On Revolution

By Hannah Arendt

Arendt has a discursive style that I find hard to stay engaged, so I only made it through the first four chapter.

Chapter 1: The Meaning of Revolution

Establishes a working definition of revolution on which to ground the rest of the essay. This can be a bit tricky since the word itself (or some variant thereof which we translate into modern english as “revolution”) has been around for centuries, millennia even, and can refer to events of a vastly different character and purpose.

Arendt in fact argues that the term revolution as it was used prior tp the 18th century was diametrically opposed to the modern concept of revolution. As it was used then, it connoted a restoration to a previous (usually implicitly more “natural” or “just” order). So in effect it was used to imply a return to an old way or order.

Arendt moots, in contrast, a new definition where a revolution must have a two animating principles:

1. It must be motivated by a desire for freedom by an oppressed people
2. It must be seeking to bring some novel political order into existence.

The second point is the key element which is often missing from pre-18th century uprisings which we usually call revolutions (the Glorious Revolution in 17th century Britain for example). To wuote Arendt:

Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.

Chapter 2: The Social Question

Thus far in the essay there is a running comparison between the two “templates” of modern revolution: The American Revolution and the French Revolution. Both are in a sense motivated from the same basic impetus (and the French Revolution is obviously deeply motivated and influence by the American Revolution which preceded it by a couple of decades)

This chapter indulges in a long and discursive discussion on Rousseau's philosophical views on how “the people” can have a unified will, providing in a sense the conceptual grounding for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as it were. I'm not sure I entirely followed how this is tied to the underlying thesis (or for that matter, what Robespierre's obsession with hypocrisy has to do with the underlying thesis), but I the gist of it, to me at least is that there was a very crucial difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution in that revolutionaries in France were forced to reckon with the misery and poverty of the French underclass in Paris. As such, they tried to solve “the social problem” of an unequal and unjust society in which the poor masses suffer unbearably.

Arendt argues that the desire of solving the social problem is in effect why the French Revolution (and many revolution after that looked much like the French Revolution) failed. The American Revolution, on the other hand, was more focused on theory and principles of governance which are ultimately much more tractable goals.

Chapter 3: The Pursuit of Happiness

In many ways, this is a reconceptualization of the previous chapter on how the French Revolution failed because it tried to solve the “social question” of mass suffering among the poor.

The framing is around a divergent focus of the French vs. American revolution that was present in embryonic form from the very beginning despite the initiators of both revolutions coming out of a broadly similar intellectual and philosophical tradition. Ardent draws a contrast between “public freedom, ” in the French case, and “public happiness,” in the American case. Public freedom, an animating phrase among the French revolutionaries, is said to be a passion or taste, a desire to be left alone in our private affairs from interference by the state. Public happiness, on the other hand is fundamentally an experience. It is the act of engaging in civic discourse, the act of participating in one’s own government.

This turns out to be a very important distinction. Elevating public happiness (or the ability for citizens to engage in the conduct of government) focuses the revolutionary effort on building a system of government that is participatory. It privileges constitution building as the highest revolutionary priority and, as such, allows the revolution to actually succeed in establishing a new government and effectively ending the revolution _without extinguishing the revolutionary spirit. _

Focusing on public freedom is much more problematic because it tends to bog the revolution down in the “social question.” As Arendt has already established, that is the rock on which the ship of revolution inevitably crashes.

Chapter 4: Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis

In this chapter, Arendt turns her focus to how constitutions form the basis of government and, once again, what the distinction is between “successful” revolutions (such as the American revolution) and “unsuccessful” revolutions such as the French revolution.

One important distinction that she makes is to reorient us away from thinking of constitutions as limiting the legitimate powers of governments and towards thinking of constitutions as creating a new power that must itself be constituted in such a way to prevent the limiting of individual liberties. The basic intuition is fairly simple, that the enumeration of rights in a constitutional document is meaningless if the actually existing power structures do not pay attention to them.

So then the distinction is a kind of historicist claim that the difference between the American and French (and later Russian) revolutions is that the American revolution was overthrowing an already limited, constitutional monarchy whereas the French and Russians were overthrowing absolute monarchies. Basically, the revolutionary government resembles the government that it overthrows and since the American colonies already had a long history of formal and informal institutions rooted in democratic governance and confederation (or fractal localism as Nassim Taleb likes to call it), they ended up with a constitutional order with a similar structure.

Range

By David Epstein

David Epstein, sports writer and author of The Sports Gene (also highly recommended), makes an extended argument against hyper-specialization.

Epstein frames the argument in the introduction by comparing the cases of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Tiger is in many ways the paradigmatic example of the benefits of hyper focusing early in life. He famously was playing golf by age 2 and went on the become the worlds greatest golfer. Federer, in contrast, samples from a number of sports in his early life and only specialized in tennis somewhere reluctantly at a (relatively) older age.

The argument in a nutshell, is that we intuitively think of the Tiger model as having a clear advantage but in reality the Federer model has a higher chance of success. Empirically, athletes who go on to compete at the elite level actually focus less at an early age than their peers who do not go on to become elite. At some point they do actually end up focusing more but in early life they tend to instead sample from a broader range of activities and sports.

Outside of sports, the case is even clearer. Science in particular is prone to have breakthroughs made by practitioners who are not necessarily hyper specialized, but can integrate information from multiple fields into new breakthroughs and ways of thinking about problems.

Stepping back from specific examples and anecdotes, I think the conceptual framework that Epstein is trying to construct relies on a handful of broad principles:

1. Exposing yourself to a broad range of information and activities leads to more robust learning and inference abilities.
2. The more “kind” a learning environment, the more specialization makes sense. Sports are generally a very kind learning environments so early specialization is probably appropriate, but only up to a point.
3. Most real world environments are wicked instead of kind, so hyper-specialization may be counter-productive period.
4. Being a generalist is a high variance strategy. It is rational for a person to hyper-specialize because it in many cases it is low variance and has a better expected outcome but in aggregate everyone pursuing low variance strategies is bad.

The interesting question that Epstein ultimately doesn’t really answer is what is the optimal level of specialization. Many of the anecdotes of successful people with range are actually quite specialized. They are just less specialized relative to their peers. And obviously, there is some level of specialization that is useful even if it is a level of specialization in multiple fields. Moreover, it’s easy to point to a doctor or medical researcher who is hyper focused on some very particular type of cell or biochemical process and see that they have over-specialized, but what about the median person in society? Is it the case the they should be, on the margin, more specialized? Less? I’m not sure after reading this book I’m really in a position to answer.