I

This paper tracks the influence of the German Revolution of 1918–19 in the work of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, assessing its significance for their work on revolution, and particularly their reflections on the New Left movement of the 1960s. The German Revolution, this paper will suggest, was a formative political experience for both thinkers: Marcuse, through his participation in the soldier councils; Arendt, at one step removed, through the experiences of her husband Heinrich Blücher in the Spartacist League. For both, the influence of this revolution has been understated, overshadowed by the extensive literature on Marcuse's status as New Left revolutionary “guru” and Arendt's work on the American and French revolutions.

Yet the German Revolution was central to the politicization of both thinkers. It is biographically at the root of their understanding of the concept of revolution, and remained an influence throughout their work. Their consideration of the possibilities of the German Revolution takes on particular resonance during the student unrest of the late 1960s, and both Arendt and Marcuse drew explicit comparisons between the two situations, viewing in the agitations of the late 1960s the possibility of a proto-revolutionary movement. Shmuel Lederman has outlined some of the ways in which the German Revolution formed a significant influence on Arendt's thinking, arguing that it “constituted an important part of a broader ‘silent dialogue’ Arendt had with the European socialist left.”Footnote ¹ James Muldoon also highlights the influence of socialist traditions on Arendt's work through the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. The council system is repeatedly cited by Arendt as perhaps the only modern alternative to the party system, and “it is from modern workers’ struggles rather than ancient Athens that Arendt draws her main examples of council systems,” he writes, although he critiques Arendt's attempts to “extract them from their socialist origins.”Footnote ² This paper develops this line of thinking with reference to Arendt's considerations on the potential for revolutionary action in the context of New Left politics in 1960s America.

It has been argued that, despite substantial disagreements in their work, Marcuse and Arendt can be profitably read together, that they “augment” one another.Footnote ³ Yet, beyond this, this paper will argue that there is a considerable degree of convergence in their thinking on the New Left which can be traced back to the biographical and intellectual context of the German Revolution. By comparing the influence of the German Revolution on these theorists, the contours of Arendt's “silent dialogue” with the left become more defined, whilst Marcuse's revolutionary theory—so emblematic for the New Left—is shown to be intertwined with his youthful experience of European radical politics.

This paper will first review the position of the German Revolution in the intellectual and personal biographies of Arendt and Marcuse, before turning to an analysis of the particular qualities they associate with the revolution that they incorporate into their understandings of revolutionary action as such: specifically, an idea of revolution theorized by Rosa Luxemburg and (briefly) realized in the institutions of the revolutionary councils. For both, the German uprising represents a moment of “what might have been” in a space of potentially radical political change that opened up after the war. What unites their idea of revolution, the paper will argue, is a shared emphasis on spontaneity, active dissent, and the essentially revolutionary character of freedom—a quality which makes revolution an indispensable constituent of all authentic politics.

Finally, the paper will show how the period of the German Revolution is viewed by both as a key turning point in modernity, the beginning of a sharp decline in the significance of the class system in the West, a historical claim which is important for their understanding of the contemporary revolutionary actor, including in the New Left. Arendt's assertion that class structures lost much of their integrity after the war reinforces her claim that Marxism fatally misunderstands contemporary society, and indicates its decreasing political relevance. By contrast, Marcuse's career-long (and considerably more nuanced) analysis of the changing nature of class in modern revolution, and his concern that the proletariat, absorbed within advanced capitalist society, is no longer a revolutionary actor, was developed within the wide framework of Marxist scholarship undertaken by the Frankfurt school, whose leading members Arendt held a well-known antipathy toward, and whose ideological principles she was skeptical of. Despite this, both agree that modern revolution cannot take place through working-class agitation, and that contemporary economic dynamics cannot provide the impulse for authentic political revolution. These, at best, idiosyncratic interpretations of the German Revolution, given the centrality of class-based politics in the events of 1918–19, are nonetheless important to Arendt and Marcuse's ideas of revolution, and particularly in the appeal of certain aspects of New Left “revolutionary” politics.

II

The German Revolution grew out of the First World War. Deepening deprivation during the war years, increasing left-wing agitation aggravated by repressive state-led opposition, and the growing inevitability of defeat had by the winter of 1918 caused rising anger against the German authorities. In early November, a sailors’ mutiny in Kiel lit the touch paper and unrest spread through Germany within days. Men and women came out onto the streets; new revolutionary institutions in the shape of workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up to organize the political and economic affairs of the new Germany.Footnote ⁴ Within a week an armistice had been signed, bringing the First World War to an end, the Kaiser had abdicated, and a republic was proclaimed.

Despite its impact, the German Revolution was widely considered to have failed, insofar as the more “revolutionary” demands of the left for political and economic change were rejected by the ultimately dominant center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), who broadly upheld the institutional and political status quo. Division between the major parties—the SPD, the USPD (an earlier offshoot of the SPD) and the initially disparate groups to their left who came together under the banner of the Communist Party (KPD)—led to chaos and eventually open violence. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two leaders of the Spartakusbund or Spartacist League, and later the KPD, would famously be murdered in January 1919 at the hands of the SPD's notorious Freikorps: a bloody emblem of the revolution's collapse into violent chaos.Footnote ⁵ Revolutionary councils clung on in some areas until May, and mass strikes and street fighting continued until the signing of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919.Footnote ⁶ This liberal-democratic constitution fell far short of the ambitions of the radicals, who envisaged the new council movement replacing Germany's ousted imperial rulers. The councils, part of the landscape of German politics since 1917, had developed out of the German labor movement during the war as strike committees, yet were distinct from either the unions or the SPD.Footnote ⁷ These participatory assemblies, composed of workers or soldiers, were more directly democratic forms of political and economic organization than party or parliamentary institutions, with delegates directly elected, typically “at mass gatherings of workers on strike or of sailors and soldiers defying orders.”Footnote ⁸ For Arendt and Marcuse, the rapid and spontaneous emergence of councils across Germany characterized the nature of the revolution.

