Our recent realisation of the vulnerability to domination inherent in our depoliticised society prompts, for Arendt, a search for examples, albeit fleeting ones, where the modern age has seen a re-emergence of freedom. In a context where we do not appear to be able to generate a reliable forum in which freedom can be enacted, where the extraordinary can arise consistently in the ordinary course of things, we need to look to the rare events that mark an upsurge of the authentic capacity for action. We may find these, she thinks, in the distinctively modern phenomenon of revolution: revolutions are ‘amongst the most recent of all political data’ (Arendt 1973: 12). This suggests that a study of revolution will be of value in shedding light on our current situation; and its more particular relevance, for Arendt, lies in the fact that it illuminates a problem which has never revealed its pertinence more acutely than it has now – the problem, politically speaking, of enacting something entirely new, of creating something out of nothing. This is the problem that has turned out to be at the heart of the political.

The approach that Arendt takes to this study is historical and comparative; but, in keeping with the tendency that we have noted consistently, it is hardly conventional. The historical dimension to On Revolution is mediated by a concern with the novel experience of the present: