Errant Arendt

Professor Arendt places great emphasis on the ‘natural wealth’ of America. Its presence before the Revolution allowed for a prosperity and equality unheard of in the Old World, and thus laid the cornerstones of the success of the American revolution—its lack of social upheaval. The ‘social question’ needn’t ever be raised; no screaming crowd of enragés or sans-cullottes demanded radical reforms; the goals of fraternité and egalité were pre-existing conditions, leaving the founders only the task of establishing liberty. After the revolution, it was this natural wealth which allowed the American style of unbridled capitalism to work; according to Arendt, the only place in the world where it has done so without creating widespread misery and inequality.

A lovely idea. It seems to be the descendant of good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, of the most messianic kind, wherein America, uniquely blessed by God among nations, becomes a city on the hill destined to shine forth enlightenment to all other nations. It has the lovely property of reducing the whole of American history to one natural pre-existing condition, for which no one can take credit or be blamed, and about which nothing can be done.

It also has the interesting convenience of completely ignoring the over one third of the American population which was, at the time of the Revolution and for 87 years afterward, enslaved. A country where millions lived in utter depravity hardly seems like a land of utter equality to me. Arendt acknowledges this, justifying the exclusion of the slaves from her analysis because they were likewise excluded from the founders’ and the European intellectuals’ analysis. This is not exactly true—from Edmund Burke to Thomas Jefferson, many of the leading intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic not only acknowledged but wrote extensively on slavery in America. It is true, however, that on the whole these intellectuals conceived of America as a land of equality and opportunity for white people, and viewed that as a positive well worth any negatives from slavery.

However, this last does not amount to a wholesale bypassing of the issue of slavery; instead, it raises slavery to the chief element of American prosperity, the flip side of American equality. Thirty years of studies since Arendt have acknowledged this, have written (I’m thinking here of the works of Toni Morrison, Winthrop Jordan, Davis Byron Davis, etc) about how American freedom and equality, both its conceptualization and its actual existence, could never have existed without its constituting other, slavery.

Perhaps we can forgive Arendt for ignoring this issue. She was certainly not the only one at the time to do so. But does anything remain of her ‘natural wealth’ thesis?

In the end, not much. If she was talking about natural resources, its true that the lands which constitute present day America nicely outfitted for industrial and agricultural ventures. But Europe is not exactly a stagnant wasteland in that regard. If her comparison is more about the more favorable ratio of people to resources in uncrowded America than in overpopulated Europe, then her point is more valid, but many other countries in the Americas—Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, among others—are comparably full of natural resources and, in the 18^th century, comparably uncrowded in comparison with the Old World, but not comparatively wealthy. The United States did have a more orderly and streamlined system for the exploitation of its resources, but that seems more the result of governance rather than the cause for the revolution which created this government.

The fact remains, however, that the American Revolution was never hijacked by the wretched masses, as was the French. This fundamental difference between the two remains, though not as rigidly as Arendt describes—the Whiskey Rebellion in the Constitution’s aftermath is but one example of the deep regional and social divisions between segments of the new society. Partly, this was due to the lack of enormous masses of miserable peasants. But mostly, it was because the American misery had been cordoned off to a specific section of the population, branded as distinctly other and controlled through and institutionalized system of violence and exploitation. The American founders could ignore the destabilizing demands of the hungry stomachs because these stomachs had had their tongues cut off. That is the true story of our successful revolution.