Herbert Marcuse, at just twenty years old, became a member of one of the soldier councils in Berlin that formed in the winter of 1918, having become disillusioned with the SPD.Footnote ⁹ He had observed the war from his station in Berlin since being drafted into the army as a teenager, but it was not until the revolution that Marcuse found himself confronted by politics. He later attributed his political awakening to this involvement in the German Revolution and the influence of Rosa Luxemburg. “My [political] experience really began in 1918 with the German Revolution,” Marcuse explained in a 1972 interview, stressing the influence of Luxemburg, whom he “greatly admired and who decisively influenced his concept of revolution.”Footnote ¹⁰

Emerging in the revolution's first days, the councils echoed the appearance of similar institutions in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. As Robert Gerwarth writes, partly because of this, they evoked strong division: “To their supporters, notably the Independent Social Democrats and the Spartacists, the councils were an undiluted form of grassroots political representation. By contrast, their opponents … viewed the councils as agents of ‘Bolshevism’ that would spread chaos and economic upheaval in Germany.”Footnote ¹¹ Marcuse's disillusionment with the SPD became fierce opposition after Luxemburg and Liebknecht's murders. Their deaths represented for Marcuse the collapse of the revolution's early promise in the face of conservative forces. But their deaths were not the only indication that the revolution was not proceeding as hoped. “I left this Soldiers Council when they began to elect former officers as a matter of course,” he wrote. “Then I saw the revolution defeated in Berlin, partly through betrayal, partly through force.”Footnote ¹²

Yet the revolution could have realized real change, he believed, and certainly Luxemburg and Liebknecht's Spartacist League vehemently opposed the SPD's call for a national democratic assembly to draw up a constitution. They argued instead for “a political system in which all power was in the hands of the soldiers’ and workers’ councils.”Footnote ¹³ By late 1918, the radical left made some headway in organizing around this ambition, when a number of groups joined together to form the KPD.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, Gerwarth observes, in contrast to Russia's revolution a year prior, the various “protesters, munitions strikers, and deserting soldiers never formed a single force” in Germany; they remained fragmented and, indeed, the SPD held more support than the Spartacists.Footnote ¹⁵ Marcuse's experiences in 1918–19 initiated his lifelong concern with the nature of revolution: what an authentic revolution is and how it might be realized. He became, he wrote, increasingly politicized during the years following the revolution, although he came to eschew the by then divided Communist Party, detecting what he considered to be a dangerous Russian influence on it.

Marcuse considered the German Revolution to be highly influential on Germany's direction in the years that followed, and in the wider European political sphere. By the 1920s, he wrote,

His work in the 1940s for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime intelligence agency, analyzed the state of Nazi Germany, communism in Europe, and possible outcomes of the war, and included frequent and detailed comparisons between 1918–19 and 1944–5. Marcuse writes that he considered the Spartacists to have been the “one group with a definite revolutionary program” in 1918–19 and reasserts their fundamentally democratic character, while the later “Bolshevization” of the KPD in the mid-1920s saw the denouncement of Luxemburg and the eradication of her ideas from the party.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet had it not been for the unions and the SPD, “1918 might have given birth to a socialist revolution.”Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, not only was it a missed opportunity for radical change, but also its failure enabled the rise of the far right.

After the revolution Marcuse pursued an academic career, but his political experiences continued to influence his thinking. He spent much of his career writing on revolution from a Marxist–Hegelian perspective, often markedly more optimistic about the possibility of change than the wider Frankfurt school, which ultimately took a rather pessimistic route, exemplified most famously in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which expressed disillusionment with the possibility of emancipation in the contemporary political and social spheres.Footnote ¹⁹ Marcuse's critical development of the Marxist idea of revolution continued to be shaped by his experience of the German Revolution, its Luxemburgian aspirations, and the totalitarian politics that ultimately prevailed over those ideals.

Unlike Marcuse, Hannah Arendt was just an observer when her mother took her to the protests in Königsberg as an eleven-year-old.Footnote ²⁰ Her mother was an admirer of Luxemburg, and upon hearing news of the uprising in Berlin, told Arendt, “You must pay attention, this is a historical moment!”Footnote ²¹ Yet it was not until she met her husband, Heinrich Blücher, that the revolution came to possess particular importance for her political thought. Arendt's early studies were in philosophy, not politics, and despite an increasing interest in Zionism from the late 1920s, Arendt would later attribute her politicization in the 1930s and 1940s to Blücher's influence.Footnote ²²

Heinrich Blücher, seven years Arendt's senior, took part in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin in January 1919 that would end with Liebknecht and Luxemburg's deaths, and the revolution, in fact, appears to have been the central political event of his life. Like Marcuse, he was drafted into the army toward the end of the war, where as a radio telegraphist his experience as a “frontrow spectator of the disintegration of the army, the overthrow of the empire and the listless inauguration of a republic in a country without a democratic tradition” threw him into the Spartacist cause.Footnote ²³ Blücher's early radical leanings softened as he aged, however, and although he retained an admiration for Luxemburg, he became critical of Marxism itself.Footnote ²⁴ There was a close intellectual sympathy between Arendt and Blücher, and when Arendt claims her politicization was due to him, there is no reason not to take this at face value. It is highly likely that he continued to influence her thinking—and, indeed, vice versa. When Arendt writes that Blücher was responsible for her rising political awareness in the 1930s and 1940s (the two met in 1936), it is unthinkable that Blücher would not have discussed with her the most important political experience of his own life: the part he played in the Spartacist Uprising. As Shmuel Lederman argues, “Can we separate Arendt and Blücher's shared admiration for the Greeks and the way they perceived freedom from Blücher's experience in the German Rate? … [W]e cannot.”Footnote ²⁵

Blücher's influence is relevant to understanding why Arendt might have returned to the revolution of her childhood periodically in her work.Footnote ²⁶ It hints too at why she was so uncharacteristically sympathetic to its iconic communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, a sympathy distinctly absent in her broader discussion of communism. Blücher indicates, in a letter to Arendt in the late 1950s, that he agrees with her characterization of Luxemburg as a freethinking individual who stood against a tyrannical opponent in the German Revolution. Writing to Arendt about his students, he noted that “if the young here have an inkling about Rosa Luxemburg, then it will do them good to be confronted by this first attempt to show what practical methods all obsolete powers use to exert political control over free people through fear.”Footnote ²⁷ For Blücher, Arendt, and Marcuse, their admiration for Luxemburg was tied up in her rejection of the Bolshevik view of revolution. Rather than “a struggle for institutional power or a new mode of production,” Luxemburg considered revolution to be “a construction of a new way of life … a long and permanent process of transformation, which involved social and economic changes in an overall reconfiguration of social relations.”Footnote ²⁸

