On Friday we concluded our reading of On Revolution in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group. Arendt’s last finished book, On Revolution is about freedom — the idea that animates her writing from beginning to end. But it is also a polemic against a long philosophical tradition that, in her view, misplaced freedom by locating it in the inner life of the will. Arendt seeks to reclaim freedom as a political experience: the capacity to act and speak in public with others, to interrupt stagnant and oppressive orders, and to begin something new. Revolution, in this sense, is not primarily an act of destruction, but a moment when freedom appears as a worldly power — the power to found a new political beginning, what she calls the constitution of freedom.
That insistence on the foundation of freedom is the heartbeat of On Revolution. Revolutions, Arendt writes, are “the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” To found a new political order is not to reform what exists but to cross an unbridgeable chasm. Every founding breaks with authority, tradition, and inherited legitimacy. That is why beginnings are so often violent. From Cain and Abel to Romulus and Remus, Arendt reminds us, political order emerges from acts that are irredeemably troubling. Whatever brotherhood human beings achieve, she writes, has grown out of fratricide; whatever political organization they create has its origin in crime.
This is not a celebration of violence. It is a recognition that violence marks the end of illegitimate authority, but not the legitimacy of the new beginning. When authority collapses — and Arendt believed it had collapsed in the twentieth century — the question is no longer how to preserve a tradition but how to found freedom anew without pretending the act of foundation is pure.
Freedom, in this sense, is not liberty. One can enjoy civil liberties under monarchies or bureaucratic regimes. I was just in Saudi Arabia where new liberties are blossoming, but there is no political freedom. Freedom, Arendt insists, is participation in public affairs: the right to appear, to speak, to act, and to share power. The American Revolution succeeded, in her telling, because it institutionalized this experience — at least for a time. The men of the revolution discovered what Arendt calls “public happiness”: the joy of legislating, deliberating, persuading, and being persuaded. Jefferson confessed that life in Congress offered him a foretaste of eternal bliss. Public freedom mattered more to them than private welfare.
But On Revolution is neither a celebration of American freedom nor nostalgic for past glory. It is an autopsy, an attempt to reclaim what she sees as the lost treasure of the American revolution.
Arendt’s most unsettling claim comes in her discussion of corruption. Corruption, she argues, is not primarily the work of elites conspiring against the people. In egalitarian republics like the United States, corruption is more likely to arise from society itself — from the people acting not as citizens but as private persons. This is corruption from below. It occurs when people exercise political power as consumers, property holders, or factional actors — carrying into public life the habits of the household and the market.
Arendt’s argument is that one core reason for the eventual failure of the American Revolution to sustain lasting freedom is that the American people have been corrupted, we have lost the practice and habit of acting in the public spirit. The great failing of the American Constitution, as she sees it, is that it provided no space for people to gather and deliberate on political questions. The Constitution, Arendt notes, gave power to the people, but only offered national and state institutions for political deliberation. Left out of the constitutional structure were local institutions such as Town Halls or civic forums. The result is that the people were given power to elect representatives without the experience of deliberating in public life that would form them as citizens. Power was distributed, but public freedom was never institutionalized. What filled the vacuum was private interest wearing the costume of popular sovereignty.
Thomas Jefferson saw this danger late in his life. Initially, he believed the great threat to republican government was public power encroaching on private life, which is why he championed the Bill of Rights. But as prosperity expanded and the private realm grew dominant, he came to see the opposite risk: that the public realm would be hollowed out by abundance and private interests. His remedy was radical and largely forgotten: the ward system. Small, local councils with no predefined purpose, designed simply to give people a place to speak and act together. In talking in public with others, people would have to justify their opinions. Opinions would be tested and filtered, transforming untutored private opinions into expressions of the public interest. These “little republics,” Jefferson believed, would be the main strength of the great one by teaching the art of making public judgments.
Arendt takes Jefferson at his word. The wards mattered not because they were efficient but because they made freedom tangible. No one could be free, she argues, without experiencing public freedom. No one could be happy without a share in public happiness. Republican government demands spaces where people learn — not represent, not delegate, not consume — but act.
The tragedy Arendt identifies is that modern revolutions abandoned this insight. Freedom was replaced by abundance. Politics became administration. Parties displaced councils. The aim of revolution shifted from founding freedom to managing life. We learned to confuse freedom with free enterprise, citizenship with elections, politics with growth.
The result is our familiar paradox: unprecedented empowerment paired with profound political emptiness. People vote, post, virtue signal, protest, and mobilize — but rarely act together to build a shared world. Corruption thrives not because citizens or politicians are immoral, but because public spaces for freedom have vanished.
On Revolution does not tell us how to fix this. Arendt distrusts blueprints. What she offers instead is a standard of judgment. Where are the places where people can appear as equals, act without scripts, and experience the risky joy of public freedom? Without them, power curdles into administration, and freedom dissolves into lifestyle.
Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the most important institution of American democracy is the jury. In serving on a jury, citizens are tasked with putting aside their personal interests and seeking to do justice. Jury service is a school for public deliberation that elevates private persons into public citizens.
Jury trials are guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. What was left out of the Constitution, however, were schools for political as opposed to legal education. That is why one way to think about reclaiming our lost revolutionary treasure is the practice of citizens’ assemblies — randomly selected groups of people who meet to deliberate about core political issues. Like a jury for politics, citizens’ assemblies are schools for the development of virtue and an antidote to the corrupting influence of abundance.
The question On Revolution leaves us with is as stark as it is unfashionable: not how to protect our preferences, but how to recover our capacity to begin again. The lost treasure of the American Revolution was not independence or prosperity, but institutions of public freedom. Whether that treasure can be recovered without another founding rupture depends on whether we are willing to rebuild the spaces where citizens learn to judge, to speak, and to act together.
