At the end of Hannah Arendt’s 1970 interview with Adelbert Reif, she offers some of her most direct thoughts on our political predicaments today. Across the political spectrum, she writes, there is a growing sense that “the system” no longer represents us. This is not simply a matter of polarization or disagreement. It is something more basic: a withdrawal of faith. Citizens on the left and the right, for different reasons, no longer believe that the institutions meant to represent them actually do so. Elections feel hollow or even stolen, bureaucracies are unresponsive and corrupt, and public life is increasingly detached from the experience of those who live under it.
When this loss of faith in the system takes hold, something predictable follows. Power is lost. But governments that have lost their power do not simply fall; they compensate. As consent weakens, governors rely more heavily on administrative decree, executive action, surveillance, policing, and legal compulsion — in short, on force. Not necessarily overt violence, but the steady expansion of mechanisms that compel rather than persuade. The result is a familiar paradox: the more the system loses legitimacy, the more it asserts control.
It is this paradox that Hannah Arendt had in mind when she spoke to Reif of a “revolutionary situation.” By this she did not mean that revolution was imminent, nor that change would necessarily come. It is very possible that a revolutionary situation can lead to counterrevolution or dictatorship. It can also persist for generations. Arendt meant something more unsettling: that power itself had begun to erode. What we witness, she argued, is not the weakness of states that have lost their power, but the rise of new kinds of states based on a peculiar combination of immense capacity for violence and diminishing power and authority.
Arendt’s crucial insight is to distinguish between power and the means of violence. Power is not the ability to command or to coerce. It is the fragile capacity that arises when people act together, when they recognize themselves in a shared world and grant legitimacy to the institutions that govern them. Violence, by contrast, belongs to a different register entirely. It can enforce compliance, secure obedience, even achieve military victory. But it cannot create the kind of consent on which power depends.
This is why the accumulation of ever-greater means of control — technological, bureaucratic, legal — does not solve the crisis of legitimacy but deepens it. The more a system relies on such means, the more it reveals the absence of the very power it seeks to replace.
The erosion of power Arendt describes is not confined to one country or one political system. It cuts across regimes, ideologies, and the familiar divide between left and right. The question, then, is not only why governments today rely more on force, but why the very conditions that make power possible — the experience of acting together in a shared world — have become so fragile.
Arendt’s answer is as unsettling as it is unexpected. The crisis of power is not merely political; it is rooted in a deeper historical process she calls expropriation. What has been steadily eroded in the modern age is not only property in the narrow sense, but the more fundamental sense of having something that is one’s own: a place in the world, a sphere of independence, a stable ground from which one can act, and a common world in which one can act, speak, and be seen and heard by others.
To understand this process, Arendt begins with capitalism — not as an ideology, but as a historical rupture. Capitalism, she argues, did not emerge out of a simple respect for private property, as its defenders often claim. It began with a massive and unprecedented act of expropriation. Lands held by the Church and by traditional communities were seized, enclosed, and redistributed. The result was not the guarantee of property, but the creation of a new class of people who possessed nothing but their labor. Stripped of property, they were forced to sell their labor in order to survive. This is what she means by the original act of expropriation.
In this sense, capitalism does not secure property; it transforms and ultimately undermines it. Property, in the older sense of Eigentum — what belongs to one, what anchors one in the world — is gradually dissolved into wealth. And wealth, unlike property, is fluid; it loses its stability and worldliness. It can be accumulated, exchanged, invested, and lost. A house ceases to be a place in the world; as property, it is reduced to money, something that circulates detached from any physical world.
Property, once a stable ground for independence, becomes part of an endless process of growth and expansion. The very success of capitalism lies in this dynamism — the growth and progress of capitalism’s creative destruction. But that dynamism comes at a cost: it detaches individuals from any lasting relation to what they own and, in doing so, weakens the material basis of their independence.
Seen in this light, socialism does not represent a fundamental break with capitalism so much as its continuation by other means. Where capitalism subjects property to the logic of the market, socialism subjects it to the logic of the state, subordinating what remains of private life to collective administration. In different ways, capitalism and socialism both contribute to a world in which individuals are increasingly dispossessed — not only economically, but politically and existentially. What remains of private life is drawn into systems of management and regulation. The promise is equality; the result, Arendt suggests, is often a more complete form of dispossession.
The reason Arendt worries that our contemporary revolutionary situation — one which has lasted for decades — may continue without resolution is that the one prerequisite for a revolution is lacking: “a group of real revolutionaries.” We have no shortage of anger, protest, or critique. What we lack are those capable of clear-eyed analysis of the situation. Instead, our so-called revolutionaries are caught up in failed ideologies of the past, from communism to racism. Their indignation is justified. But without a real analysis of the situation, they offer not a path forward but simply a wild desperation in the face of corruption and hypocrisy.
If there is hope for a real revolution in the name of freedom, one that would restore power in a way that actually increases freedom rather than furthering the process of expropriation, it must begin with a real understanding of the problem, not with slogans. What is needed is the difficult task of understanding our world as it is.
What, Arendt asks in the final pages of the interview, could an alternative system of government look like? She offers a cautious and admittedly utopian suggestion: a system of councils, grounded in the experience of people acting together. While she recognizes that the councils would involve a full-scale rethinking and reimagining of our system of sovereign states, she has reasons for believing that such a system is possible.
First, councils are not something she has made up as a fantasy. They have emerged in the wake of every revolution in recent centuries. Second, the councils are grounded in the experience of people acting together. They resist sovereignty and thus are the opposite of expropriation. In this sense, council governance offers at least a model for a new system of government that could inspire a new revolutionary founding of freedom.
Whether such a vision of council governance is possible is an open question — one Arendt explicitly refuses to answer. What is not in doubt is the problem it seeks to address.
Faced with a world in which the system defined by expropriation is faltering and has lost its power, the task is to recover spaces in which people can once again act, speak, and appear to one another as equals — spaces in which power, rather than force, can arise. It is not that the councils are the answer; they are, however, one way to open the question of a better future. The idea of council governance is, therefore, one potential answer to the real analysis of our present situation. We remain in the uneasy condition Arendt first described: a revolutionary situation without a revolution, a world in which power ebbs even as the machinery of control expands.