For Arendt, as for Blücher, Luxemburg and Liebknecht's deaths marked a transformative moment in the German Revolution: the end of the Spartacists’ ambitions for radical change, and the beginning of an irreversible process of collapse for the revolution itself, which would become disastrous for the political culture of Germany. For Arendt, this shift to the quasi-open use of violence by the ruling party against its opponents had the effect of polarizing German politics and emboldening the far right. “Since this early crime had been aided and abetted by the government, it initiated the death dance in postwar Germany,” she wrote. “The assassins of the extreme Right started by liquidating prominent leaders of the extreme Left … and quickly moved to the center and right-of-center.”Footnote ²⁹ She draws a direct line between SPD terror tactics and the rise of German totalitarianism, noting that many Nazis would later be recruited from the Freikorps.Footnote ³⁰ This watershed moment was (with hindsight) the shift into the era of totalitarianism. “The days before and the days after the first World War,” Arendt writes, are “separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion … The first explosion seemed to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems able to stop.”Footnote ³¹ Reflecting back on the revolution, both Arendt and Marcuse identify in it a moment of possibility that ended with the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. For Arendt and Marcuse, this crime marked the loss of revolutionary ideals in Germany, although it is important to point out that both the SPD and the Spartacists adopted the language and practice of violence in their politics.Footnote ³²

When Arendt and Marcuse write about the German Revolution, its promise is that of a Luxemburg-style revolution; that is, a mass participatory action undertaken freely by the people, and its failure is that it did not attain this end. This is a fair characterization in some respects, but certainly not in all. While, as Mark Jones explains, the German Revolution was “a period of time during which street politics were as important, if not more important, than at any other point in the history of modern Germany,” the crowd by no means fully backed the Spartacists; on the contrary, the largest rallies were in support of the SPD.Footnote ³³ Many feared the Spartacists, the threat to order they represented, and the “fanatical rage” they displayed.Footnote ³⁴ Luxemburg herself, as Jones shows, was not a benign influence; her “unambiguous call to reject negotiations in favour of further revolutionary violence reveals that once the rebellion had begun, she too was caught up in the dynamic of radicalization that was taking place around her.”Footnote ³⁵ While it was true that the “German Revolution provided the context for the radical right to establish an organisational and ideological base that sustained it through the following decade, transcending the immediate task of containing the revolution,” its collapse was not quite as immediate and catastrophic as both suggest.Footnote ³⁶ Gerwarth points out that for several years after the Revolution, Germany's relative stability meant that “the future of the Weimar Republic was wide open.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet the promise of revolution that Luxemburg represented for Arendt and Marcuse remained a reference point for both throughout their lifetimes, and by the end of their careers, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, amongst a new “revolutionary” turn with the rise of the New Left, they were still drawing on these ideas of the German Revolution.

III

Marcuse and Arendt's analyses of revolution came from contrasting perspectives.Footnote ³⁸ Arendt was vehemently opposed to Marxism, even positing Marx's ideas as precursors to totalitarian ideology. Marcuse, meanwhile, sought to develop a Marxism more suited for the twentieth century. Marcuse was a central figure in the Frankfurt school (for whom Arendt constituted “the right”), whilst Arendt positioned herself firmly against the institute, particularly Theodor Adorno, for whom she had an intense personal and intellectual dislike (the feeling was entirely mutual). Yet both were also disciples of Heidegger in the 1920s, and Richard Wolin explains how, on revolution, Heidegger was and remained a major influence. Arendt's “political thinking followed what one might describe as a ‘left Heideggerian’ course,” he writes; “she transposed the revolutionary energies that Heidegger praised in right-wing revolutionary movements to the ends of the political left. Thus, Arendt identified profoundly with the experience of the workers’ council movement.”Footnote ³⁹ For Marcuse, “though Heidegger and Marx marched to different drummers, at times they both seemed to be striving to reach a similar terminus. In Marcuse's view, both Heidegger and Marx strove to redirect the utopian energies latent in the Western philosophical tradition toward the practical goal of remedying the shortcomings of the human condition.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Christopher Holman argues that Marcuse and Arendt's work has more in common than is generally recognized. He claims that reading them in conjunction can overcome some of their theoretical deficiencies: in Marcuse, “a seeming nonconcern with the political as a potential sphere for the manifestation of performativity”; in Arendt, “a definite nonconcern with the social as a potential sphere for the manifestation of performativity.”Footnote ⁴¹ At root, he argues, their ontologies are fundamentally similar. “Both Marcuse and Arendt will ultimately be concerned with the affirmation of a negative ontology,” he writes, “that defines human beingness in terms of the capacity for radical creation, in terms of the capacity for spontaneous generation of new subjective and objective actualities.”Footnote ⁴² He emphasizes the importance for both of the spontaneous possibility for originality to arise out of action, and that both locate a unique joyfulness in authentically political action: for Arendt, “public happiness,” for Marcuse, “the joy of freedom.”Footnote ⁴³

This convergence is reflected in their interpretation of the German Revolution. Holman notes that “it is of the utmost significance to realize that both Marcuse and Arendt identify these two phenomena [the New Left and the council tradition] as modes for the actualization of the creative capacity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ These overlapping aspects of their ideas of freedom can be linked to their lifelong engagements with the German Revolution, specifically the lost possibilities of a Luxemburgian revolution and council politics. This connection reveals, for Arendt, some of the ways in which she draws on socialist traditions, whilst distinguishing Marcuse's position from orthodox Marxism, and also from his Frankfurt school colleagues.Footnote ⁴⁵ In their commentary on the New Left movements of the late 1960s, their interpretations of the German Revolution's brightest possibilities for sociopolitical change came to shape their thinking on an increasingly politically chaotic America—leading to a shared optimism about political alternatives that might emerge out of the growing political dissatisfaction of a new disparate collection of left-wing groups.

