Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt 9780812297942

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Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

VIOLENCE AND POWER IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT

Caroline Ashcroft

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5296-5

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. The Modern State and Its Problems

23

Chapter 2. The Jewish Army and the Reconstruction of a People

59

Chapter 3. The Polis and the Res Publica

84

Chapter 4. Revolutionary Politics and the Unleashing of the Social

107

Chapter 5. Political Violence in Modernity

133

Chapter 6. A Politics of Nonviolence?

161

Chapter 7. A Space for the Political

202

Notes

243

Bibliography

265

Index

271

Acknowledgments

277

INTRODUCTION

Questions of violence and politics are inextricable, and in modern political theory, figures from Thomas Hobbes to Max Weber have been touchstones for thinking about the relationship between political legitimacy, political fear, and political violence. The problems of who or what can claim the right to wield violence, what justifies or authorizes that right, and what limitations can be set on violent actions are in many respects foundational to thinking about politics. In the twentieth century, two world wars and the total and genocidal violence they engendered shaped thinking about power in profound ways. In addition, the precarious balance between nuclear powers that followed overshadowed political experience for decades, posing an existential threat of a kind that was unprecedented in human history. Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political theorists of the twentieth century to deal with the question of how to approach the role of violence in public life. Yet, despite the fact that this is perhaps the most pressing issue of her era, and that its implications are at the very center of her oeuvre, this theme has rarely been seriously tackled in the large body of scholarship on Arendt. The rise of Rawlsian liberalism as a predominant school of thought in late twentieth-century Anglo-American political thought, particularly in the post–Cold War world, has drawn the attention of many writers toward theories of “ideal” justice against which contemporary politics can be held to account, and away from themes of political violence and more typically realist political concerns. Hannah Arendt’s sustained meditation on these themes, giving rise to a body of original and controversial work, offers a route back to thinking about this issue in a way which is critical of what she billed “the tradition” of thinking on violence and the state, but which does not seek to evade the realities of violence. Her work is a critical reflection on the practices of modern, sovereign politics, but she also asks how we might positively constitute a better kind of politics, and how we ought to understand what that sort of politics might

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look like. She asks how we might identify what is politically harmful, how we might reform the political accordingly, and how we can protect what is of value in our political world. In this vein, this book has two aims. First, it sets out to deepen our understanding of Arendt’s conception of the role of violence in her political theory. But it also seeks to use her work as a provocation to think about how we might engage with, build on, or criticize contemporary ideas of the political that have drawn on Arendtian themes— notably via the notion of “agonal” or “agonistic” politics as theorized in recent years by thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig—and how we can read Arendt in different ways to challenge or further our understanding of the political.1 Thinking through the problem of violence in her work, therefore, leads into the wider question of what politics is according to Arendt and the political theorists who take their cue from her work. Arendt has often been characterized as a thinker caught between past and present—a “reluctant modernist,” in Seyla Benhabib’s words—captivated by an idealized image of the Greek polis, in contrast to the traumatic political events of her own time, which she nevertheless found herself compelled to seek understanding of.2 There are evidently elements of truth in this characterization, not least her early enthusiasm for and training in classics; her swearing off of politics in disgust at the rapidly deteriorating situation of Germany in the 1930s; and most impor tant, her portrayal of the tradition of political thought since the ancient Greeks. What this phrase refers to is a perceived dominant thread of political philosophy as that has evolved— problematically—over the last two and a half thousand years. This tradition, connecting different iterations of Western political philosophy over this time, suffers from one original fault, Arendt believed, rooted in Plato’s work and its subsequent influence on Western thought. That defect was the Platonic prioritization of contemplation over action, abstract form over concrete realities, and the universal over the particular. This demoted political action from its formerly preeminent position in Greek politics and set in motion a growing disregard for the activity of politics. Yet it is for “the tradition” as that has developed since the beginning of the modern era that Arendt reserves her greatest criticism. In the development of the sovereign state, she identifies a second and more dramatic shift—a rejection of political freedom—in the claim that legitimate politics necessarily takes the shape of a command-obedience relationship between ruler and people, enforced through violence or the fear of violence. The principles of sovereignty, Arendt believed, exclude freedom from the political sphere in

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favor of private and strictly limited freedoms, while using violence as a means of enforcing and upholding control. As this idea developed and took hold in Western political thought, it became more and more dangerous to freedom, she suggests, motivating or enabling the emergence of increasingly alarming political practices and regimes.

Violence, Power, and the Political “The raison d’être of politics is freedom,” Arendt wrote, “and its field of experience is action.”3 Freedom is both the purpose and the foundation of politics, the “reason why men live together in political organization at all,” she asserts.4 The freedom she refers to is not an inner, individualized freedom from, but more exactly a “condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality.”5 Without this originary freedom, she argues, we would have no sense of freedom because we become aware of freedom only in and through our interactions with other people. This particular kind of freedom lies beneath her idea of “the political.” This slightly strange but characteristically Arendtian way of describing the political sphere is based on her claim that freedom must be understood as worldly reality. Politics is defined in spatial terms in Arendt’s work. The political is a space of action: the “field of experience” she refers to. This means if we are to understand politics, we must identify what happens in this space of action: its internal constitution or dynamic, but also what constitutes the limitations of this space—the borders of the political. Politics is a space of equality, and some limitations on action are necessary to ensure that equality is guaranteed or at least protected. At the same time, it is a free space of action, and therefore citizens must be able to speak and be heard within the political space. Only through this dialogical process can a people, via the sharing of perspectives, create the “common sense” necessary for their common world. Arendt’s idea of the political as a space of freedom is also a vision of politics driven by participation. We coexist in the world together—we are existentially plural—and any legitimate politics must realize this truth, she believes. Because of this participatory and pluralistic idea of political action, she argues that politics is driven forward through what she refers to as “power,” a mode of action which, in contrast with rule, is “action in concert.”6 Several major conflicts emerge from this idea of the political, however. Arendt’s politics is sometimes described as agonal, and she draws on the concept of the Greek agon in her claim that politics is the space in which

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Introduction

agents can express their freedom through conflict with one another. But she also utilizes the notion of power, as acting in concert, as the cohering force of political action. There is a significant ambiguity reflected in some very different interpretations of Arendt in the existing literature on the relationship between individualized, conflicting “action” and the consensusbased, participatory notion of “power.” How do these two forms of action interact in the political, since neither has clear priority? There are also questions over what kind of actions Arendt’s analysis might apply to. Is political action about doing politics, as individuals (whether conflicting or participatory) interact in the space of politics, or is political action also the making of politics, whether through law, war, or revolution? If we think about politics as a world or space, it would seem that the construction of that space is of central importance to politics. Yet Arendt seems conflicted on this question, sometimes leaning toward more constitutional understandings of politics, sometimes insisting on the nonteleological and noninstrumental nature of political action. A final question, closely related to the doing/making problematic, relates to how the space of political action can be conceptualized. Is a political world constituted through institutions such as laws, or is it simply formed by a network of interconnected people who share the aforementioned common sense? And if politics is essentially a community of free people tied together only by their relationships with one another, what perpetuates this community? Because she sometimes insists that politics must be noninstrumental, understanding politics in institutional terms is difficult; yet, at times, she also seems to accept the necessity of constitutions and corresponding political institutions. Arendtian politics incorporates all of these—sometimes conflicting—notions of action and world. Arendt’s idea of the political is often understood to stand in direct opposition to violence, that is, violence is something that cannot be political. This is due largely to the definitions of power and violence she offers in her 1970 essay “On Violence.” Here, she defines violence, in distinction to power, as an instrumental, individual, or private action that takes place outside the realm of speech. She also argues in several other works against the common understanding that conflict and violence are simply politics in its extreme form, and that we must understand that violence is qualitatively different from politics. This has exposed Arendt’s political theory to criticisms of idealism or even immorality. If citizens cannot be protected by the political community, how can their rights be guaranteed against threats? Yet Arendt does accept that violent action can be justifiable, both in terms of individual self-defense

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(which this work will not look at in depth) and, more interestingly, in order to attain political ends and especially to protect the political. There is a tension, therefore, between her conceptualization of violence in purely abstract terms and her analysis of violence in the world of real politics. She is a thinker for whom “world” is essential and who thinks in explicitly phenomenological terms; therefore it is indispensable to recognize that the latter form of analysis is not only part of her work but crucial to what Arendt understands her role as a political theorist to be.

