“The difficulty here is that revolution as we know it in the modern age has always been concerned with both liberation and freedom.” Why is the difference between liberation and freedom so important for Arendt?

In On Revolution, Arendt examines a critical difference between liberty and freedom. She defines liberty negatively within a contextual reference of an established state. Specifically, liberty is concerned with the extent to which individuals can exercise their civil rights, and the condition under which they are protected from a [limited] government. Freedom, on the other hand, is a positive notion of increasing the public sphere in which one can exercise their civil rights through participation in politics. Her work focuses on analyzing the principle differences behind the concept of liberty and freedom by identifying the source origin and the consequent differences in the progression of the French Revolution and the American Revolution. From a political theory standpoint, the fundamental principle that drove the French and American Revolutions consequently led to different political results. This is a direct consequence of her thesis that the beginning and principle are coeval, which Arendt argues is important in understanding the distinction between freedom and liberty, from which the French and American revolutions are used as examples to illustrate this distinction.
Arendt begins with the concept that revolutions are “the only political events which confronts us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” The conceptual difference between liberty and freedom is examined after first establishing the fact that a revolution, rather than a revolt, implies a radical reform of existing institutions. The catalytic force behind the French Revolution was more economic than political. Born out of economic motivation, the French Revolution, which was the final product of brewing unrest, quickly overthrew the existing figure of authority. The American Revolution, born out of the human faculty to reason politically that “to be free is not merely to be unobstructed; it is to take positive action with others,” addressed the question where the civil rights accorded to the English people did not necessarily extend over to the citizens of its colonies. In the American Revolution, the pre-revolution element was the product of intellectual mediation that manifested into a revolution against the British establishment.
In this respect, Arendt points out why freedom is a positive concept. The power derived from the community, through intellect and political discourse, laid the foundation on which to develop their ideals. This beginning principle can be traced to the Mayflower compact from which freedom is identified as the power of individuals resting on the existence of cooperation. Thus, the beginning principle necessarily influenced subsequent political dialectics that illuminated the flaws found in the pre-revolution establishment. It provided a common ground on which the American revolutionists were able to promote political activity that is grounded on mutual understanding and mutual pledges. They valued it not because it may lead to agreement or to a shared conception of the good, but because it enables each citizen to exercise his or her civil rights.
On the other hand, Arendt argues that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative. The French revolutionists, in framing the economic exploitation of the proletarians into a ruling class, believed that they could justify and pretend that economic motivations were equivalent to political motivations. What the revolutionaries were actually seeking was emancipation from the political institutions that had condemned the poor in poverty, not freedom, as this emancipation was driven largely out of necessity more than anything else. For this reason Arendt disagrees and criticizes Marx’s claim that “poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.” The first outbreak of the French Revolution merely enabled the social question play a revolutionary role in destabilizing the old authority.
Through the notion of revolution as a means of achieving political ends, Arendt also demonstrates how the concept of liberty and freedom dictated the course of the revolution. In the French revolution, the desire and necessity for liberty initiated the radical, swift movement at the outbreak of the revolution. However, infused with the pre-revolution thought that the shift in power was approaching, the revolutionists proceeded to accomplish the displacement of feudalism and monarchy through violence, used in lieu of power. This critical fact underlies Arendt’s conclusion that the French revolutionists distorted the notion of liberty by forcing “The inescapable fact that liberation from tyranny spelled freedom only for the few and was hardly felt by the many who remained loaded down by their misery” . Thus, the social question (extricating the poor from poverty) was never given full attention because the revolutionists were confronted with the next problem: “the task of foundation and the task of lawgiving, of devising and imposing upon men a new authority.”
The notion of liberty was gravely misconstrued by the French revolutionists because they did not realize that what they were seeking was not political freedom but protection from the arbitrary exercise of power by the existing institution against them. Given their lack of competence, the revolutionists resorted to the Machiavellian notion of “appeal to high Heaven”, which was “not inspired by any religious feelings but exclusively dictated by the wish ‘to escape this difficulty’”. Emphasizing on the thesis that the beginning and principle are coeval, Arendt further shows how the French Revolution later evolved into tyranny, ironically reverting back to the old regime.
In fact, the French revolutionaries lost their legitimacy as soon as they equated power with violence, because “freedom and power have parted company, and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.” The underlying principle on which the French revolutionists built their campaign was flawed. Theoretically speaking, they had “attempt to derive both law and power from the selfsame source.” Not only did they proceed from the notion that they were seeking political freedom instead of liberty, the French revolutionists also attempted to justify their cause which had morphed into some other less relevant cause. The thesis that the beginning and principle are coeval had revealed the misconception of liberty on the French revolutionaries’ part, as well as the perversion of political ideals in the further stages of development of the French Revolution.
