Hannah Arendt, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The French Revolution failed as a political revolution because the social question — the politics of poverty, of bread, of the misery of the masses — pulled the revolutionary movement toward the abdication of freedom before necessity.12 Robespierre's pity for the suffering masses, transmuted into the political principle of the Terror, is the case in which what should have been the foundation of public freedom became instead the politics of necessity.
Where the politics of necessity rules, freedom — the activity of beginning something new together, the constitution of a public space of appearance — cannot be founded. The American Revolution succeeded where the French failed because the social question did not intrude into the political agenda: the founding fathers could attend to the constitutio libertatis, the foundation of public freedom in lasting institutions, because they were not distracted by the demand to feed the hungry.
The American case casts the longer shadow of slavery, which is the social question that the founders did not address and the country has not yet finished addressing. The analytical claim is not that poverty does not matter or that the suffering of the poor is politically irrelevant; the claim is that the politics of necessity and the politics of freedom are different activities, and that the revolutionary tradition's repeated collapse of the second into the first is the central reason why the lost treasure of the modern revolutionary tradition — the council system, recovered in the sections on the Hungarian Revolution — has not become a political institution that endures.34
For technical means in the fight against poverty can be handled in complete political neutrality; they need not interfere with political developments one way or the other. The wreckage of freedom on the rock of necessity, which we have witnessed over and over again since Robespierre introduced his "despotism of liberty," is no longer unavoidable.Revolution and Freedom, a Lecture, p. 378
Once this necessity appeared in public, embodied in the sufferings of the immense majority of the population, it was found that there was no greater force on earth. Hence, in the words of the French Revolution, les malheureux sont la puissance de la terre.Revolution and Freedom, a Lecture, pp. 373–374
And though the rage of impotence eventually sent the Revolution to its doom, it is true that suffering, once it is transformed into rage, can release overwhelming forces.On Revolution, p. 108
My point here is not merely the truism (theoretically interesting enough) that liberation is the prerequisite of freedom and hence entirely different from it, but the practical truth that liberation, and especially liberation from necessity, always takes precedence over the building of freedom because of the urgency inherent in necessity.The Cold War and the West, pp. 276–277
On Revolution is the least-read and most-misread of the major books. The standing critique from the Marxist and progressive left treats the social-question argument as a moral indifference to the suffering of the poor or as a complicity with the order that produces them. The historians charge that the contrast between the two revolutions rests on a sanitization of the American case — that American chattel slavery, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the structural poverty of the early republic were the conditions of possibility for the founders' freedom from the social question, not its absence. The contemporary critical-race readings (Robert Nichols's Theft Is Property! among others) press this charge into the conceptual structure of the contrast. Canovan's A Reinterpretation Chapter 6 defends the council-tradition reading and the lost-treasure thesis; Kateb defends the analytical claim against the moral-indifference charge; Sheldon Wolin's reception is sympathetic on the council material but critical of the freedom/necessity distinction. The book's stature has grown slowly: the Hungarian-Revolution material that ended Chapter 6, the lost treasure image, and the analysis of the council tradition have made On Revolution the touchstone for participatory-democratic thought from the 1968 generation forward, even where the social-question argument has been resisted.