Interpretations of Violence in Arendt Arendt has generally been read as a theorist who excluded acts of violence from what she dubbed the political sphere. By extension, she has tended to be thought of as a figure who believed violent acts could not be considered political acts proper. Most of those who have written on Arendt’s rejection of violence draw predominantly on the arguments of “On Violence” to argue that, for Arendt, the sphere of politics is a benign, pacific space of human community from which violence is structurally excluded. She has often been portrayed as a thinker who wholly rejects realist visions of politics. Bhikhu Parekh, for example, claims that Arendt is wholly uninterested in theorizing politics as a place of security, writing that for her, “political activity comes into being not because men are physically vulnerable and need protection” but solely because “they are unique, creative, think differently, are capable of unpredictable acts and need public spaces of appearance.”7 Keith Breen writes that “in contrast to political realism’s equation of the ‘political’ with domination, Hannah Arendt understood the ‘political’ as a relation of friendship utterly opposed to the use of violence.”8 Yet, she “succeeds in purging politics of violence,” Breen claims, “only by inverting realism’s conceptual hierarchies” rather than overcoming them.9 What is required, he asserts, “is a view of the ‘political’ that accepts the interwovenness of violence and power.”10 This, he considers, is very definitely absent in Arendt’s account, and so “her separation of violence and power is . . . untenable.”11 This analysis is premised upon Arendt’s writing in “On Violence” and her reference to violence as the opposite of power: “mute and monological . . . relying on implements and without intrinsic relation to politics’ prime condition, plurality.”12 Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings’s 2008 article comparing Arendt’s and Frantz Fanon’s perspectives on violence is likewise heavily based

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on “On Violence” in its claim that Arendt’s work “builds on an ideal of politics which is, indeed, absolutely free of violence.”13 They critique her portrayal of violence as one in which violence is “individualised” and not considered structurally, and state that she does not “take . . . seriously enough the question of how the link between violence and politics could be dismantled, and the debt finally settled.”14 Frazer and Hutchings argue that Arendt does not adequately deal with the question of the debts that politics owes to violence. However, although they note that Arendt in some cases recognizes politically “justified” violence, and that she “attempts . . . to avoid the liberal solution of . . . effectively denying violence; and [also] . . . eschews any form of pacifism,” these important observations are somewhat marginal to their overall analysis.15 There is a strong suggestion in the literature on Arendt and violence that to simply ignore the existence of violence in politics is a potentially catastrophic omission in her work. Hence, Jürgen Habermas writes that Arendt’s separation of action from other activities of life results in the problematic screening of strategic elements such as force and excludes the possibility of structural violence (so leaving an Arendtian political theory unable to engage with problems of structural violence). The problem can be solved, he claims, only if we assume that structural violence is built into political institutions.16 But such structural inequality is clearly at odds with Arendt’s depiction of the political space as a space of equality, absent of “rule.” If one interprets Arendt as a strict pacifist, we are at an impasse. Other approaches can be taken, such as that of Annabel Herzog, who in her thoughtful piece on the concept of violence in Arendt proposes to examine the constitutive role of violence in Arendt’s political philosophy. She argues that it was “Arendt’s conception of violence which allowed her to create the categories that constitute her political philosophy and, in par ticular, the categories of public and private.”17 She proposes that violence, understood as pure instrumentality, “gives life, negatively so to speak, to the two necessary domains of human existence,” and so she adopts Mary G. Dietz’s claim that in Arendt’s work “instrumentality is always formulated negatively.”18 Certainly, the concept of violence is used by Arendt to delineate certain elements of her work, and Herzog outlines this in a very considered manner. Yet this analysis is again based on the claim that violence is always negative in Arendt’s eyes and that the instrumentality implicated by violence is always negative or unpolitical. This does not necessarily correspond to what we find in Arendt if we look beyond the rather abstract claims of “On Violence.”

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Rather, these interpretations are based on a somewhat limited assessment of the textual evidence. First, they analyze a very limited range of Arendt’s writings, predominantly portions of The Human Condition (itself a highly complex, multifaceted text) as well as “On Violence.” Given the centrality of the topic of violence in Arendt’s writing much more widely, this is a significant misrepresentation of her work. However, the ambiguities that inhere in Arendt’s work on violence have been picked up and puzzled over by some other scholars; indeed, for some it is a central concern. Benhabib has noted, for example, that there are “inconsistencies, if not contradictions” between Arendt’s theory of the political and her political engagements.19 Benhabib refers particularly to Arendt’s support in the 1940s for a Jewish army and the various political controversies of the 1960s on which she wrote, noting that these inconsistencies related primarily to her treatment of violence. Arendt recognized, Jeffrey Isaac writes, “that less-than-ideal forms of politics, including violence, were ubiquitous,” and furthermore, that any politics refusing to accept violence is “invidiously utopian.”20 The problem thus becomes even greater if Arendt both appears to accept the necessity of violence in politics and at the same time makes the claim that violence is outside the realm of politics. Isaac explains this by claiming that “for Arendt . . . it is not the use of violence so much as its codification that must be categorically opposed.”21 George Kateb also attempts to square her claims by arguing that, for Arendt, “violence as a method of concerted action can remain natural only if it pursues the short-term goals of an aggrieved group.”22 There is certainly merit to both suggestions, but neither Kateb nor Isaac explains how the structural limitations of discursive politics, in the implicit rejection of violence, may be overcome in order to constitute a systemic understanding of politics that can engage with the problem of violence. One key problem with the standard interpretation is that it fails to relate the theoretical perspectives that Arendt articulated to the complex and sometimes compromising realities of political practice. She may have been in some ways a “reluctant modernist,” but her political thought is energized by her commitment to understanding modern politics and restoring its potential, not simply rejecting it in favor of a crude idealization of the polis (the importance of which, this work will argue, has been somewhat overstated). Accordingly, most interpretations lack due consideration of the contextual rationale behind her separation of violence and politics. Arendt’s thought has thus been crucially misunderstood in connection with one of the topics that

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mattered most to her: at best her position has been misconstrued, at worst her core insights have been ignored. Arendt states, “In so far as violence plays a predominant role in wars and revolutions, both occur outside the political realm, strictly speaking, in spite of their enormous role in recorded history.”23 Yet, in Arendt’s writings on particular events in history or contemporary politics, a different story is told. Despite the apparently unequivocal theoretical division between violence and political action (here understood to incorporate both agonal action and power), they do not always appear to be as distinct from one another as one might be led to believe. It is not simply that Arendt recognizes the frequent appearance of the two together—although she does—but that she depicts violence, at times, as politically praiseworthy, even integral to political activity. And this is consistently the case throughout her lifetime. In the 1940s, she quotes approvingly from a Polish underground newspaper: “everyone knew . . . ‘that the passive death of Jews had created no new values; it had been meaningless; but that death with weapons in hand can bring new values into the life of the Jewish people.’”24 In a piece written in the mid-1950s, Arendt writes of how the Roman Republic (in distinction to the Greek city-states) used practices of war not simply to conquer and destroy but to gain “something new, a new political arena, secured in a peace treaty according to which yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s allies.”25 And in the 1960s, she wrote in a letter to her close friend Karl Jaspers on the case of Sholem Schwarzbard, an anarchist RussianJewish writer who shot and killed the government official whom he considered to be responsible for the death of fourteen members of the Schwarzbard family during the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Russian Civil War: “He shot the man who had been the ringleader of the Ukraine pogroms during the civil-war years in Russia, then immediately went to the nearest police station. After a two-year trial, Schwarzbard was acquitted. I knew him well in Paris, a wonderful fellow.”26 Neither does Arendt underestimate the violence of the political sphere. Far from it, she writes that courage is one of the core political virtues, for the very reason that in the political sphere, “we have arrived in the realm where the concern for life has lost its validity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”27 The works of Iris Marion Young, John McGowan, and Patricia Owens are particularly helpful in enabling us to step away from the somewhat limited interpretations that a focus on “On Violence” alone tends to produce. Young’s reading of the violence/power dynamic, for example, while starting with the