In Arendt's On Revolution, she offers her most comprehensive account of revolution through her distinctive readings of the French and American revolutions. She critiques the “social” character of the French Revolution against the more authentically “political” American Revolution. Revolution, she insists, is as much about constituting a space for political action as it is about liberation or the tearing down of political institutions. These two revolutions were transformative for modernity: in them, for the first time, people understood themselves to be constructing a genuinely new type of politics. This is what we identify as revolution today, she believes. On Revolution represents Arendt's most developed thinking on revolution, tracing modern revolution back to its eighteenth-century origins and particularly to the United States. But her interest in revolution significantly pre-dates this work, and we frequently find Arendt returning to contemplate the German Revolution in relation to various contemporary events. From her earliest published works, to those she wrote toward the end of her life, the German Revolution, understood in Luxemburg's terms, periodically resurfaces as an example of modern revolution.

As Arendt writes The Origins of Totalitarianism—her first major work—in the late 1940s, she reflects upon Luxemburg's apparent prescience: “Her prophetic words of warning against the suppression of political freedom and with it of public life read today like a realistic description of the Soviet Union under Krushchev.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In the 1958 edition of Origins, Arendt added a chapter on the Hungarian Revolution, which she argued bore comparison to the German Revolution nearly forty years earlier. In On Revolution, written in 1963, she points out that along with the Paris Commune, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the German Revolution is one of the few moments in modern history, after the American Revolution, when the truly political-revolutionary institution of the councils emerged, albeit briefly.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1966, Arendt returns to the German Revolution in an essay analysing Luxemburg's revolutionary ideas and her role in the revolution. Luxemburg has much to tell us about the politics and the promise of revolutionary freedom, Arendt insists, and the revolutionary possibilities she represents are portrayed as a solution to some of the ailments of modern politics. Arendt had earlier written that one of Luxemburg's most important contributions was that she revealed that “there was something fundamentally wrong” with Leninist communism from the start.Footnote ⁴⁸ “This ‘wrong’ was most strongly denounced, not by the normal, non-Communist world, but by the inner protests and warnings of Rosa Luxemburg against the suppression of inner-party democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Luxemburg's criticism reveals that one need not apply “bourgeois standards” to the Communist Party to detect its tyrannical tendencies, Arendt claims. “One needed only to look at the revolutionary past of the party itself.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The suppression of inner-party democracy in favor of a hierarchical party structure at the head of the movement is catastrophic for the likelihood of genuine revolution, Luxemburg suggests, and Arendt wholeheartedly agrees.

In the later essay on Luxemburg, Arendt goes further, suggesting that “she was not an orthodox Marxist, so little orthodox indeed that it might be doubted that she was a Marxist at all.”Footnote ⁵¹ This somewhat dubious repositioning of Luxemburg was necessary for Arendt's “rescue” of Luxemburg's ideas from Marxism.Footnote ⁵² “What mattered most in her view was reality,” Arendt claims,

Luxemburg's “third-man theory,” which theorized capitalist growth as reliant on the continued existence of precapitalist sectors, was fundamentally anti-Marxist, Arendt claimed, because it indicated that capital did not set off “a process of accumulation that would follow ‘with iron necessity’ its own inherent law up to the final collapse. On the contrary, expropriation had to be repeated time and again to keep the system in motion. Hence, capitalism was not a closed system that generated its own contradictions and was ‘pregnant with revolution’; it fed on outside factors.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The historical determinism Arendt objected to in Marxism was similarly revoked by Luxemburg. “What was an error in abstract Marxian theory was an eminently faithful description of things as they really were,” Arendt wrote.Footnote ⁵⁵ Political change and revolution thus appear as a “non-necessary,” freely chosen activity.

Luxemburg possessed an authentic understanding of politics because she thought about politics in terms of contingent reality rather than material necessity or historical law, Arendt argued. She and her compatriots were truly revolutionary, Arendt wrote, because they did not merely believe “in revolution as a theoretical necessity but wished to do something about it.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Against the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg refused to accept the rule of the party. “She did not believe in a victory in which the people at large had no part and no voice,” claimed Arendt, and was “far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one.”Footnote ⁵⁷ From here, Arendt makes a leap to characterizing Luxemburg as a republican rather than a socialist thinker, noting her “repeated insistence” on a “republican program” in Germany and Russia, and her stress “on the absolute necessity of not only individual but public freedom under all circumstances.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Luxemburg's most important contribution to political theory emerged from her involvement with the revolutionary workers’ councils of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Arendt asserts. This showed her that “good organization does not precede action but is the product of it,” that “the organization of revolutionary action can and must be learned in revolution itself … that revolutions are ‘made’ by nobody but break out ‘spontaneously,’ and that the ‘pressure for action’ always comes ‘from below.’”Footnote ⁵⁹ That is, the activity of revolution cannot be separated from the action of politics; authentic revolution is authentic politics, and it always comes not from the party leadership but from the people. Those attempting, like the Bolsheviks, to make a revolution in their own ideological image by utilizing tyrannical power will invariably fail because their revolution is simply not an authentically political one. “Haven't events proved her right?” Arendt asks.

Arendt's chapter on the Hungarian Revolution in The Origins of Totalitarianism argued that there we saw a “true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat; its greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted … the twelve days of the revolution contained more history than the twelve years since the Red Army had ‘liberated’ the country from Nazi domination.”Footnote ⁶¹ These are quite remarkable claims for a brief and unsuccessful revolutionary attempt, and it is clear that for Arendt it offered, as the German Revolution had, a moment of promise amidst the darkness of twentieth-century European politics.

The integrity of the Hungarian Revolution rested upon two factors: the character of action in the revolution and the institution of revolutionary councils. Its action was mass spontaneous political participation; “what carried the revolution was the sheer momentum of acting-together of the whole people.”Footnote ⁶² The councils institutionalized that freedom, as they had done in prior revolutions, but “even more markedly than in the case of earlier ones.”Footnote ⁶³ Councils are the only modern alternative to the (deeply flawed) party system, Arendt writes, “But while the historical origin of the party system lies in Parliament, the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and spontaneous demands of the people … not deduced from an ideology.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Structurally, councils are the opposite of parties, because rather than being selected by party machinery, “the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom”; that is, power flows upwards, rather than downwards as in the party system.Footnote ⁶⁵ The parallels between Arendt's image of the German Revolution and her description of the later Hungarian Revolution are evident: both embodied political freedom, and in both the genuinely democratic councils emerged to institutionalize that freedom.

