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The Joy of Politics. Revolution was happily different in the U.S., writes Arendt, because America was free of the mass poverty that corrupted European revolutions. The Negro slaves, to be sure, were impoverished; but at that time they were not considered people and so aroused no compassion. "It is as though the American Revolution was achieved in a kind of ivory tower into which the fearful spectacle of human misery, the haunting voices of abject poverty, never penetrated." Without the masses running amuck in the streets, the Founding Fathers were able to concentrate brilliantly on political freedom and to establish it permanently.
Hannah Arendt is best as historical analyst; her discussion of revolution is occasionally worthy of the Founding Fathers themselves. But as political scientist, she suffers from creeping perfectionism. She complains that even the American Revolution ultimately failed because Americans lost interest in their political condition in order to pursue their private gain. As she sees it, the U.S. citizen has too much affluence and too little civic concern. People should be fully and joyously participating in politics, as the Greeks once did in their city-states or the early American colonists in their town meetings.
But Hannah Arendt's prescription for the good society is not very relevant to a mass society. At the time of the Ameri can Revolution, the U.S. population was 4,000,000, and the electorate a mere 6% of that. In today's complex industrial society, politics is a fulltime, demanding job. Most of the U.S.'s 187 million busy citizens are willing—and occasionally even grateful—to delegate day-to-day political decisions to the politicians, whom they can unseat at election time.
The American Revolution managed to establish and maintain a state of liberty in which a common citizen can usually make himself felt politically if he tries. Most revolutions, as Hannah Arendt points out, have not.