Hannah Arendt, in her illuminating book On Revolution (Viking, 1965), exalts the American Revolution as the most successful one and traces that success to the fact that «it occurred in a country that knew nothing of mass poverty and among a people who had a widespread experience of self - government;» She
says that one of the blessings in the American situation was that the revolution grew out of a conflict with a limited
monarchy, for «the more
absolute the ruler, the more
absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.»