Yes, I feel similarly as dragonwriter...Arendt seems to be over-generalizing about revolution. Revolution is only a term, which has constantly been linked to t

Yes, I feel similarly as dragonwriter...Arendt seems to be over-generalizing about revolution. Revolution is only a term, which has constantly been linked to the collective act of overthrowing the current government and establishing a new one. The thing is, I feel we should not confine our thoughts to the term "revolution" itself -- different people are definitely going to have different concepts about this term, even after it has been "precisely" described in some authoritative dictionary or encyclopedia; but rather, we should focus on the purpose of this term (i.e. its pragmatics), with all its ambiguities, which I think we could roughly state as "to have an government, whether an existent one or a totally new one, that could satisfy the needs of the revolutionaries -- or more often, the needs of the leaders of the revolutionary masses, and not the revolutionary masses themselves". Many governments, in history or for the current time being, would often like to call themselves revolutionary government, be it North Korea, People's Republic of China, USSR, or Libya during 1977 - 2011; and their military forces of the revolution are often called, "people's army" or "army of liberation / salvation". But what is revolution, what is freedom, and what is people, all those concepts only exist in the mind of the leaders of those revolutions, and often not as a result of a collective desire as they are expressed by the masses living those countries -- and as a matter of fact, the existence of this "general will" itself is quite debatable. One feasible solution of having a government that could be sure to benefit for every person living in the country -- if that is possible -- is a government that operates based on a set of universal rules and universal values. ("universal" as in the sense that it is applicable -- but not necessarily mentally accepted -- to every one; in short, "universal" is roughly in the same sense as the golden rule of ethics, as well as Kant's "categorical imperative".) In summary, revolution, for the purpose of revolution or for the purpose of freedom, is meaningless if we do not have a concrete and practical grasp of what "freedom" is and what exactly the revolutionaries want to achieve (i.e. a pragmatic purpose). And in this view, perhaps we should not simply categorize the events of "American Revolution" (1765) or "French Revolution" (1789) as revolution, but simply as those events themselves -- and as a matter of fact, the success of either the "American Revolution" or the "French Revolution" is almost a miracle, and had their counters force acted a little differently (for instance, had Louis XVI acted a little more ruthlessly), they could very easily fail quite completely.