This characterization of the councils, whilst somewhat idealized, was not without basis in the German Revolution. Certainly, the radical left argued for the institution of a council system controlled by workers, and the democratization of the civil service, army and workplaces, against the SPD vision of a parliamentary republic.Footnote ⁶⁶ The emergence of the councils is generally described as spontaneous: with delegates elected during strike gatherings and protests, and establishing internal organizational structures, including executive committees.Footnote ⁶⁷ They developed not along Russian lines, writes Ralf Hoffrogge, but “rather as spontaneous resistance organisations … councils became a new way of workers to represent their interests … These councils were simply a new form of the labour movement's democratic assembly traditions.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Parliamentary republicanism and council democracy were not always considered to be opposed, but conflict between the two political regimes swiftly emerged—as well as divergence within the council tradition of how the people should be represented—and eventually the SPD's parliamentary model was dominant.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet historians support the vision of possibility that the councils held. Donny Gluckstein writes of how “the council was more than a machine for passively counting votes in respective party proportions. It was itself a laboratory for change … the very existence of workers’ council democracy involved a process of debate and scission which means it would evolve along with the class it embodied.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In Arendt's revolutionary chronology, the Hungarian Revolution directly follows the German Revolution. “If there was ever such a thing as Rosa Luxemburg's ‘spontaneous revolution,’” she wrote of the events in Hungary, “this sudden uprising of an oppressed people for the sake of freedom and hardly anything else … something, that is, which everybody, conservatives and liberals, radicals and revolutionists, had discarded as a noble dream—then we had the privilege to witness it.”Footnote ⁷¹ Yet, just as the Bolsheviks destroyed the power of the soviets in Russia, and the SPD “liquidated the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils in 1919,” so too were the councils repressed in Hungary by the Soviets, Arendt explains.Footnote ⁷² Arendt's analysis of the Hungarian Revolution is modelled on the German Revolution, and her insistence of its importance is strongly indicative of the continuing relevance of the German Revolution in her political thought and her history of revolution.

In the 1960s student movement in America, Arendt saw another possibility for positive political change. Finding much still to admire in America's republican model, she was not convinced of the need for fully fledged revolution, but recognized that there were nonetheless substantial problems in the contemporary republic. She tentatively identified some grounds for hope of a better political future in the American New Left, whilst harboring reservations about the New Left that curbed her enthusiasm. She opposed the development of a rhetoric of violence within the New Left, and she associated this not just with a militant Marxism, but also with the rise of the black power movement.Footnote ⁷³ While the postwar generation's first reaction to the war was an “an almost matter-of-course espousal of a politics of nonviolence,” the country since saw a rise in the acceptance of violent action, she observes.Footnote ⁷⁴ Arendt explicitly contrasts the model of the councils to antipolitical communities of “hippies and communes,” who disdain engagement with the world, and opposes those elements of the New Left movement who look to violence to resolve political problems.Footnote ⁷⁵

Yet the New Left also showed promise. Arendt highlights the “very great successes” in the field of civil rights, and “the resistance movement against the war in Vietnam.”Footnote ⁷⁶ She pays tribute “to the pioneering role that the Civil Rights Movement played in initiating the events that led to the New Left in a broad sense,” as Richard King notes, and she cites “the importance of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in generating the emerging student movement … she was enthusiastic in her praise of the positive traits of the student movement, especially ‘the sheer courage, and astounding will to action.’”Footnote ⁷⁷ There are qualities in the student movement that are characteristic of the true revolutionary. She highlights the “disinterestedness” of the New Left as its most striking quality, that its followers were not motivated by selfish ends, and she argues that “every revolutionary movement has been led by the disinterested, who were motivated by compassion or by a passion for justice.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The New Left possesses a potential for action that is the key to true political action as Arendt understood it, even if she believed that the student “revolutionaries” could not yet recognize that power was there to be grasped.Footnote ⁷⁹ She even saw civil disobedience itself, as it emerged in America in the 1950s and 1960s, as a potential corrective to the gap left by the Founders when they failed to institutionalize the prerevolutionary participatory townships which Arendt believed had formed the early equivalent of the councils in America.

The potential of the German Revolution is echoed in the promise that Arendt saw in the quasi-revolutionary tumults of the 1960s. The movement was neither flawless nor blameless. But it held a certain potential which was reminiscent of the spontaneity and participatory actions of earlier revolutions. She identifies the appeal of a Luxemburg-style revolution in the New Left, in the appeal of Luxemburg herself to the movement: “It speaks not only for the person of Rosa Luxemburg, but also for the qualities of this older generation of the Left, that the legend—vague, confused, inaccurate in nearly all details—could spread throughout the world and come to life whenever a ‘New Left’ sprang into being,” she claims. And yet, “every New Left movement, when its movement came to change into the Old Left—usually when its members reached the age of forty—promptly buried its early enthusiasm for Rosa Luxemburg together with its dreams of youth.”Footnote ⁸⁰ There is something about this idea of revolution that struck a chord with the hopeful enthusiasm of the young. Arendt did not believe that the New Left “revolutionaries” had actually read Luxemburg's work—their enthusiasm resulted from the myth of Luxemburg. Yet even the myth, Arendt seems to suggest, contains something of the authenticity of revolution in its spontaneity of participation, and its pursuit of freedom. The chances of the council model's resurgence in modernity were, she admitted, slim. And yet, she concluded, “perhaps after all—in the wake of the next revolution.”Footnote ⁸¹

This continued critical engagement with socialist movements, this time in the American New Left, develops Lederman's observation of Arendt's “silent dialogue” with the left in her work, taking it all the way through to the end of her career, and situating it within an American context. This engagement even, arguably, edged toward a more active involvement in the movement. As King writes, “Herbert Marcuse was usually identified as the main theoretician of the new Left, but Arendt herself exerted a good deal of influence on it in its early years, particularly in university settings such as Berkeley.”Footnote ⁸² And just as Arendt tries to reposition Luxemburg outside the socialist mainstream, she makes similar moves in her analysis of the New Left, which make the movement much more palatable to an anti-Marxist such as Arendt. She argues that despite itself, the New Left has experienced an “unconscious drifting away from Marxism,” and that its moral character (or “disinterestedness”) “clashes with its Marxian rhetoric.”Footnote ⁸³

