Description
It was noted in the wake of the Arab Spring that the absence of social revolution as a horizon of collective mobilisation is both puzzling and urgent. Its demise has nevertheless been celebrated by liberals as the end of the “modern myth” of revolution birthed in the French and articulated by Marx. This judgement is influenced by the philosophy of Arendt, which establishes several antinomies to assess the normative quality of revolutions, including the bifurcation of political and social revolution, agency and structure, and as events and processes. Her philosophy has traction with diverse scholars and policymakers, from critical theorists, Cold War liberals, to Straussian neoconservatives, and has been endorsed by revolution scholars for evaluating the emancipatory ethos of revolutions hitherto underemphasised in empirical studies.
This paper challenges these positions by demonstrating that Arendt’s antinomies are empirically unsound, politically debilitating, and normatively untenable. It argues that we must look elsewhere for a humanis framework adequate for the twenty-first century, such as that found in Hegel and Marx. Their dialectical approaches to revolution can help overcome Arendt’s antinomies and inspire a genuinely emancipatory perspective that is more attuned to contemporary political realities and consonant with pioneering relational and processual sociologies in IR.
