the problem of power. The colonists had learned to generate power through compacts of mutual promises, but power alone is not enough to found a stable and lasting government.

To be stable, governments need not just power but authority. They have to inspire enough respect that citizens will support the laws and follow them freely. To found a government on a constitution that has nothing behind it but the will of a sovereign (whether that sovereign is a king, a class, or a majority) is to build a government on a foundation of sand. A constitution without authority may be changed at will or replaced whenever a new sovereign comes to power. The revolutionaries knew that the act of foundation would be futile if the constitution did not inspire (in the words of James Madison) “that veneration which time bestows on every thing, and without which the wisest and freest government would not possess the requisite stability.”Footnote ⁸³ They sought not just to constitute a new power structure but to found a new authority.

The Revolution raised basic questions: What legitimates fundamental laws? What gives authority to a constitution? What is the ultimate ground of political authority?

The Lost Heritage of the Revolution

What then was the heritage of the Revolutionaries? How has it been forgotten?

In her answer to these questions, Arendt focused on phrases used by the revolutionaries: “the spirit of the revolution,” “the revolutionary spirit,” “the spirit of 1776.” In her view, these words point to something essential to revolution – something no longer clearly understood.

Arendt thought “the spirit of 1776” was born of a new experience of politics. The crisis with Britain pushed the colonists to take action, and the demands of action forced them to participate in politics with unprecedented commitment and intensity. From 1765 to 1775 they learned to organize meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, civic associations, committees of correspondence, committees of public safety, militias, illegal assemblies, and finally Continental Congresses. Once support for the British authorities collapsed, the revolutionaries were forced to improvise institutions with which they could govern themselves. It was this experience of action – “the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” – that revealed to them their capacity for public freedom and self-government. The struggle for liberation led the revolutionaries to rediscover among themselves a way of being together in which they could decide what to do and how to live together through mutual persuasion and common deliberation.

People who have experienced the nonviolent revolutions since 1989 have a sense of this spirit. They saw how events unfolded: the deepening crises in public authority; the first protests; the unforeseen days when mass demonstrations took on a momentum of their own; the opening of the public realm; the emergence of popular movements crystallized around a demand for freedom; the suspension of business as usual; the sudden collapse of support for established regimes; and the peaceful and anarchic transitions to new forms of government. But they also saw how these events altered public life: how public events overshadowed private life; how people who were normally apolitical became engaged in politics; how the public realm was no longer ruled by fear; how those who moved to the center of the crisis in order to join with others and to act in concert found themselves bound by an impersonal solidarity; how revolutionary action was largely inspired by patriotism and love of freedom; how in order to succeed the revolutionaries had to act in a spirit of mutual commitment to one another and to the polity as a whole; and how revolutionary situations alter not just the atmosphere of public life, but also the very principles that inspire and guide political action.

The principles that inspired and guided the revolutionaries in 1776 had to be other than the principles that ruled private life: not self-interest but public spirit; not individual liberty but public freedom; not personal fulfillment but public happiness. Arendt suggested that it was these principles of action that the revolutionaries meant by “the spirit of 1776.”

When the revolutionaries spoke of “the spirit of 1776” they were speaking obliquely of the principles that inspired and guided action in the revolutionary situation.

But this spirit weakened after the revolution, according to Arendt. In this respect the experience of the American revolutionaries was not unique. Modern history has been punctuated by the abrupt appearance and sudden loss of the spirit of revolution.

The spirit of 1776 is part of the lost heritage of the Revolution. Why was it lost?

Arendt gave two reasons.

First, the revolutionaries failed to establish institutions where most citizens could engage in political action governed by the principles of consent, equality, nonviolence, common deliberation, and mutual promises. The revolutionary spirit was born when the crisis in public authority drew ordinary citizens into political action–into meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, civic associations, committees, assemblies, and conventions. These actions had to be governed by the principles of public spirit, public freedom, and public happiness. And yet when the revolution ended, the founding fathers failed to establish institutions where ordinary citizens could continue to participate meaningfully in public life. Since the founders were concerned with government at the state and federal level, they focused on questions of representation rather than local participation, and they founded a republic in which representatives engage in politics but where citizens have little access to the political realm:

The Constitution made citizens out of Americans without establishing local spaces where as citizens they could meet, deliberate, and act on matters of common concern – where they had to confront different points of view and were expected to submit their opinions to the test of free and open criticism, where they had to work through their differences through mutual persuasion, where they were expected to speak and act for the common good, where they could initiate and organize projects, and where they could decide what to do and how to live together.