IV

It was in Marcuse's discussion of the New Left that his debt to the German Revolution fifty years earlier becomes most clear. The new generation's revolutionary hopes brought back memories of the revolution of his own youth that, as we have seen, were so politically formative: on one occasion, Marcuse “spoke at length about how much the events of 1968 and 1969 reminded him of his own experiences in Berlin during the Spartacist winter.”Footnote ⁸⁴ From the mid-1960s Marcuse became preoccupied with the New Left movement as it gathered pace, seeing in it new possibilities for radical change. He engaged with the movement widely, speaking on campuses across Europe and the United States, the country that, unlike most of his Frankfurt school colleagues, Marcuse had settled in permanently. The American political context is particularly important. He explained that his philosophy became more radical from the mid-1960s because “I thought I saw my past experience being repeated in this country too. Politics was veering to the extreme right, democracy was being eroded, the oppression of minorities was increasing, and an aggressive foreign policy was being pursued which had already led to two so-called ‘limited’ wars.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Marcuse thus draws an explicit comparison between 1960s America and postwar Germany.

However, it was not just the problems of American society that echoed postwar Germany, but also the potential for political and social change that emerged with the New Left. From Marcuse's perspective, the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s held parallels with the German Revolution. “There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion,” he wrote, an “expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Marcuse, as Ben Agger points out, “is one of the few Marxists who is unwilling to accept the Leninist sacrifice of short-term liberty and spontaneity to longer-term goals such as capital accumulation.”Footnote ⁸⁷ As Arendt had, Marcuse looked to Luxemburg's idea of revolution to conceptualize this. “His experiences,” Kellner writes,

In Counter-revolution and Revolt he directly connects the concept of totality with Luxemburg. “Rosa Luxemburg knew that a radical transformation of the working class was a condition of revolutionary strategy: the working class will acquire the ‘freely assumed self-discipline of Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.’”Footnote ⁸⁹ This notion of totality, and the imperative of total rupture in authentic revolution, was important throughout Marcuse's work on revolution—his notion of “the Great Refusal”: a radical rejection of existing political conditions that he advocated in One-Dimensional Man, relies upon total upheaval—but particularly in his analysis of the New Left. This, like any true revolutionary action, had a “radical and total character,” he writes, and he includes here groups dismissed by Arendt as “hippies and communes.”Footnote ⁹⁰ As Kellner explains, “Marcuse characterizes the New Left broadly as including intellectuals, groups from the civil rights movements, and youth groups, including hippies.”Footnote ⁹¹

Marcuse did not consider the New Left in the late 1960s to be revolutionary yet. To claim that the student movement was revolutionary in itself would be “nonsensical,” he wrote in a letter to Adorno in 1969.Footnote ⁹² “But it is the strongest, perhaps the only, catalyst for the internal collapse of the system of domination today.” No, he writes, “the situation is not a revolutionary one, not even a prerevolutionary one.” And yet,

In the context of his hopes for the New Left, Marcuse's thoughts return to the councils, where his own political experiences had begun. Musing on the possibility of revolutionary worker control in factories, he notes that such a development would echo the “seminal achievement of the revolutionary tradition, namely, the ‘councils’ (‘soviets’, Räte) as organizations of self-determination, self-government (or rather preparation for self-government) in local popular assemblies.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Like Arendt, he notes that the councils are an alternative to parties.Footnote ⁹⁵ “Their emergence presupposes a new consciousness,” he writes, “the breaking of the hold of the Establishment over the work and leisure of the people.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Marcuse hoped, rather than expected, these councils to emerge, but it is notable that he identifies such Räte as the form of revolutionary organization appropriate to the contemporary era of mass society. The very strength of the New Left movement lay in its similarity to the spontaneously emerging, pluralistic, local councils that Marcuse had been part of in 1918–19:

What made the German Revolution an authentic revolution for Arendt and Marcuse was its brief embodiment of a participatory idea of freedom that Marcuse refers to as the “spontaneous … joy of freedom” and Arendt describes as “experienced in spontaneity.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Authentic revolution is an essentially critical activity, which must come from “below” (Arendt) or “outside” (Marcuse) society. This means that revolution cannot be ideologically defined—an idea we see emphasized in Arendt and, more surprisingly, in Marcuse. It means that revolution cannot be determined by leaders or parties, but can only emerge from the people. It is a public freedom; the freedom with which Marcuse and Arendt are concerned is not the freedom of the individual, but has to do with people acting together. Most distinctively, the freedom embodied in authentic revolution exists only in the activity of dissent and difference: the critical action of Marcuse's dialectical framework, or the “natality” by which Arendt believes each individual is capable of bringing distinctiveness into the world. Thus freedom lives and dies with the phenomenon of action in the world. The active nature of revolutionary freedom is apparent in the way each ties active dissent to freedom.

Fifty years after the German Revolution, Arendt and Marcuse echo Luxemburg's sentiment that “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Discussing civil disobedience in contemporary America, Arendt writes that “consent implies dissent, and is the hallmark of free government; one who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent. Consent as it is implied in the right to dissent [is] the spirit of American law and the quintessence of American government.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse writes, “Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were … essentially critical ideas … Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organized.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Revolutionary freedom exists only for “the one who thinks differently,” who understands dissent as a real possibility. The course of revolution cannot be predetermined, but rests upon the active and free engagement of its participants. Its meaning and direction emerge only in the revolution, but in an authentic revolution this is also the realization of freedom.

There is therefore something essentially revolutionary about the nature of freedom, because it is tied to the ability to dissent and criticize. Freedom is only freedom when the possibility of dissent is really available; it appears in the act rather than in its consequences. For Arendt, political legitimacy is only possible when dissent is possible, thus linking the political freedom to contract with others in society to the freedom to oppose that society. In America, for her the best example of a relatively free, modern state, its continued freedom—and its legitimacy—derived from the “revolutionary spirit” which still existed in its people and the words of its Constitution.Footnote ¹⁰² For Marcuse, freedom only exists when individuals have the opportunity to participate in a world where difference is possible, i.e. where society is not merely one-dimensional. For Marcuse, the “one-dimensionality” or uniformity of modernity represses the possibility for dialectical processes of critique, the basis of revolution. Without the possibility of dissent and dialectical movement, revolution is impossible, as is freedom. For Arendt, the same problem is represented by “mass society,” in which extreme individualization causes a loss of thinking capacity. Thinking for oneself is achieved only by understanding multiple perspectives, hence the importance of plurality for freethinking. The possibility of dissent is necessary for thought, but freethinking is also necessary for the capacity to dissent to be retained. Mass society and one-dimensionality are structural features of modern society which are similarly repressive for Arendt and Marcuse. This means that the opportunity to express dissent from political norms must be an ever-present possibility in any genuinely free political community. Freedom requires conflict; that is, the presence of dissent. As Rainer Winter writes, “dialectical thinking for Marcuse has a negating or emancipatory power. This seeks not only to understand or interpret the world, but rather to contribute to its transformation.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The same can be said of plurality in Arendt's work. Because freedom can only be enacted through opposition it is always at least potentially revolutionary.