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conceptual claims of “On Violence,” actively seeks to go beyond that text; she uses, in particular, On Revolution to explore the distinction Arendt makes between “legitimacy” and “justification.” Young contends that if we are to rationalize the ideas that appear in “On Violence” as part of a coherent system we must see power, in the Arendtian sense, as being part of but not all of politics, and that, indeed, we may at times find power hand in hand with violence. Young notes, for example, that power may be utilized and is necessary in such political activities as “military campaigns, imperial rule of extensive territory . . . [and] the organization of a mass resistance movement.”28 But she asserts nonetheless that that violence is intrinsically destructive and thus nonconstructive (a claim with which this book takes issue). Even so, this is far removed from the exclusionary relationship of violence/power that the essay might initially suggest, and in order to explain this, Young points to the way that Arendt roots her rejection of violence in a critique of a Weberian conceptualization (and justification) of politics as sovereign domination. This interpretation is largely supported in this work, which also seeks to develop some of these ideas further by bringing in more of Arendt’s canon to deepen our understanding of what she is criticizing in modern politics, and the alternatives she sets out. Young effectively shows why we need to look beyond a single text in order to comprehend this enormously complex theme in Arendt, and the problems that will invariably arise if we refuse to do so. John McGowan also takes violence seriously in Arendt. He writes that there is a “political violence in Arendt’s work—a violence that cannot be linked to necessity.”29 He claims that in contrast to totalitarian violence, which does not represent political reality because it is fundamentally ideological, there is a form of violence that appears in Arendt’s work which is legitimately connected to politics: the violence that appears when groups are frustrated in their attempt to create a space for politics.30 This, he argues, is “political through and through.”31 The particular problem of totalitarian violence, McGowan argues, is that it is “unceasing and unpredictable . . . its act of creation can never be completed because terror is, at base, a protest against the very terms of existence.”32 But the representation of an alternate vision of violence in Arendt’s work, McGowan claims, means that we may differentiate more broadly between types of violence in Arendt; that we may do so in terms of politics; and that some of these forms of violence may be defined as political, in opposition to terror-violence. He notes, for example, that there is a “Nietzschean affirmation” of the violence of work in Arendt, which stands in contrast with her rejection of the

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violence of labor, but that “Arendt takes some pains to insist that the founding and maintenance of the polis is work, not action, and as such is not itself political.”33 He concludes that “treating violence as a means sometimes necessitated by circumstances . . . has the crucial consequence of erasing the strict boundary between the non-political as violent and the political as nonviolent in Arendt’s work.”34 But her later work, McGowan argues, specifically “On Violence,” “undoes Arendt’s earlier linking of violence to labor and fabrication and hence to the prepolitical in distinction to power. . . . Violence is now presented as a flawed form of action.”35 Thus McGowan recognizes the way in which “On Violence” is in certain respects a step apart from Arendt’s earlier work on violence, and that to deal with the question of violence suitably we must at least consider these variations. Like Young, however, he insists that there is an essential separation between work and politics in Arendt, and argues that because of this the violence of work cannot be considered truly political. Patricia Owens, whose analysis focuses on the role of war in Arendt’s work, agrees that differentiation between types of violence can be discerned in Arendt’s work. For Arendt, she states, “brute violence and war are not the same . . . war is part of human affairs, ‘what politics is about.’ ”36 She makes a distinction between pure and mitigated violence, and because of this, Owens, like McGowan, believes there is greater potential to consider violence as legitimately connected to the political. Although Arendt believed politics and war to be fundamentally distinct, Owens claims that she also often described war as a method of constituting new public spaces as well as a means of constituting self through action and appearance in the world.37 The difference between the conceptual bases of the two concepts does not prevent them from interacting in a politically relevant, legitimate, and not simply destructive manner. Much of Owens’s argument is based on Arendt’s writings on the Greek and Roman political systems. She explains that Arendt “condemned the ancient Greeks for building their polis around the ideals of agonistic contest while simultaneously excluding all legal and political recognition of the ‘barbarians’ outside.”38 By contrast, the Romans are seen to have given their enemies a legal status through peace treaties which expanded the political space of the Republic. For the Greeks therefore, but not the Romans, war could never be more than a struggle against other, and as Owens states, “Arendt ultimately explained the demise of the system of Greek city-states in these terms.”39 That is to say, the extreme agonism exemplified by the Athenian polis,

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produced in part by the Greek understanding of the law as nomos, an impenetrable boundary setting the limits of the polis, eventually resulted in its downfall through its inability to deal with the changing threats to the city. Roman lex, on the other hand, predicated on a notion of law as a system of relationships rather than boundaries, allowed real political change to occur and political systems to evolve. Crucially, this included the incorporation of the defeated other within new and legitimate political-legal communities. Lex, in practical terms, was, for Arendt, therefore a concept of law superior to the Greek nomos, Owens convincingly argues. As she points out, “the purpose of law was to offer some stability and form to what would otherwise seem so fleeting and transient, political words and action.”40 Lex enabled the Romans to translate the military action of war into the reshaping of their political world, without severe disruption to their tradition, something inconceivable to men of the polis. Hence, Owens writes, violence for Arendt is “constitutively outside; the historical and political context of [violence and the public] is mutually related and codependent.”41 War and the mitigated violence of war translates into the political via the intermediary of legal institutions. Both Owens and McGowan make persuasive but very different arguments about why violence is politically relevant for Arendt. McGowan illustrates the need to distinguish between types of violence in Arendt’s work in order to understand how violence in its different guises may relate to politics. But ultimately, he argues, the strict, “utopian” border between violence and politics that Arendt sets up cannot be sustained convincingly. Owens takes a different route, maintaining a division between the political and the violent but depicting war as both transformative and transforming: first appearing outside politics and acting as a means of change, then being retrospectively transformed into an extension or alteration of politics. Thus, while McGowan believes the theoretical boundary cannot reasonably be maintained, Owens emphasizes the importance for politics of what occurs outside, keeping in place the strict definitional border between violence and politics. While Owens does not seek to offer a generally applicable answer to the broader question of how violence and politics come together, McGowan does not believe it can be found. It is clear, then, that there is a problem to be resolved in Arendt’s work in relation to the question of violence and particularly the way that we understand the connection—or disconnect—between the late essay “On Violence” and the considerations on violence that appear in various forms across her work. Arendt clearly separates violence from the political in “On Violence,”

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leading to the first and dominant set of interpretations of her thinking about violence itself. Violence is distinct from power, and power is read to be equivalent to politics. This has led to significant criticisms of her perspective on the role of violence in the political sphere: that her understanding is unrealistic; that she fails to consider structural violence; that violence is conceived problematically as having an exclusively negative relation to politics; or that her explication of the relation between violence and power or politics is inadequately stated. Others, rather than using the essay as a basis for a purely critical analysis of Arendt’s ideas, have attempted to delimit Arendtian violence by pointing to the fact that there are conceptual discontinuities between different texts or, for example, highlighting the importance of different, justifiable forms of violence such as self-defense. Those who have delved deepest into the question of violence have converged on several key themes that will be central to this work: the idea that there are different forms or acts of violence and that it cannot be considered a unitary whole for Arendt; that it is necessary to look at Arendt’s corpus beyond “On Violence” to properly grasp the ideas she proposes there; and the idea that we must explore the relationship between work and violence if we are to comprehend the concept of violence in Arendt. On the latter point, substantial variation appears between those who have attempted to understand Arendt’s portrayal of this complex relationship, but it nonetheless represents a key component of her thinking about violence. These widely varying interpretations of Arendt highlight how our understanding of her thought on violence can transform the way we read her more broadly. Is she to be understood as a stubbornly out-of-touch idealist who refutes the very existence of violence in politics, or a thinker who pragmatically rejects the ideological assumptions of modern liberal political thought? Is she simply an incoherent or inconsistent thinker, or is there a deeper continuity to her work? It throws into relief—and perhaps offers ways of answering—the much contested question of what Arendt understands the content of politics to be, and the relationship between the different components of the vita activa and the political sphere, notably the relationship of the nonpolitical spheres of work and labor to power and the political. And in relation to the latter point, it raises the question of how we understand boundaries to operate in Arendt’s conceptualization of politics: what it means to constitute or maintain a political space in real and conceptual terms. My own contribution to unraveling the idea of political violence in Arendt, or the relationship between violence and politics in her work, develops some of the ideas already raised. Like McGowan, this work will argue that it is

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essential to parse violence into types, some of which are condemned as nonpolitical or anti-political (which are themselves not quite the same) and, some of which are, as Owens writes, prepolitical. In contrast to both of these thinkers, I argue that some forms of violence can indeed be reasonably considered political and even politically essential for Arendt. This study offers a much more comprehensive look at Arendt’s total canon in relation to violence than has previously been undertaken, and the broader analytical framework that her ideas of violence are situated in—or to put this slightly differently, it asks what Arendt intended to achieve with her redefinition of violence. Thus the importance of intellectual and political context when analyzing the concept of violence is considered in more depth than has previously been the case, as is the relationship or development of ideas throughout her work from the 1940s to the 1970s. Both of these aspects enable and require us to ask the question: Why does Arendt seem to fluctuate so wildly on the concept of violence, and what might that mean for our reading of her politics? And this analysis, finally, leans toward a political rather than philosophical reading of Arendt. By a political reading, I mean that particular instances and examples of politics and history, as analyzed by Arendt, form the focus of my analysis of violence, in order to answer the question of how she treats different types of political violence in practice rather than purely in the abstract, enabling a more grounded understanding of her claims. Yet, given the debate over how the ambiguities and contradictions in Arendt’s work can be resolved, this study also sets out to explain the idea of political violence in the conceptual framework she offers in The Human Condition, and in particular, how violence or forms of violence relate to action or power, labor, and work—and how she draws the boundaries of the political using these categories.

