Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The Book That Explains Why Revolutions Keep Failing

 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is the book people come to later, after reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Revolution explains why modern political movements, even well-intentioned ones, so often collapse into chaos, violence, or empty spectacle. Why nearly all revolutions begin with a cry for freedom and end under tyranny. Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has called On Revolution Arendt’s most important work for our time. 

I didn't read On Revolution to learn about 18th-century history, but that aspect fascinated me the most from my first (of three) readings. I read the book to understand why most revolutions fail. Why do today's movements and “moments” of rising against tyranny today feel simultaneously urgent and powerless—why they generate outrage and mobilization but fail to produce lasting freedom.

Arendt’s central claim: "most modern revolutions confuse liberation with freedom, and the confusion destroys them."

Liberation is not freedom

Liberation means being freed from something—tyranny, poverty, occupation, oppression. Freedom, in Arendt’s sense, means the ability to "act politically with others in a durable public space." It means founding something that lasts: institutions, laws, assemblies, and a shared world where people appear to one another as equals.

The American Revolution, she argues, succeeded because it understood this difference. The French Revolution (and the Russian Revolution) failed because it didn’t.

The American founders, to their eternal credit and our benefit, were obsessed with founding.  They fought to write constitutions and found legislatures, courts, and lasting programs. They worried less about the social questions such poverty, hunger, and inequality and more about how to build a political structure that could outlast them. They created a space for citizens to act together across generations.

The French revolutionaries, by contrast, became consumed by suffering. Once “the people” were redefined as the hungry masses, politics was no longer about public freedom—it became a moral crusade to eliminate misery. And misery, Arendt insists, has no natural limit. Once the revolution defines itself by alleviating suffering, it must keep escalating, because suffering is endless. That is how revolutions devour themselves.

In Arendt’s formulation, compassion is a terrible political guide.

Not because suffering isn’t real—but because it can’t be organized into stable institutions. You can relieve hunger. You cannot found freedom on pity.

Why revolutions radicalize

This is where On Revolution becomes eerily contemporary.

Arendt shows how revolutions tend to slide from political action into moral absolutism. Once a movement defines itself as the voice of “the people,” anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy of humanity itself. Violence becomes justified. Due process evaporates. The revolution must keep purifying itself to remain “true.”

That logic did not die in 1794. It is alive in every movement that substitutes "moral righteousness for political construction."

Arendt is not saying people shouldn’t care about injustice. She is saying that "you cannot build a republic out of rage, resentment, or suffering alone." Those are forces of destruction, not creation.

What the American founders understood—better than almost anyone before or since—is that politics is not primarily about justice in the abstract. It is about "creating a space where people can argue, act, compromise, and govern themselves without killing each other."

That space is fragile. It must be designed, protected, and institutionalized. Once it disappears, no amount of moral fervor can replace it.

The lost tradition of councils

One of the most fascinating parts of On Revolution is Arendt’s recovery of what she calls the “council tradition.” In almost every major revolution—American town halls, French sections, Russian soviets, Hungarian workers’ councils—ordinary people spontaneously create local bodies to govern themselves. These are moments of genuine political freedom: people speaking, voting, deliberating, acting together.

And then, almost without fail, (except in America) these councils are crushed—by parties, bureaucracies, or charismatic leaders.

Why? Because councils represent horizontal power, while modern politics is obsessed with vertical power: seizing the state, controlling the apparatus, winning elections, commanding the police and military. The councils threaten elites of every ideology because they distribute power too widely.

Arendt believed the greatest tragedy of modern revolutions is not that they fail—it’s that they destroy their own most democratic institutions in the process of “winning.”

That insight alone makes On Revolution worth reading in the 21st century.

Why Berkowitz is right

When Berkowitz calls this Arendt’s most important book for our time, he is pointing to something uncomfortable: we live in an age of permanent political agitation with very little political creation.

Everywhere you look, people are mobilized. Very few are building.  Social media creates movements without institutions. Outrage without constitutions. Protests without durable structures. Everyone feels morally outraged; almost no one is founding anything that can last.

Arendt would recognize this instantly. She would say we are drowning in liberation movements that cannot produce freedom. We are very good at tearing down. We are terrible at building a shared world.