Arendt in particular lamented the failure of the founding fathers to incorporate the town meetings into the state and federal constitutions. She agreed with Emerson that the townships were “the unit of the Republic” and the town meetings “the school of the people” in political matters.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In this respect the town meetings in America were similar to the 139 deme assemblies established by Cleisthenes in classical Athens: they opened a space where citizens could learn the ethos of democratic politics through the practice of local self-government. The experience of self-government on a local level taught them the realities of political life and instilled in them the practical principles of American politics. But the founders failed to incorporate town meetings into the structure of the republic.

This failure contributed to the demise of the town meeting as an institution and to the loss of spaces where ordinary citizens could actively engage in politics.

In addition, the institutions the Founders did establish were bound to distort American views of politics. The poleis of classical Greece lacked two institutions that now tend to seem essential to political life: political representation and elections. Especially in classical Athens, decisions were made not by elected representatives but by the citizens themselves, not just in the citywide assembly but also in the 139 local deme or neighborhood assemblies. There were positions of authority in Athens, but citizens were chosen for those positions not by election but by lot. The Founders of the United States, perhaps by necessity, instituted a representative government in which leaders are chosen through elections, and these institutions have understandably skewed our view of politics, foregrounding the struggle among politicians for the power of elective office, and relegating to the background the actions of citizens deliberating over and working for the common good. Representative government altered but left intact the division of the polity into those who rule and those who are ruled. It made the rulers accountable to the ruled, but it did not establish political arenas where citizens could meet as equals and govern their own affairs. The government of the United States is not a democracy in the original sense of the word, Arendt thought, but has become an elected oligarchy.

The revolutionary spirit disappeared in part because the founders failed to found institutions where, in Jefferson’s words, ordinary citizens could become “participators in the government of affairs.”

But the heritage of the Revolution was lost for a second reason. Arendt argued that the revolutionaries failed to translate their nontheoretical understanding of politics into a set of concepts that could articulate the meaning of their experience and preserve it for future generations: “The American failure to remember can be traced back to this fateful failure of post-revolutionary thought. For if it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸

The failure of post-revolutionary thought was not a failure to think about the revolution but a failure to refine the terms in which it was understood. It was not that the revolutionaries failed to understand the revolution but that they failed to work out concepts that could adequately grasp and make explicit the nontheoretical understanding they derived from their experiences. So the deepest insights of the revolutionaries were veiled beneath the false clarity of inherited concepts.

This failure of post-revolutionary thought led to a failure of memory –not a failure to record the facts of the revolution but a failure to grasp and preserve its meaning. The revolutionaries told the story of the Revolution, but they interpreted their story in terms of traditional concepts rather than rethinking traditional concepts in light of their experience. The failure was not that events were forgotten but that the meaning of the revolution was concealed beneath superficial interpretations. In Arendt’s view, this concealment still prevails. Today Americans proudly conserve the failures of post-revolutionary thought and memory.

These failures are evident today in the most common interpretations of the Revolution, according to Arendt. The Revolution is remembered as a triumph of classic liberalism – as a rebellion against a lawless and overreaching tyranny, and as the establishment of a limited government based on civil rights and the rule of law. It is remembered as the founding of a Christian nation – a nation whose laws are founded on the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And it is remembered as a pseudo-revolution – as a change of government that left existing social structures intact. Arendt thought these interpretations distort and conceal the meaning of events: the American Revolution was not just a fight for civil liberties, limited government, and rule of law; it was also a struggle for political freedom. It did not end with the birth of a Christian nation; it ended with the birth of a secular political realm. It was not a moment of social upheaval, but of political innovation. The Revolution was a moment in the modern age when the political clearly reappeared as a way of life and as a distinct sphere of human existence.

These failures are also evident in common readings of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is commonly understood in terms of the political theories from which the revolutionaries inherited their concepts, rather than in light of the actual practice of self-government. Readings of the Declaration have missed the tensions between explicit theory and implicit insight. They have failed to fully grasp the nontheoretical understanding of power and authority implicit in the text. And they have identified the principles of the Declaration with its theoretical propositions rather than the practical principles that actually governed the act of declaring independence.

This failure is also evident in our thoughtless use of traditional concepts. We will not fully understand the meaning of American history until we critically dismantle the inherited terms in which we think: action, power, authority, law, principle, contract, government, citizenship, rights, equality, opinion, judgment, persuasion, rhetoric, consent, dissent, and freedom. Above all, we have to rethink inherited concepts of the political.