Dissent is valued as the activity of true freedom. Freedom to choose the status quo is not a particularly valuable freedom. This is the case even for Arendt: where consent and the right to dissent are linked, it must be an active form of dissent. This has as much to do with the intrinsically valuable act of dissent as it has with the problematic conditions of modernity. Freedom has to be active in order to be meaningful. “In contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer,” writes Stanley Aronowitz, “Marcuse was a philosopher of praxis; he was forever searching for the openings for revolution and believed that theory was intimately linked to action.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Similarly, says Etienne Tassin, for Arendt, “freedom designates an action and not a status, an acting and not a right.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The institutional model that Marcuse and Arendt believe can best realize this idea of revolutionary freedom is the council: embodying spontaneity, plurality, and critical engagement in political activity. For Marcuse, it was the fragmented countercultural groups of the 1960s who possessed the capacity to dissent and thus held the key to initiating change. These were certainly not fully developed councils, but his references to the way in which these groups “foreshadowed” council politics, and possessed the same characteristic of “organized spontaneity,” reveal the links he drew between them.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For Arendt, councils—small groups of active citizens engaged in political discussion and action—were the only realistic alternative to the state in modernity. Whilst these groups sprang up only rarely in the contemporary world, Arendt's reflections on the nature of the New Left indicate the potential she believed the student movement held for the emergence of council-style politics.

V

The German Revolution was thus a conceptual model of revolution for Arendt and Marcuse; it represented—briefly—an authentically political revolution. Both theorists also indicate that this period saw a transformation in Western society: the collapse of class-based social organization. It is beyond question that class organization played a major role in the events of the German Revolution: though a mass movement, it played out amongst parties with class-based constituencies, and the councils themselves were outgrowths of labor movements. Yet Arendt and Marcuse both suggest that it was at this point in Western history that class lost its pivotal role in social organization, and with this, the question of who constituted the revolutionary actor was burst open. This enabled Arendt and Marcuse's ideas of the revolutionary (or proto-revolutionary) agent later to converge in their understandings of the New Left, where the dissenting actors were primarily defined not in economic but in sociopolitical terms: Marcuse's countercultural groups and Arendt's “disinterested” political actors.

In his 1958 Soviet Marxism, Marcuse explains why the German Revolution's failure was so catastrophic for orthodox Marxism. As per Marx's predictions, Lenin believed that the overcoming of industrial capitalism was essential for true communism. Thus, even after 1917, Lenin “clung to the notion that the Russian Revolution must be rescued by the German Revolution.” Lenin believed that Germany promised “to unleash that chain of revolutions in mature countries which would restore the ‘orthodox’ way of international revolution,” Marcuse wrote.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ “The Soviet state would not only be ‘protected’ by the proletarian state of a highly developed industrial country but would also share in its technical and material wealth, and the transition to socialism would thus be secured and accelerated. [There was an] almost desperate orientation toward Germany … during the first years of the revolution.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The revolution's failure thus had dramatic implications:

The failure of history to progress as predicted by Marx meant that Lenin could not continue to place his faith in the industrialized proletariat as the agent of the revolution. That this marks a sharp shift in Lenin's thought is historically contentious. But this interpretation agrees with Marcuse's own belief that the working class was not likely to be the active agent in contemporary revolution, albeit still essential. For Marcuse, the German Revolution played a key role not only in the development of Soviet communism, but also in revealing the impotence of the proletariat in modernity. “The Marxian concept of a revolution carried by the majority of the exploited masses” has been overtaken by historical development, he claims.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In his discussions of the New Left, Marcuse again insists that the proletariat can no longer be considered to be the revolutionary agent.

Organized labor cannot fulfil the role of revolutionary, Marcuse argues, claiming that now “the concentration of radical politics in active minorities, mainly among the young middle-class intelligentsia, and among the ghetto populations,” means that these groups are now the “potential catalysts of rebellion,” that “their consciousness and their goals make them representatives of the very real common interest of the oppressed.”Footnote ¹¹² Although this might seem, he continues, an “intolerable deviation” to Marxism, in fact it is the means of enabling a new base. The proletariat has lost its revolutionary function, but “the radical transformation of a social system still depends on the class which constitutes the human base of the process of production.”Footnote ¹¹³ Under modern conditions of integration, whereby the working class has been coopted into capitalist consciousness, “the new political consciousness of the vital need for radical change emerges among social groups which, on objective grounds, are (relatively) free from the integrating, conservative interests and aspirations, free for the radical transvaluation of values.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The working class has not wholly lost its role as the “basic force of transformation,” but it “assumes a stabilizing, conservative function; and the catalysts of transformation operate ‘from without.’”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Such “immunization” appeared even before the First World War, Marcuse writes, arguing that the SPD's nationalism and shift away from radicalism presaged the defeat of the postwar Central European communist revolutions, by the “majority of organized labor … in alliance with the bourgeoisie and the army,” and the forces of social democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Germany was “the only country where it came to a powerful resurgence after the defeat,” Marcuse writes, referencing the revolution, yet, even here, “Social Democratic as well as Communist labor succumbed quickly to the Fascist regime.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The failure of the German Revolution reflected the broader context, Marcuse suggests, specifically the integration of the working class into capitalist society.