On Revolution is not a book you read once and “get.” It is deeply critical of the modern left and deeply skeptical of the modern right. It admires the American founding while being merciless about its blind spots. It honors revolutionary courage while condemning revolutionary excess. And it is written with Arendt’s characteristic clarity: sentences that are lucid and full of insight, but often complex. 

[An aside:  I shared my enthusiasm for Arendt with a friend who is an Arendt skeptic.  There are a lot of Arendt critics who dislike her conclusions in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I had the book with me when we met for coffee. My friend opened the book randomly to the opening sentence of chapter 3, read it aloud and said, "What does that mean." It was 82 words with three dependent clauses. I stammered "I'll get back to you."]

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The hardest thing On Revolution asks us to accept is this: Freedom is boring.

Not in lived experience—but in structure. Freedom requires procedures, rules, institutions, compromise, and limits. It requires people to lose elections and accept it. It requires citizens to live with people they dislike. It requires slow, frustrating, incremental change. It requires grace. And as Arendt says explicitly, it requires forgiveness. 

Revolutionary passion, by contrast, feels alive. It feels pure. It feels righteous. And it burns itself out.

Arendt understood that if you want a society where people can keep acting together, you must give up the dream of moral perfection. You must choose a flawed, procedural, human republic over the intoxicating fantasy of total justice. That's why the woke left felt so wrong with its on line banishing of people. When the Trump right silences critics with death threats they are no better than the left.

In an age of endless crisis and constant mobilization, Hannah Arendt’s message is quietly radical: the goal is not to feel righteous—it is to build a world where freedom can endure.

Arendt might say we’re watching a classic revolutionary pathology play out in slow motion: movements replacing politics with moral crusade. When that happens, institutions stop being arenas for disagreement and start being treated as obstacles to righteousness. Courts, universities, media, legislatures—once they fail to deliver the “correct” outcome, they’re declared illegitimate. That’s how democratic organs get hollowed out from the inside.

You see it on both ends of the spectrum. One side tries to discredit elections, the other to delegitimize speech and process. Different flags, same impulse: “If you disagree, you don’t belong.” That’s exactly the move Arendt warned about—the moment when “the people” becomes a moral category rather than a political one.

The tragedy is that Americans are still surrounded by the very tools Arendt thought precious—local institutions, courts, assemblies, constitutional processes—but more and more activists treat those tools as corrupt by definition. They want purity, not procedures. That’s the road that leads away from freedom, even when it’s paved with good intentions.

Sadly, On Revolution predicts nothing good in the current situation in Iran.  The Jihadis that run the country have already murdered thousands. They could murder tens or hundreds of thousands and believe they are doing God's will. And if the mullahs fall whatever follows them will be more interested in power than freedom. 

 

Living on the Edge: Reading All of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger

Over the past fifteen months I read all six of Sebastian Junger’s books. I didn’t plan it as a project, but once it started it took on the coherence of one. It began in October 2024, when I heard Junger speak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference at Bard College. His talk focused on Tribe, but what stayed with me afterward—especially over lunch—was not any single argument, but his way of seeing the world. He spoke about danger, belonging, and the fragile structures that hold people together in crisis with the clarity of someone who had tested those ideas with his own body.

I had already seen Restrepo in 2010, the year I returned from Iraq. I watched it in a small theater in the Village with Jim Dao, then the New York Times’ war correspondent embedded with the 10th Mountain Division. Dao had encouraged me to see it, and he was right. The film didn’t feel like most war documentaries, which are shot from relative safety or filtered through official narratives. Junger and Tim Hetherington were in the middle of the firefights. The camera shook because bullets were flying. It was impossible not to feel that the filmmakers were risking their lives alongside the soldiers they were recording. Whoever in Army Public Affairs allowed that film to be released was either extraordinarily brave or quietly suicidal. Nothing in it was sanitized.

What struck me most at the time was how exposed Camp Restrepo was compared to my own deployment. I spent much of my Iraq tour on a large airbase. We had missile attacks, and we took badly aimed fire on night flights, but it was nothing like being in an isolated valley surrounded by hostile forces. The men at Restrepo were under threat every hour. When I later read War, Junger’s written account of that deployment, I gained a deeper understanding of the unit and of his own presence there. It only increased my respect for what he and Hetherington had done.

