Reading Group 'On Revolution': Session 2

Reading Group ‘On Revolution’: Session 2

The next session of our reading group of Hannah Arendt’s ‘On Revolution’ will be this Wednesday on 19:30. We will discuss the first chapter of the book.

For those who don’t have the book yet, here is a PDF version.

All revolutions deal with liberation and freedom, and many ideological conflicts arise from clashes between different ideas about what constitutes “true freedom”. Arendt touches on this in Chapter 1. We would like to compare her analysis to the way the debate about freedom is often framed in today’s mainstream liberal discourse – as a clash between negative and positive freedom.

Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ introduced these terms, and outlines the tensions very well, so we picked it as this session’s supplementary text.

If you’re short on time but still want to prepare for the discussion, you can read the summary on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead.

Happy reading, and see you on Wednesday!

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