Tradition, memory and revolution. Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt facing the revolutionary past.

This article aims to reflect on the role of tradition, memory and revolution through the work of Benjamin and Arendt. To this end, I begin with Benjamin's position in dialogue with Marx and other nineteenth-century revolutionaries in order to delve into the importance of memory for the present and the future. Arendt's thought is then analyzed in order to reflect on the revolutionary tradition, on the revolutionary use of the classical tradition during the American Revolution and on the forgotten republic of councils in the revolutionary tradition. Both thinkers propose to incorporate the questions of tradition and memory into the present, but in such a way as not to fall into traditionalist or fetishistic attitudes.