In an indirect way, Arendt argues that freedom is not about removing government, but constructing a new one from basic principles, which the American revolutionists understood perfectly. The French revolutionists, not knowing the distinction between violence and power, and “convinced that all power must come from the people,” necessarily threw themselves into a state of nature whereby attempts to establish freedom were confronted with the problem of justifying the use of violence. Since the poor had used an unconstitutional means to overthrow the existing government, they were confronted with the question of what exactly is the end of revolution and what exactly constitutes a revolutionary government. Borrowing a quote from Robespierre: “under constitutional rule it is almost enough to protect the individuals against the abuses of public power” Arendt uses this observation to highlight why liberty is not only negative, but that liberation seeks only to protect the individual from further arbitrary exercise of power.
Another distinction between a revolution striving for freedom and a revolution striving for liberation is the understanding of where power resides. In the American Revolution, people were organized in self-governing bodies and had respected the faculties of speech and freedom, which they did not throw into the state of nature. As Arendt explains, the founding fathers behind the American Revolution understood power as the opposite of “pre-political natural violence.” Unlike the French proletariats who failed to grasp the idea of real power, which “rested on reciprocity and mutuality,” the American revolutionists understood that power in a covenant made it legitimate because it could not be usurped. In contrast, while the French revolution banished the so-called power of kings, princes, or aristocrats with ease (power that was “spurious and usurped”), they failed to recognize how to establish real power that would unite the common people. For Arendt, this was the crucial point the French revolutionists missed and that would have successfully consolidated the confidence of the rising proletarian class. It is the same confidence that they were seeking for in their real political goal for liberation.
Arendt demonstrates that this distinction is critical in understanding where power is derived from. The men of the American Revolution understood by power the very opposite of a pre-political natural violence. To them, power came into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges; only such power was legitimate. The unconstitutional use of violence in the French Revolution, which succeeded in sweeping away the old regime, also silenced the intellectual voice for an institution that would ensure liberty. As Arendt succinctly observes, “violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. ” In condemning the intellectual voice that would have act as political guidance on the discourse of the revolution, the French revolutionists also banished any hopes of political enlightenment. Underlying this explanation is the idea that “nothing seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows.” The French revolutionists, comprised of the poor, never had relevant experiences in government and were not in the position to set up a government. The American revolutionists, having already envisioned the new kind of government that they want to establish, knew exactly the appropriate kind of foundation on which they could expand and maintain political freedom.
The primary distinction between political liberty and political freedom is that the former is more directly relevant to answering a social question based on economic inequality, whereas the latter is directly concerned with increasing what Arendt terms as “public happiness” or the citizen’s right to participate in the public or political realm. She continues to elaborate why the American revolutionists have rightfully understood the concept in equating political freedom with happiness:
“The very fact that the word ‘happiness’ was chosen in laying claim to a share in public power indicates strongly that there existed in the country, prior to the revolution, such a thing as ‘public happiness’, and that men knew they could not be altogether ‘happy’ if their happiness was located and enjoyed only in private life.”
Reiterating the thesis that the beginning and principle are coeval, Arendt shows how each revolution, in defining the political objective, necessarily associated different qualities to different ideals. The American revolutionaries equated political freedom with happiness, which was then regarded as a legitimate objective of the government. Beginning from this idea, they were able to use their concept of freedom as a guiding principle in drafting the first constitution. Hence, under a new political system, the role of the government is defined as “promot[ing] the happiness of society” . Endowed with this particular political enlightenment, the concept of freedom was reinforced with the basic pre-revolutionary principles, that of expanding civil rights and political discourse.
The intention of liberating oneself from a totalitarian government is not the same as the desire for greater political freedom. “The meaning of revolution – confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” – and Arendt clarifies the meaning of violence, which she criticizes as traditionally associated with revolutions. In underpinning the distinction between liberty and freedom, Arendt successfully shows the consequent error that the French revolutionists had committed as the revolution progressed based on a misunderstanding of the revolution. Liberation may be a condition of freedom, but it by no means can automatically lead to more freedom. At the same time, Arendt demonstrates how the emphasis on the social question disappeared because by forcing Rousseau’s notion of the General Will, which became an axiomatic principle that drove the subsequent events of the French Revolution, as “the theoretical substitute for the sovereign will of an absolute monarch.” Liberty is a condition for freedom, because it facilitates the establishment of a new political way of life, although it does not certainly lead to more freedom. In light of her thesis on beginning and principle as coeval, Arendt argues that in the event of revolutions, both in turn serve to illuminate the political foundation and the beginnings of political establishments.