Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Hannah Arendt on revolutions, coup's d'etat and insurrections

I came across this passage in Hannah Arendt's On Revolution:  "This means of course that revolutions are more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified in calling every coup d'etat a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war. Oppressed people have often risen in rebellion, and much of ancient legislation can be understood only as safeguards against the ever-feared, though rarely occurring, uprising of the slave population... Coups d'etat and palace revolutions, where power changes hands from one man to another, from one clique to another, depending on the form of government in which the coup d'tiat occurs, have been less feared because the change they bring is circumscribed to the sphere of government and carries a minimum of unquiet to the people at large, but they have been equally well known and described." (Viking edition, p. 27).

PS As for the part about "minimum of unquiet", Ms. Arendt has not seen the maximum unquiet that the Arab coups d'etat have brought to the lives of people.