The failure of the European proletariat to rebel led him to develop his argument that, while the transformation of the working class was still necessary for authentic revolution, its position in a capitalist system which develops and then satisfies a set of manufactured needs meant that the working class became ever more firmly entrenched in the system. “By virtue of its basic position in the production process, by virtue of its numerical weight and the weight of exploitation, the working class is still the historical agent of revolution,” he wrote. Yet “by virtue of its sharing the stabilizing needs of the system, it has become a conservative, even counterrevolutionary force. Objectively, ‘in-itself,’ labor still is the potentially revolutionary class; subjectively, ‘for-itself,’ it is not.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The development and satisfaction of needs “perpetuate the servitude of the exploited,” argued Marcuse.Footnote ¹¹⁹

As a rule, Arendt was less interested in questions of class, to the extent that her work sometimes evades its discussion, often problematically, particularly through her separation of society and the political. Yet in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt offers a historical analysis of class that highlights the world-historical importance of the period immediately following the First World War. This period, she argues, saw the collapse of the old world as “the party system ceased to be a working device and the class system of European society broke down under the weight of growing masses entirely declassed by events.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Germany was one of the first to experience this, she argues, producing “one of the most dramatic events in recent German history.”Footnote ¹²¹ The importance of this cannot be overstated. “Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law,” she writes, “yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy.”Footnote ¹²² The collapse of class systems, “the only [remaining] social and political stratification of the European nation-state,” undermined the way in which political communities operated: “the whole fabric of visible and invisible threads which bound the people to the body politic.”Footnote ¹²³ Once they were dissolved into mass societies, the foundation of democratic freedom had been lost. “Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with the end of the Second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The war was the “great prelude to the breakdown of classes and their transformation into masses.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Within the German Revolution, of course, an alternative to party, class, or mass society had, briefly, emerged: the revolutionary councils. These alternative forms of institutionalized political action emerged in the space, Arendt argues, that the collapse of class and party politics had left unfilled. Although Arendt roots her idea of the council in premodern institutions such as the prerevolutionary American townships, or even in the radically participatory democracy of ancient Athens, the council is a political form which, uniquely in an era of “mass politics,” offered a means of realizing and institutionalizing action beyond the moment of the revolution itself.

For Arendt and Marcuse, the German Revolution sits within a period of extraordinary change and both believed that those changes reshaped politics. For Marcuse, the working class was dissolved within capitalist society under a perpetual false consciousness; he was profoundly concerned with finding the catalyst for future revolutions precisely because, under contemporary conditions, the proletariat is not capable of initiating revolution. Arendt argued that the First World War was the stimulus for the dissolution of class, destroying the social structure that ensured rights and freedoms in the nation-state. The revolutionary possibilities that both associate with the German Revolution are also connected to this collapse of the old social order. For Arendt, the collapse of class meant the end of the party system, and thus opened a space for a different kind of politics. This space could have been occupied, as it was briefly in 1918–19, by the councils. Instead, history took a different direction. The collapse of politics brought about the possibility for a renewal of freedom, via the revolution, but its failure meant that this space was instead occupied by fascist and Nazi movements: “After the first World War, a deeply anti-democratic, protodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian movements swept Europe.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Marcuse's memories of the German Revolution also reflect this ambiguity. While it looked, in the moment of the Revolution, as if there were a real possibility of radical political change, this was never viewed as inevitable. In Repressive Tolerance Marcuse writes of the Spartacist Uprising that “it could be and was anticipated whether the movement would serve the revamping of the old order or the emergence of the new.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Germany teetered, instead, on a knife edge between revolutionary change and the reestablishment of the old. Ultimately, the failure of its revolution not only served as a “revamping” of the old order, he suggests, but also provoked a reaction that influenced the rise of fascism in Germany.Footnote ¹²⁸ Despite this retrospective analysis, Marcuse does not rescind his claim that the German Revolution possessed the qualities of an authentic revolution, that it was pregnant with possibility, albeit not ultimately realized.

VI

The German Revolution, for Arendt and Marcuse, was a lost moment of possibility, where authentic politics arose briefly and tantalizingly, before its collapse left a dangerous void in which fascism thrived. It realized a freedom exceptionally rare in modernity: a total, spontaneous, public freedom which enacted the people's power against the institutionalized hierarchies of modern state power. Arendt and Marcuse stress the spontaneous quality of action, the way freedom was realized through action itself. The revolution marked a rupture with the past; its enactment created a space in which a completely different kind of politics could emerge. That this rupture was brief and that the German Revolution failed in its more radical ambitions does not lessen the extraordinary quality of this brief moment in German (and revolutionary) history for these two theorists. The German Revolution, like any true revolution, represents for Arendt and Marcuse a genuine realization of freedom, but it also indicates that there is something revolutionary about the character of freedom itself in their thinking.

Heather and Stolz have noted that “because of her rejection of Marxism as a guide to political action, many critics of Arendt have dismissed her thought as positing an outdated conservatism.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet Arendt's portrayal of the German Revolution emphasizes a more radical aspect, suggesting that she is committed to revolutionary practices as a means to attain freedom. To view freedom as dissent, as Arendt does, brings her closer to some of the key premises of critical theory, but her work remains firmly political, against the “increasingly depoliticized” Frankfurt school.Footnote ¹³⁰ Marcuse, on the other hand, here draws closer to Arendt than to his Frankfurt school colleagues, when he centers political action in his work, and emphasizes the continuing potential for change against, notably, Adorno and Horkheimer, whose “skepticism vis-à-vis the student movement resulted from their critical assessment of Bolshevism as a potent and insidious form of political domination.”Footnote ¹³¹ Marcuse too is a theorist of action. The German Revolution is a historical touchpoint for his thought on the possibilities of the New Left, and ground his sometimes somewhat overoptimistic assessment of that movement's possibilities in a tangible historical precedent.

It is also notable how similar their historical characterizations of the period of the German Revolution are with respect to their claim that the German Revolution took place amidst the collapse of class. This claim oriented their work in important ways: Marcuse in the search for an alternative revolutionary subject, Arendt in the search for a new politics that might fill the void left by the failure of traditional politics. This search took on the utmost importance for both, because in that turn to mass society, and in the wake of the German Revolution's failure, fascism arose to take its place. For both thinkers, then, the German Revolution appears as a transformational moment in modern politics and in the history of revolution, one which could have led to a truly emancipatory politics, but its failure, by virtue of the extraordinary changes taking place around it, resulted in the very opposite. Despite this, both believed in the character and possibility of political change that it promised, and both found faint echoes of this hope fifty years later in the New Left movement.