Abstract
This paper explores the theoretical positions of Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse on revolution and the issue of social and political change. A close reading of their main writings and of a selection of posthumously published materials like conferences, discussions, drafts, and letters, testifies that their reflections on revolution must be read as a “dialogue” with the experience of the October Revolution. These thinkers offer a comprehensive analysis of the reasons for the failure of the first successful revolution of the twentieth century to bring about social justice, equality and freedom, on the one hand, by considering the empirical conditions in which the seizure of power occurred, and those which determined the subsequent development of the Soviet state, on the other hand, by considering the role of theory and the weight of ideology whose roots are to be found in Marxian, Marxist and Leninist precepts and ideas. The first part of this chapter will be devoted to these diagnoses. The shadow of October obviously hangs over Arendt’s, Adorno’s, and Marcuse’s pondering of the prospects for revolution. They had to base their thinking on new empirical and theoretical bases in order to avoid the pitfall of October. However, this historical experience was not devoid of inspiring elements, which they borrowed and reshaped after their own fashion. The second section of this paper will explore these conceptions of revolution, which remain enlightening today.
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Notes
- 1.
Because “Germany’s situation could hardly have been worse after a revolution than under Nazi rule,” he added with irony (Horkheimer 1972: 164).
- 2.
None of these thinkers viewed the founding of the German Democratic Republic, which was a Communist-styled regime, as the fulfilment of the emancipatory promises of the German Revolution in any way. The GDR’s regime counts among those which Adorno denounced for being repressive, such as the soviet-styled regimes in the East (Adorno 1965: 79; 1966: 53).
- 3.
One-party dictatorships are not totalitarian in themselves, but they are a fertile ground for totalitarianism (Arendt 1953a: 392; 1968: 379). Russia became totalitarian under Stalin’s rule following the Moscow Trials (Arendt 1954: 34), and it remained so at the time of the Cold War (Arendt 1958b: 5).
- 4.
Arendt pretends that she does not conflate Marx’s thought with Marxism, underlining, for example, that it was Marxism, rather than the former, which degenerated into ideology (Arendt 2002: 276, 278), but in fact, she often treats them as a single set of ideas.
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Lavallée, MJ. (2020). October and the Prospects for Revolution: The Views of Arendt, Adorno, and Marcuse. In: Telios, T., Thomä, D., Schmid, U. (eds) The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14237-7_10
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