Understanding Violence and Power in Arendt: A New Reading The approach taken in this work is one of intellectual history, comprising an attempt to reconstruct a reasonable—albeit partially synthetic, as all interpretations necessarily are—reading of Arendt through textual examination of her published and unpublished writings, augmented with contextual information that enables us to better understand the meaning of these writings for Arendt. In relation to the question of violence, a theme which spans her entire oeuvre from the 1930s to the 1970s, it will by now be clear that a key

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contention of this study is that we must look at the entirety of her thought on this question rather than favoring particular texts. Only by trying to understand what Arendt had to say about violence in the fullest sense can we understand the intention behind individual texts, which are of course not comprehensive in their treatment of this subject matter. This is not something that has previously been undertaken in the other wise already extensive literature on Arendt’s work. In response to this the question may be posed: Is Arendt simply inconsistent in her treatment of violence in politics? Certainly many readers of her work on violence believe this to be the case. Total consistency is almost certainly an unreachable bar for any political thinker writing about any complex topic over a span of several decades. We can also see that Arendt shifts the style of her analysis when she deals with different questions, situations, or approaches. But this does not necessarily mean that her understanding of violence in politics is inconsistent, and this work makes the firm claim that it is not. Why ought we to take this position? First because, as I hope to highlight here, violence is clearly a central political issue for Arendt from her very earliest published work to the last. It appears in many different contexts: the problem of violence is central to her thought on Jewish politics, totalitarianism, revolution, the rise of the social in modernity, the politics of the ancient world, and beyond. The relationship between violence and politics is something she spends a great deal of time thinking about and takes seriously, and it is thus highly unlikely that she would not have a firm idea of what she thinks about such a fundamental political concept. That is simply to say, it is reasonable to assume Arendt has thought through her position on violence rather than to reject her thinking on this issue as incoherent. A more pertinent question perhaps is whether she changes her mind about the role of violence in politics over time. It is again the assertion of this study that Arendt does not, at least not substantially, and this work accordingly spans her writings. The following chapters explore several different cases of Arendt’s thinking on violence— critical and positive—which, while analyzed individually, also convey a substantial continuity. This work aims to draw out these continuities in order to comprehend Arendt’s overarching understanding of violence, and perhaps even more importantly, what she intends to achieve with her analysis, in terms of her project of rethinking the misguided politics of modernity. The fundamental question that orients this book can be phrased in very simple terms: How can the relationship between violence and the political in Arendt’s work be understood? Yet the scope of the question and its politi-

Introduction

15

cal implications are vast. In order to understand this relationship, it is necessary to understand how Arendt conceptualizes violence and “the political” but, beyond this, to view how these concepts are identified or employed in the political world. Violence and politics are not fixed terms but dynamic concepts which vary depending on the context. The relationship between violence and politics is therefore similarly protean. But by understanding the relationship between politics and violence the possibilities and limitations of both may be better understood. Thinking about politics in this way—in an Arendtian way—helps us to avoid the temptation of idealized politics and to think instead about how concepts can be used to help us recognize legitimate political actions and forms against those that are illegitimate or inherently problematic. On the converse side, just as politics is never truly ideal, neither are abstract concepts of violence wholly representative of violent action in reality. A more nuanced understanding of violence as it appears in a political context is required to understand Arendt’s thought. Whereas some violence is indeed anti-political, there are also forms of violence that are politically neutral and forms that, if not political, are pro-political. I argue that Arendt has been widely misunderstood both by those who have criticized her from the perspective of sovereign realism as politically naive, confused, or simply willfully neglectful of the less-than-ideal nature of politics, and by those are positively influenced by Arendt’s concept of “the political” as a pure space of free action from which violence or force is wholly excluded. Both her critics and some of her advocates fail to grasp the complexities of Arendt’s idea of violence. The theoretical simplicity of violence as she defines it, as an action of command over others via the use of instruments of force, and which is pointedly contrasted by her with what she terms power—the collective exercise of individually free action, and for her the driving force of legitimate politics—has obscured the fuller meaning of violence in Arendt. Although it can be defined theoretically in relatively simple terms, its fluid nature and the consequent implications for politics can only be comprehensively grasped through its operationalization in par ticu lar forms and contexts. Analyses of violence of this kind pervade Arendt’s work, and it is this aspect of her thought that makes her a pivot between sovereign realism and agonistic nonhierarchical politics, and a way to mediate between these modes of thinking about politics. Although this is primarily a work of intellectual history, there are normative political judgments that might be drawn from this interpretation. Yet the study is not intended to definitively situate Arendt as a partisan of any

16

Introduction

par ticular political position. It is true that this reading of Arendt implicitly critiques liberal views of politics that conceive of violence as inherently politically unacceptable. However, it does not therefore necessarily carry any par ticular political ideology along with it. Such a view could be seen to open Arendt up to a left-leaning interpretation of her work, as the notion of revolution in its full—potentially violent—sense is restored, against liberal neutrality. However, a rereading of Arendt that takes the role of violence in politics seriously can equally lean toward a perspective that emphasizes the more conservative aspect of her thought: a justification of political violence might be used to defend some more conservative political functions which seek to uphold an existing political community. It is not the intention of this author to lean toward either reading—but it is important to recognize that such implications might be drawn from this. This corresponds to Arendt’s own considerations of where she lay on the political spectrum. She explicitly refused to align her political project with either right or left, she associated exclusively with neither, and her political thought in fact rejects this kind of categorization. “I never had such a position [on left/right politics],” she once said. “The left think I am conservative and the conservatives think I am left or a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less. I don’t think that the real questions of this century will gain any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.”42 For example, in her analysis of revolutionary France and America in On Revolution, revolutionary activity is shown to be concurrently bound up with the desire for change but equally with the desire for stability and preservation into the future; not only the desire for something new but an appeal to authentic, lost political traditions. Any analysis of Arendt’s understanding of violence and its implications for her political thought cannot therefore be considered primarily in terms of left or right politics, although her critique of liberal political ideology—which for her can encompass both left and right politics—is certainly important. Rather, the reinterpretation of Arendt that takes place in this work simply seeks to offer up a more pragmatic and useable Arendt, one which is neither inward looking, backward looking, or blind to contemporary political reality but which asserts that politics must be understood to be open to change, including violent change in certain circumstances. Famously eschewing philosophy (her field of study as a young academic), she pointedly described herself as a political theorist throughout her postwar career. This study takes seriously this self-description, and thus its emphasis lies on understanding Arendt as a thinker concerned above all with political practice—here, her concern with

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17

the practice or role of violent action in politics. This project thus attempts to construct a reading of Arendt which takes into account her own ambiguity in rejecting some forms of partisan political categorization, but which also seeks to position Arendt as a substantially less idealistic, more practiceoriented thinker than she has often been portrayed. In this book I will argue that Arendt’s rejection of political violence must be understood in the context of her critique of sovereignty, a type of political authority which has a very par ticu lar meaning for Arendt. For her, sovereignty is a categorically modern form of rule, originating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which emerged in order to enforce order in the wake of the rise of another modern phenomenon that Arendt terms “the social.” The “social,” a sphere which is neither properly public (political) nor wholly private (individual) but in which private interests come to govern and dominate political activity, is the corruption of the political and antithetical to political freedom, Arendt believes. In “social” politics, the public space of discourse and power is overwhelmed by the tremendous force of private interests. The social, in certain respects, is akin to an individualistic capitalist spirit understood in the Weberian sense but is somewhat broader, pertaining to a wider set of concerns and interests. Importantly, social and sovereign politics is intrinsically violent, but that is not the primary reason it is problematic for political life and the pursuit of freedom. The key reason is that sovereign politics, Arendt argues, is exclusively private and based on individual interest, and therefore it cannot be a space in which action and power—forms of activity that require plurality—can be enacted. In this condition, only sovereign rule, a rule which possesses and perpetually threatens violence, can create order. While we currently live in a world of sovereign rule, politics need not be sovereign, Arendt believes, and indeed, if politics is to be recovered, it must not be understood exclusively as such. The main conceptual boundary, although not the only one, that exists between Arendt’s idea of violence and her idea of politics is that the former is essentially private action and the latter essentially public. Modern sovereign politics possesses and enacts a violence that is essentially private, because it acts not through the public participation of citizens but over the subjects of a state. However, there is a form of action that can transcend the public/private divide in Arendt’s framework of the vita activa—the activities that constitute the whole of our worldly lives—and this is what she calls “work.” Whereas political or speech action is public, and labor—the economic activity of providing for one’s biological needs—is private, work is the