After the Arendt conference, I decided to begin with Tribe. It was the conceptual bridge between Restrepo and everything else Junger had written. I have known the comfort and intensity of belonging, and I also know how fleeting it can be. My best tank crew—the one I trained for months and that shot at the top of our battalion gunnery—fell apart within weeks. One man was reassigned. Another left the Army. Another went to a different unit. As Junger makes clear in both Tribe and Freedom, a tribe can be for life, or it can be for only as long as the mission lasts. Either way, while it exists, it feels more real than almost anything else.

Freedom extended that insight. It argues that human beings are built to endure danger, risk, and uncertainty, and that safety, while pleasant, can be psychologically corrosive. Junger’s stories of people choosing hardship over comfort made me rethink my own career, my own decisions to re-enlist and to seek out difficult environments. Comfort is not always the same as meaning.

Two of Junger’s books unexpectedly returned me to my childhood in the Boston suburbs. A Death in Belmont brought back the fear that hung over our neighborhoods during the era of the Boston Strangler. I was a kid then, but I remember how adults spoke in hushed tones, how doors were locked, how an invisible threat hovered over everyday life. Junger treated that story not just as true crime but as a social mystery, a way of examining how communities process terror.

The Perfect Storm did something similar through nature. Growing up near the Atlantic, I always knew the sea could turn deadly. I had seen nor’easters from shore. Junger turned that abstract danger into a gripping reality, showing how ordinary working men—fishermen just doing their jobs—could be swallowed by forces far beyond their control. Like Belmont, it is a book about how thin the line is between normal life and catastrophe.

Then there was In My Time of Dying. That book forced me to look again at my own near-death experiences. I have had two. One was an explosion that left me blind. The other was a racing crash that broke my neck and nine other bones. I faced mortality, but not in the prolonged, grinding way Junger did. His clarity about what it means to cross that threshold and come back from it is unlike anything I’ve read. It is not mystical. It is analytic, almost clinical, and because of that it is profoundly unsettling.

After finishing all six books, something shifted. I realized that, for all my brushes with danger, I had lived a comparatively sheltered life. Junger had gone farther—to the edge of war, to the edge of the sea, to the edge of his own biological existence—and then returned to tell the story with discipline and precision. He did not glamorize risk. He examined it.

Taken together, Junger’s books describe a world more dangerous than I experienced and more honest than most of what passes for contemporary nonfiction. He writes about soldiers under fire, fishermen in storms, families stalked by a serial killer, and a man dying on a hospital bed, but the subject is always the same: how human beings behave when the structures that protect them fall away. Reading him in sequence revealed a single, sustained inquiry into what it means to live on the edge of disaster—and how, sometimes, that is where life feels most real.

Sherlock Holmes, The Dog That Didn't Bark, and Protests in Iran

 

The phrase “The dog that didn’t bark” is one of my favorite metaphors from Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination.  In this case part of the 1892 Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."

In the story, a valuable racehorse disappears and its trainer is murdered. Inspector Gregory is puzzled because the watchdog in the stable made no noise during the crime. Holmes points out that this is exactly the key fact.

Here is the crucial exchange:

Gregory: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The implication:

The dog knew the intruder. If a stranger had come, the dog would have barked. Because it stayed silent, the culprit must have been someone familiar—an insider.

Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has become shorthand for:

An important absence — something that should have happened, but didn’t, and therefore reveals the truth.

The people of Iran have been protesting the tyrannical murderous Jihadi regime that runs their country for a month, at the cost of their lives. Yesterday 200 protesters were killed.  

Why are the campus protesters who were out in the street in support of Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters since October 7, 2023, not out in support of the people of Iran?  

Where were those campus protestors when the Iranian people strove for freedom in 2022? In 2009?  

No Jews, no news. 

The people who chant "Globalize the Intifada" in America and are silent about Iran are showing how much they care about the suffering of Islamic people.  

They don't, unless they can blame the Jews.

While protesters in Iran were slaughtered by security forces, the pro-terrorist Jew haters were on the street in Manhattan chanting: 

"There is only one solution; Intifada, Revolution!" "Death to the IDF" and "Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here."

George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

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A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

My Books of 2025: A Baker's Dozen of Fiction. Half by Nobel Laureates

 

The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story.