Power & Revolution

Seven steps into the question beneath all the others: what is politics, what is power — and what is it for?

A course on the thought of Political Philosophy.

What you will learn

  • Distinguish the three activities of the vita activa — labor (necessity), work (the durable world), action (the political) — and why action is unique.
  • State the conditions of action: plurality (men, not Man) and natality (the capacity to begin).
  • Explain the rise of 'the social' and the opening tension: whether politics can be about bread, or whether the social question devours freedom — the bridge from Course 4.
  • State the autonomy of the political: why political action has its own excellence (virtù), not reducible to private or Christian morality.
  • Explain the founder: why founding is an act done alone but for the common good, judged by the world it builds (Romulus excused by the result).
  • Run 'learn to be able not to be good': why the political actor cannot keep his hands clean, and how this differs from mere wickedness.
  • State the definitions: power as acting in concert (belonging to a group, an end in itself) vs violence as instrumental (needing implements, justified by ends).
  • Explain why power and violence are opposites — and why tyranny is the most violent and least powerful of governments.

Course outline

  1. What Politics Is — The frame for the whole course: the three activities of the active life — labor, work, action — and why ACTION, the speech and deed among plural equals, is the properly political one; plurality and…
  2. The Realm of Its Own, and the Founder — Machiavelli's discovery that the political is a realm with its own logic and its own excellence — virtù, irreducible to private or Christian morality — and the founder who, to bring a lasting free…
  3. Power and Violence — Arendt severs two words the whole tradition fused: power is the human ability to act in concert, springing up between people and lasting only while they hold together — an end in itself; violence is…
  4. Revolution and the Social Question — Marx's answer and the course's live antagonism: revolution as the engine of history, the proletariat as the universal class, the violent expropriation of the expropriators — and the insistence…
  5. The Conservative Answer — Burke against revolution itself: society as a partnership across the generations of the living, the dead, and the unborn; the inherited wisdom of prejudice and prescription against the abstract…
  6. Totalitarianism and the Banality of Evil — Arendt on the century's novel horror: totalitarianism not as a harsher tyranny but as a new form of rule that atomizes individuals, makes them superfluous, and aims to destroy spontaneity itself…
  7. Power Everywhere, and What Politics Is For — Foucault's challenge — that power is not held at the apex but exercised from everywhere, productive and capillary, the administration of life itself — and then Arendt's closing verdict: the lost…

Works read in this course

  • The Human Condition — Arendt (1958): the vita activa — labor, work, action — plurality, natality, and the rise of the social
  • On Violence — Arendt (1970): the severing of power from violence — power as acting in concert, violence as mere instrument
  • On Revolution — Arendt (1963): liberation vs freedom; the American and French revolutions; the lost treasure of the councils
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism / Eichmann in Jerusalem — Arendt (1951, 1963): totalitarianism as a novel form; the banality of evil
  • The Prince / Discourses on Livy — Machiavelli: the political as its own realm, virtù, the founder who must learn 'not to be good'
  • The Civil War in France / Capital — Marx: revolution, the expropriation of the expropriators, the social question at the centre of politics
  • Reflections on the Revolution in France — Burke (1790): society as a partnership across generations; the danger of the wiped slate
  • The History of Sexuality, Vol. I — Foucault (1976): power as productive and capillary, everywhere; biopower; where there is power, there is resistance

Terms introduced

vita activa, labor, work, action, plurality, natality, the social, the political, power, violence, liberation, freedom, the lost treasure, totalitarianism, the banality of evil, virtù

Part of the Simposeum course library.