18

Introduction

form of activity that people undertake in order to build or create things that last, the artifacts and institutions that constitute a world in perpetuity. Work is a category of action which therefore draws together both public and private actions. It provides a bridge between the two, and a way in which violence can be understood to legitimately relate to political questions of action and the freedom that inheres in action. By thinking through violence and politics in terms of the category of work as a (sometimes) public activity, the Arendtian political becomes more than a space of pure action. It expands to a space that permits and even requires political action of a broader nature, including instrumental and even violent action. Nor is work a form of action which relates only to creating or constituting new political forms. Politics is a constant process of creating, or in Arendt’s terms, augmenting. The activities which mediate action and institutions are political, I will argue, and the way we can best understand this mediation is through the category of work and the activity of building a world. Violence, for Arendt, can be thought of in considerably more neutral terms than many of those interpreting her work have argued. It can be used by many different kinds of groups and for an array of political ends. Violence itself does not of course legitimize the actions of such groups or their ends, but neither does it delegitimize these communities or their actions. The use of violence in and of itself does not result in the depoliticization or politicization of activities or peoples. Its instrumental character entails that violence is not just the use of tools, but the use of violence itself as a tool. Arendt is favorable toward violence when it is used by a group for genuinely political purposes, that is, those that favor the establishment or creation of a political realm. Violence can construct things that are beneficial to the public or political realm, and the constructive activities of violence (as a form of work) can thus be a kind of political activity. The opposite is also true: violence is anti-political when it becomes a tool used by communities or for ends that are destructive of the political sphere and all that entails, for example, those who seek to perpetuate sovereign politics, who adopt what Arendt calls “process-thinking,” who seek to prioritize the social above the political, and of course those who pursue totalitarian forms of politics. But there are limits to the type of instrumental and violent action that can be understood as politically legitimate or comprehended in political terms. Political violence must be public rather than private. More specifically, it must encompass plurality in some manner and thereby represent the difference or distinction between citizens, rather than being oriented toward the attainment of complete unity. Political violence cannot be undertaken according to the principles of process-thinking, or the principles of the sphere of the social. Yet

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between action as political ideal and the coercive or violent action driven by sovereign rule, there is a broad space where violence or coercion can be public, or quasi-public, under certain conditions. There are two important caveats to this. The first is that the use of violence and its effects on politics must be understood in context. Arendt is writing in and against a society where, in her opinion, politics is widely understood as violence, and where the risks to the political sphere of misusing violence politically are therefore much greater. The second caveat is that violence can never be conceived of as wholly neutral, for Arendt. It always possesses the possibility of corruption and even a tendency to corrupt—but this does not therefore mean that it cannot or should not be used for political ends where necessary. What is key is that violence cannot be understood as an end in itself, but only as a means which may be used for good or for ill. Otherwise, the tendency of violence to become a circular, self-reinforcing system threatens the replacement of politics by violence itself. That is to say, while there are clearly political dangers in violence, there are also dangers in not using violence, so how it is understood and used is an essential consideration. When thinking about violence, the closely related but nonidentical category of conflict invariably arises. Conflict is central to politics, and many contemporary political theorists who have drawn on Arendt’s work have developed these ideas in their theories of agonal or agonistic understandings of politics. Usage of Arendt’s work is often as much critical as it is a reflection of, or inspired by, Arendt’s ideas. But there are shared ideals and overlaps between Arendtian and agonal political theories. Agonism is a powerful, alternative way of thinking through politics. As a theory which understands politics as being a process of conflict, it recognizes difference rather than seeking unity, the oft forgotten remainders of liberal political ideology. But agonal political theory is often limited to speech conflict and discourse— conflict that occurs within the space of the political—rather than engaging with questions of how to deal with or even understand the role of violence in politics itself, even when it is necessary or politically beneficial. We might think, for example, of the coercive capacity of the state in enforcing justice; the military capacity of a community to protect its citizens and their rights to peace; or the rights of minorities to express criticism through civil disobedience in various forms, in the absence of alternatives. Chantal Mouffe, who I discuss in the last chapter, is a notable exception to this with her theory of antagonism, and the interpretation of Arendt I offer develops the Arendtian idea of the political in similar directions to Mouffe’s notion.

20

Introduction

Considering violence and its relation to conflict or the agonal contributes a new perspective on these ideas. Agonal theorists tend to think in terms of what happens within the space of politics and how it is internally constituted, rather than about what constitutes the boundaries of politics or how the rights of citizens are guaranteed by the political entity, questions which are much more closely related to violent conflict such as war or the execution of penal systems.43 Often these rights are assumed, but there is a question of how guarantees and limits can be legitimized or realized if politics is indeed a space of perfectly free (limitless) action. Arendt’s concept of work can help us to think through the ways that violence can be understood from within theories of agonism, in how politics can be constituted or created, augmented or changed, or indeed protected from threats. It can help us to think through the questions of how a political world can be protected without undermining the activity of action and power that legitimizes political action. This approach suggests that the use of violence is not necessarily unpolitical, as long as it is “public,” that is, not just enacted for the public (although that is necessary) but also enacted by the public, or at the very least, that it depends on being able to persuade the public that violence is politically viable and therefore a collective action through tacit consent.

Outline of Chapters This book comprises two sections: Chapters 1 to 5 examine the textual evidence in the canon of Arendt’s published and unpublished work on violence and the political, offering a new interpretation of her thought on political violence; Chapters 6 and 7 explore what this looks like in the modern world: in Arendt’s time and in relation to recent and contemporary political theories influenced by ideas of productive conflict or agonism. Chapter 1 introduces Arendt as a critic of sovereignty, outlining her claim that sovereignty developed through the events and political theorizing (especially of Hobbes) of the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, in an evolving process that would ultimately lead into, first, imperialism, then totalitarianism. In the modern world we understand politics as violence, and this is the basis of Arendt’s rejection of both sovereignty and violence itself. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 consider three case studies of violence in Arendt’s work. The first focuses on some of Arendt’s earliest work, written in the 1930s and 1940s, comparing her understanding of a Jewish people and her argument

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for a Jewish army during the Second World War with her critique of mainstream Zionist sovereign politics of the early 1940s onward. The second case contrasts Arendt’s thinking on the Greek polis—her supposed ideal politics— with her thought on the Roman res publica, in order to make the case that the more firmly constituted Roman polity, despite its lesser capacity for action than Greek democratic politics, is in many ways a preferred form of political organization. While the polis excludes violence from the political sphere, keeping it on the outside of politics, the res publica has methods of making violence and war legitimately political and possesses a distinctly more instrumental approach to political action. The third case study compares the constitutionally creative American Revolution with the purely destructive or liberatory French Revolution, highlighting Arendt’s acceptance of violence in the case of the American Revolution while rejecting it in the French case. The distinction she makes here is not between levels or types of violence, although that is relevant to the story she tells, but the purpose of the violence; the French Revolution is unpolitical because its violence was destructive, and much of the reason for this was its fatal entanglement with “the social.” Together, these examples produce a clearer image of what Arendt believes are legitimate uses of violence for political ends and what kinds of violence or coercion are, by contrast, unpolitical or illegitimate. Chapter 5 asks how—in light of these examples, which make up a reasonably cohesive body of thought—we can understand Arendt’s vehement rejection of violence, arguing that her thinking as a whole makes sense only if we contextualize it in her critique of modern politics as violence, and her critique of the nonpolitical violence of the social that permeates modernity. Chapter 6 takes this reading and asks how such a way of thinking about politics can be applied to the contemporary world, and in particular to American politics of the 1960s, on which Arendt wrote so profusely. Her work on civil disobedience, viewed through the lens of the interpretation offered in the previous chapters, reveals a much more expansive and pragmatic idea of what the political is and how to recognize both “true” political action, and violent action or disobedience which is politically destructive or subversive. Even in the modern world, genuine politics can be discovered, and it is intriguing and highly telling that Arendt identifies it (in America) most clearly in the activity of civil disobedience, an activity that is close in nature to revolution, and with the violence that revolution inevitably entails. Finally, Chapter 7 explores how this relationship between violence and power within politics can help us to engage in new ways with the political theory or theories of agonism, using

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the work of three influential theorists—Bonnie Honig, Seyla Benhabib, and Chantal Mouffe—to outline a kind of theorizing which can be critiqued via this analysis of Arendt but also positively developed in new directions. Understanding Arendt on violence, power, politics, and the relationship between these concepts helps us to think about politics in new ways. This analysis rejects the exclusive and highly limiting focus on the Greek polis and its idealistic participatory and discursive democracy in favor of a model of politics that is also concerned with its own stability and permanence. It is a model of Arendtian agonism that is considerably more pragmatic in its capacity for thinking in terms of ends as well as action. Thinking in an Arendtian way about politics as a spatial dimension, which is constituted by fluid boundaries, changing divisions, and internal dynamics that are constantly in productive conflict with one another, enables us to think about politics in theory in ways which mirror the messy politics of the real world, without seeking to exclude, reject, or define that which falls outside the boundaries of norms and preferences, political or other wise. Arendtian politics is always torn between keeping the space of the political open to freedom, action, and natality and a pressure to close off the space of politics in order to protect this fragile space for freedom. It is pulled between action and the space for action. But at the very least, politics must be able to perpetuate itself in a wider world which is always under threat from violence, internal or external. Understanding Arendt on violence and politics can help us to think through what is unacceptable for politics, what is intrinsically destructive of politics or destabilizing, as well as what is productive, constitutive, and even essential to political action itself. It helps us think through, in other words, how we might open, and hold open, a space for politics.

CHAPTER 1

The Modern State and Its Problems

The modern political world is a world of sovereign states. This is one of the most consistent features of politics in the modern era and shapes how we understand and organize contemporary politics. The sovereign state guarantees security, internal and external; citizenship rights of political participation are predominantly understood within the framework of sovereignty; individual lives are shaped and regulated by its laws. Arendt understood this and both feared and railed against the seemingly unquestionable dominance of sovereignty and the threat it posed to the contemporary political world. It is “almost self-evident,” she wrote, in the months following the end of the Second World War, from her perspective as a German Jewish refugee in America, “that the whole Continent [of Europe] is likely to collapse because of the principle of national sovereignty.”1 When Arendt wrote these words in 1945, she was still reeling from her discovery of the extent of the German totalitarian state. She had first heard about Hitler’s death camps in 1943, and even with her own experience and knowledge of the regime, found the existence of the camps almost inconceivable. It was not simply the level of barbarism that shocked her but the inexplicable irrationality of the whole endeavor. This was something new to the long history of tyranny and despotism—this was something other than despotism in the older sense. With this thought, she turned her attention to analyzing the roots of totalitarianism as she began working on the text that would become The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her work on totalitarianism brought Arendt to prominence in American academia and beyond, and it is what her legacy continues to be irrevocably connected with, more than any other theme. This is quite justified; her reflections on totalitarianism would shape her work and thought to the very end of her career. It is at the core of

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her understanding and critique of modern politics, as a motivating factor in her attempts to recover or revive certain political concepts. Arendt’s personal experience of totalitarianism in Hitler’s Germany was, in comparison with that of many other German Jews, mercifully limited: her flight from Germany preceded the worst of the horrors. Yet even so, German totalitarianism shaped her life in important ways. It led to her exile from Germany in 1933 and again from newly occupied France to America in the early 1940s. Because of this exile, she held refugee status for eighteen years, from 1933 to 1951, when she became a naturalized US citizen. Although not politically active as a young woman, Arendt had possessed a keen interest in Zionism since the 1920s and, after the Reichstag fire of 1933, she provided support to the Zionist cause by offering her apartment to Jewish political figures fleeing persecution and by undertaking illegal research collecting evidence of anti-Semitism in Germany for the German Zionist Organization.2 The latter activity resulted in Arendt being arrested and held for eight days, after which she was released thanks partly to an absence of evidence against her, but more importantly, to the unusually affable official responsible for Arendt’s capture and interrogation. Nonetheless, the experience showed Arendt she was no longer safe in Germany, and with her mother (Arendt’s only close relation in the country) she left for Paris, via Prague and Geneva. In Paris, Arendt joined a growing refugee population made up of not only German Jewish refugees but exiles from Eastern Europe too. Her affiliation with Zionism became deeper, and she worked for a time for Youth Aliyah, an organization preparing young Jewish people for emigration to the Palestinian territories. Her exile in Paris possessed a certain appeal as she was surrounded by other refugee intellectuals, in a country where she spoke the language fluently, and in a city in which she evidently felt at home, if not wholly at ease. But she felt herself to be a refugee, and her thinking was, accordingly, increasingly occupied by questions of Jewish politics and what could or ought to be done by the Jews in their increasingly precarious situation in Europe. Also, her time in Paris was not to last. After war was declared between Germany and France, the government ordered “enemy aliens”—such as Arendt—into internment camps across the country. In 1940, Arendt thus ended up imprisoned once again, this time in a women’s camp in Gurs. Just a few weeks after her arrival, however, amid the chaos that ensued as France fell to Germany, Arendt managed to escape. She eventually managed to secure visas to travel to the United States for herself, her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and her mother, and in 1941, they sailed together for New York. This second migration proved

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more challenging. None of the three spoke English, and Arendt had to learn the language rapidly in order to support the family and manage their affairs. They took little with them; their means were extremely modest; and the three lived in uncomfortably close quarters at the start. Yet New York was also not without its attractions: many other Jewish refugees from Europe had made it their home, among them many of Europe’s foremost academics. Soon after her arrival Arendt was hired as a columnist for Aufbau, a Jewish Germanlanguage newspaper, and she began to write extensively, predominantly on Jewish politics. It was not long before her work was also taken up and published by other American journals, in English as well as German. Yet, despite her relative success in difficult circumstances, the sorrow Arendt felt at the loss of her homeland, her language, and all that went with that is palpable in an article she wrote in 1943 titled “We Refugees.” “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in the concentration camps, and this means the rupture of our private lives.”3 She notes that, amid the forced optimism, suicide was common: “a quiet and modest way of vanishing.”4 Man “is a social animal,” she wrote, and “life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off.”5 Exile meant the loss of nearly every thing that made life meaningful. Furthermore, statelessness stripped individuals such as herself of the legal and political rights that had come to be considered by many in the post-Enlightenment world as fundamental and inalienable. She discovered through her own experience how easily every facet of a human life could be stripped back, in legal, political, social, and private terms. For those who had been less fortunate than Arendt, that became deadly. Arendt’s reflections on this regime would form the focus of her work for the next decade. Since her time in Paris, Arendt had become a firmly political thinker. This was driven by the urge to understand the position of the Jews in the modern world and especially in Hitler’s Germany; but increasingly, she saw Jewish persecution as a precursor or indicator of broader political problems in modernity that were not limited to any one group. The result was totalitarianism, an essentially new form of political regime, and one not restricted to Germany alone, as Arendt’s analysis of Stalin’s USSR made clear; it could also, in theory, emerge in the modern world wherever similar conditions arose. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Arendt became increasingly convinced that

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the reason for the collapse of politics into totalitarianism could be found in problematic principles or ideologies of modern politics, namely the ideal of national sovereignty. Thus, as her predictions for the future of Europe indicate, by the end of the war she believed that the dominance of sovereign politics in Europe would result in the emergence of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism was, for Arendt, a political evil without comparison. But it was not without cause. Sovereignty is, in the end, unsustainable because its fundamental premises are at odds with the reality of the world around us, she believed. “No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth,” she insisted. “Sovereignty is possible only in imagination, paid for by the price of reality.”6 Arendt’s postwar fears did not fade with the passage of time. On the contrary, her concern with sovereignty, and her attempts to reveal its inadequacies or dangers, were a constant feature of her work. The “illusory” nature of sovereign power made it no less dangerous. Part of its danger has to do with the relationship of sovereignty to violence and the inevitability of violence that accompanies sovereignty. No substitution for warfare is possible, she notes, “so long as national independence, namely, freedom from foreign rule, and the sovereignty of the state, namely the claim to unchecked and unlimited power in foreign affairs, are identified.”7 The claim to unchecked power— both internally and externally—is the basis of modern sovereignty, and its unlimited nature invariably provokes violent conflicts or subjugation and tyranny. In the worst case, this tyranny becomes totalitarianism, a regime form unique to the modern world and, for Arendt, one which was only possible through the idea and institution of sovereignty, a political form and concept belonging to modernity. Arendt’s idea of sovereignty goes beyond straightforward definitions of the concept, such as that it is the supreme power of the state, or the dominant or absolute political authority, although this is part of how she understands the term. Her continually developing analysis of sovereignty, rather, reveals her conceptualization of what may properly be defined as politics or the political by also serving as an example of the anti-political, in opposition to which her notion of politics takes shape. Sovereignty is a foundational aspect of Arendt’s work because for her it represents precisely what politics should not be. As such, it is at the heart of her critique of contemporary politics, illuminating her understanding of an authentic politics that contrasts with sovereignty and revealing the nature of her concern with violence in the modern world. Because sovereignty is so intimately bound up with the use of violence, it is impossible to understand one without the other in Arendt’s work.

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Arendt’s reflections on Rousseau, “the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty,” offer a glimpse into how she perceives sovereignty and the problems inherent in it. Rousseau argued that “power must be sovereign, that is, indivisible, because ‘a divided will would be inconceivable,’ ” Arendt writes. “He did not shun the consequences of this extreme individualism, and he held that in an ideal state, ‘the citizens had no communications one with another,’ that in order to avoid factions ‘each citizen should think only his own thoughts.’ ”8 This attitude of “extreme individualism” was absurd, Arendt argued, because it is wholly at odds with the nature of political interaction. “In reality Rousseau’s theory stands refuted for the simple reason that ‘it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future,’ ” she continues, quoting his Social Contract. “A community actually founded on this sovereign will would be built not on sand but quicksand. All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate framework of ties and bonds for the future—such as laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances— all of which derive in the first instance from the faculty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future.”9 If we understand sovereignty as a singular, general will which, as such, possesses absolute power over political decisions at any time, we not only ignore how political communities have always functioned in practice but exclude the elements that provide political stability, namely agreements and promises between citizens, where each possesses powers of their own. Sovereignty therefore fails to account for two aspects which Arendt takes to be central to any authentic vision of politics: first, what she terms “plurality,” the existence of discrete, distinct political actors in the plural; second, the possibility of freedom of choice, impossible where sovereignty is defined as unified will. So, she concludes, a state governed by Rousseau’s sovereign “in which there is no communication between the citizens and where each man thinks only his own thoughts is by definition a tyranny.”10 With the tyrant comes an end to freedom. If there is no longer a space for freedom to be enacted, political freedom can no longer exist.11 That is true whether that possibility has been physically closed off, for example, by the outlawing of free public association, or theoretically excluded by our own conceptions of the political, as in the modern idea of sovereignty that Rousseau set out in his work. Today, we no longer understand freedom in its original (i.e., real) terms, writes Arendt, but identify freedom with sovereignty, a move which “is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.” Following its implications through, she suggests

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that this “leads either to a denial of human freedom—namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign—or the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all others.”12 Either human freedom is assumed not to exist, because it is at odds with sovereignty, or freedom is a zero-sum game of the possession of power over others. The whole idea of sovereignty and the will-freedom identification that it rests on are, she insists, fictitious. “The famous sovereignty of political bodies,” she writes, “has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence.” Through violence, control over political communities can be maintained for some time, yet “if men wish to be free,” insists Arendt, “it is precisely sovereignty which they must renounce.”13

The Origins of Sovereignty Rousseau, while giving us a representative outline of sovereignty in its advanced form, was far from being the progenitor of the modern concept. To find the origins of sovereignty, Arendt explains, we must look back to the beginning of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular to its “greatest spokesmen” Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.14 Modern understandings of political power, she claims, “derive from the old notion of absolute power that accompanied the rise of the sovereign European nation-state.”15 Bodin and Hobbes reflect the philosophical and political views of their time, but through their formulations of sovereignty, they gave a specific shape to those ideas which would become influential in their own right. However, it is worth observing that Arendt identifies precursors to the problems of hierarchy and violence in the modern state that stretch much further back, indeed, all the way back to the beginning of what she terms our (Western) tradition of political thought. Events and ideas in the prehistory of sovereignty prepared the ground for what came later. She locates the start of the Western tradition of political thought—not, she specifies, our political or philosophical history—in classical Greece. “At the beginning,” she states, “stands Plato’s contempt for politics, his conviction that ‘the affairs and actions of men are not worthy of great seriousness’” and that politics is merely an unfortunately unavoidable distraction from more impor tant matters.16 Plato is more interested in freeing the mind for its inquiries into matters of the eternal, and so we see in his work and in the work of those he has influ-

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enced down the centuries not just the “philosopher’s scorn” for mortal affairs but “the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is necessary for mere life and survival.”17 Thus, Arendt claims, from the first moment that politics became a subject of systematic inquiry, it was as a necessary evil. Our tradition “unhappily and fatefully, and from its very beginning, has deprived political affairs, that is, those activities concerning the common public realm that comes into being whenever men live together, of all dignity of their own.”18 The status hierarchy of ancient political thought, which prioritized the activities of the mind above action itself, set the standard in philosophy for thousands of years: thought should rule over worldly action; thinkers should rule over doers of deeds; the unity of the philosophical standard should rule over the chaos of practical, worldly matters. Despite the efforts of some—notably (for Arendt) the more pragmatically minded Cicero—to counter the diminished status of political action in philosophy, the Greek idea was perpetuated for millennia, not least through Christian doctrine. From the beginning, the tradition of Western political thought was flawed in its rejection of worldliness. Yet, while the premodern era was no golden age, a much more serious problem was posed by the emergence of the principle of sovereignty, Arendt believes, and in its radical reevaluation, and ultimate rejection, of freedom itself. This leads us back to Hobbes and Bodin. What was it about these two thinkers, or their work, that was so dangerously novel? It should be noted that Arendt’s referencing of Hobbes and Bodin is neither superficial nor fleeting. As Liisi Keedus points out, Arendt would have been well aware of earlier debates around Hobbes’s role on the development of modern politics. “Nowhere in inter-war Europe was Hobbes as intensely discussed as in Germany,” Keedus writes, “and nowhere were these discussions as relevant for the evaluation of liberalism.”19 Within this rich tradition, Keedus is somewhat dismissive of Arendt’s “relatively brief interest in Hobbes [which] was above all instrumental.”20 Yet Arendt makes repeated reference to both thinkers throughout her work, but above all to Hobbes, of whom there is discussion, often extended, in almost all of her books and in a number of articles. The books which omit Hobbes entirely are those exclusively devoted to the thought or lives of par ticular individuals—Kant, Augustine, Rahel Varnhagen, and Adolf Eichmann.21 It is very apparent, in surveying Arendt’s work, that Hobbes was often at the forefront of her mind and that he was, for her, the essential figure in understanding the origins of state sovereignty in political thought. The focus of Arendt’s interest in Hobbes shifts over time, so across her work she emphasizes different aspects of his thought and sometimes

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changes the language she uses to describe his ideas. Yet key features of her treatment of Hobbes do remain the same as that proffered in her first extended analysis of his work in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Writing in Origins in the late 1940s, Arendt offers a detailed analysis of Hobbes’s work and his influence.22 She characterizes Hobbes as “the bourgeois philosopher,” a philosopher for a bourgeois age still to come to fruition. His work resonates so strongly now, she suggests, because he was a thinker ahead of his time. “It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest,” she argues, “who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is accumulation of power.”23 While his principles were not immediately recognized by the bourgeoisie, he is the greatest, indeed “the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.”24 His work—she singles out Leviathan—contains “the only political theory according to which the state is based not on some kind of constituting law—whether divine law, the law of nature, or the law of social contract—which determines the rights and wrongs of the individual’s interest with respect to public affairs, but on individual interests themselves.”25 The acquisitive urge of the bourgeoisie is the basis of Hobbes’s political theory, Arendt claims, along with an extreme individualism. The urge to power is derived from the primary, bourgeois, acquisitive impulse. Annelies Degryse highlights the similarities between Arendt and C. B. Macpherson’s study of Hobbes, published six years prior to Origins, although Degryse does not believe a line of influence between the two can be identified. Nevertheless, while there is no evidence that Arendt is drawing on Macpherson in her analysis, “Arendt’s reading of Hobbes and the rise of the bourgeoisie is in line with Macpherson’s,” writes Degryse. “They both detect and describe the many connections between the conceptual model of Hobbes . . . and the coming bourgeois society. . . . However, Arendt’s understanding of Hobbes moves away from Macpherson’s.”26 For Macpherson, the state regulates and orders markets, whereas for Arendt the state is (in Carl Schmitt’s words, cited by Arendt) “an irresistible and overpowering huge machine.”27 Arendt emphasizes that she does not believe Hobbes has therefore discovered the primary impulses of human nature that drive political action, but in fact, the reverse. Hobbes is a realist, she says, in the sense that he is attempting to grapple with the conditions of the coming age and seek out a political structure fit to dominate in such conditions. “It would be a grave

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injustice to Hobbes and his dignity as a philosopher to consider this picture of man an attempt at psychological realism or philosophical truth,” she firmly asserts. Hobbes is “interested in neither, but concerned exclusively with the political structure itself, and he depicts the features of man according to the needs of the Leviathan.”28 At least, she clarifies, this is the only way in which “his concept of man makes sense and goes beyond the obvious banality of an assumed human wickedness. This new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it.”29 Thus Hobbes was, in contrast to what his work might lead us to believe, not concerned with discovering the nature of man but rather with formulating a political model that could manage the demands placed on it by the competitive and acquisitive desires of the new man. Hobbes starts from an “unmatched insight into the political needs of the new social body of the rising bourgeoisie,” Arendt claims, “whose fundamental belief in an unending process of property accumulation was about to eliminate all individual safety.”30 His insistence on power as the motor of human action “sprang from the theoretically indisputable proposition that a never-ending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power.”31 There are several features of Hobbes’s “bourgeois” political philosophy that concern Arendt, but two in particular represent for her a startling break with tradition: his representation of citizens/subjects and of the sovereign/ ruler. In her notes for lectures given at Berkeley in the mid-1950s, Arendt writes of how Hobbesian man is “essentially solitary” yet never alone, and so perpetually fearful of the unpredictable actions of his neighbors. “This is the first aspect of loneliness which exists first of all in Society,” she notes, “lonely in a crowd, one against all, or rather we feel that all are against one. The object is not to know himself, ‘this or that particular man,’ but to know through introspection mankind.”32 The individualism of bourgeois, liberal culture is prefigured here in a deliberate attempt by Hobbes to manage the coming political storm, or so Arendt claims. His political solution to this problem is to reimagine and reduce mankind to one man. By conceptualizing a society of men as one man, with the same essential desires and reason, the competitive impulse disappears between the citizens who make up the political body. And in the political sphere, the artificial person of the sovereign both embodies the qualities of this singular, universal man and enforces its authority. Yet the competitive urges that motivate this new society cannot be expunged from the body politic altogether. This is integral to understanding

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what distinguishes modern sovereignty from mere tyranny. The Hobbesian commonwealth is based on “delegation of power,” argues Arendt, rather than rights, and as law emanates from absolute power, “it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it . . . absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society.”33 This power is necessarily absolute, Arendt suggests, because the capitalist impulse that had begun to take hold of Western society, the “acquisition of wealth conceived as a neverending process,” required a correspondingly never-ending process of power generation to counter the aggressive competitiveness of the conflicting parties in this new economic battle.34 This process must be absolute, supreme and unlimited—and so Arendt depicts sovereignty as an essentially and necessarily dynamic authority, one which is continually seeking to expand its power; a process rather than a static form. Men, although “flattered” by Hobbes at being depicted as “power-thirsty animals” (Arendt’s expression), would ultimately be forced to wholly surrender their power. Hobbes’s criticism of ancient and humanist political philosophy, and his grandiose claims to be the founder of political science itself, highlights his conscious and thoroughgoing rejection of the tradition of political thought in the West, a rejection which Arendt was equally determined to emphasize, albeit for apparently quite different reasons. His rejection of political theories which, Arendt seems to imply, had always considered subjects or citizens as existing in the plural (even if not as strict equals), and his replacement of that plurality with a singular and unitary quality of reason, identical in all people, is one key shift. For Hobbes the problem of politics is plurality; the solution is to erase it. Hence, he develops his argument for a new kind of sovereign power, an everexpanding process of domination, in order to erase the plurality of societies that now threatened not conflict but the creation of a permanent conflict, the war of all against all. Hobbes wanted “nothing more nor less than the justification of tyranny,” summarizes Arendt, “which, though it has occurred many times in human history, has never been honored with a philosophical foundation.”35 Tyranny was ancient, but Hobbes’s justification was novel and helped to usher in a new political era. Arendt would later write that in the West, for all its undoubted flaws, freedom and politics had nevertheless remained bound together for centuries, with only totalitarianism finally cutting the thread.36 With Hobbes’s attempt at a philosophical justification for tyranny, the violent exercise of power over citizens, that thread had begun to fray. It is difficult to determine whether Arendt wants to portray Hobbes as an extraordinarily foresighted philosopher or as a philosopher who substantially

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created the concept of modern sovereignty. She is clear that he is not the only philosopher who is engaged in this task; her reference to Bodin as a thinker engaged in a similar (and earlier) project of sovereign legitimacy establishes this beyond doubt. Whether Arendt wants to attribute par ticular features of sovereignty to Hobbes or simply claim for him a remarkable prescience is unclear. But her emphasis often seems to lean toward the latter. Hence, she writes that he was “the true, though never recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie” who, “through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic.”37 She claims that Hobbes “could already detect in the rise of the bourgeoisie all those antitraditionalist qualities of the new class which would take more than three hundred years to develop fully.”38 Written in the years immediately following the war, as part of her analysis of totalitarianism, Arendt’s reading is evidently shaped by recent events as she projects back upon a more distant past. The moral indifference of Hobbes’s political theory is stressed; he “liberates those who are excluded from society . . . from every obligation toward society and state. . . . They may give free rein to their desire for power. . . . Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcast’s organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie’s moral philosophy.”39 In Arendt’s later work, Hobbes continues to be the central figure in her presentation of sovereignty, although the language she uses evolves. Her preferred terminology is no longer that of the “bourgeoisie” but she refers, for example in The Human Condition, to Hobbes’s vision of “a society relentlessly engaged in acquisition.”40 And she holds firm to her claim that Hobbes is the phi losopher who justified tyranny in philosophical argument for the first time. Annelies Degryse goes further, arguing that Arendt saw Hobbes as the father of totalitarianism and, furthermore, what she would later term the social: the dominant mode of modern life which problematically merged the political with the unpolitical, thereby confusing and corrupting genuinely political understanding and action.41 This is perhaps an overly strong claim, but there is unquestionably a link between Hobbesian sovereignty and both of these problematic and interconnected concepts, even if the social is a concept which only becomes fully fleshed out in Arendt’s later thought. Traditionally, Arendt writes, violence is “the most disgraceful of domestic actions” because it has always been considered the “outstanding characteristic of tyranny.”42 Hobbes’s attempt to save violence from disgrace highlights the earliest confusion of power and violence but exerted “remarkably little

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influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own time,” she writes.43 Its influence in our own era, by contrast, is immense. In On Revolution, she underlines the connection between the sovereignty of the people, as that emerged in French Revolutionary thought, and Hobbes’s notion of the social contract. Both demand a contract that resigns power to the government, which “contains in nuce . . . the principle of absolute rulership, of an absolute monopoly of power to ‘overawe them all.’ ”44 Undoubtedly, the idea of sovereignty that Arendt developed through her reading of Hobbes continued to shape how she thought about modern sovereignty for the rest of her career. There is one key conceptual shift that appears as having taken place slowly over many centuries preceding Hobbes, but which is fundamentally necessary to his approach, according to Arendt: a shift from understanding freedom as a state of being or a kind of action to freedom comprehended as will. Hobbes took the latter idea and, combining it with his understanding of the bourgeois forces of modernity, introduced into politics the idea of necessary process: first freedom is placed in the individual I-will, and then (by Hobbes) in the Iwill of mankind and the forces that supposedly drive man. Arendt believed that in the classical world freedom was understood quite differently. The polis was a “space of freedom” in which citizens enacted freedom; freedom itself was understood as a state of action or activity rather than a will-to-freedom. Only when the early Christians (she singles out Saint Paul) discovered a nonpolitical freedom did freedom become a philosophical, as opposed to a political, matter. “Freedom became one of the chief problems of philosophy when it was experienced as something occurring in the intercourse between me and myself,” Arendt claims, and, crucially, “outside of the intercourse between men.” Through Christianity’s notion of the soul, “free will and freedom became synonymous notions, and the presence of freedom was experienced in complete solitude.”45 By contrast, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of the will, Arendt asserts, and, she writes, had they known that a conflict between I-will and I-can could be possible, they “would certainly have understood the phenomenon of freedom as an inherent quality of the I-can, or . . . conceivably have defined it as the coincidence of I-will and I-can; [they] certainly would not have thought of it as the I-will or I-would.”46 Although the shift to freedom as I-will originates in the Christian liberum arbitrium or the choice between good and evil, it is in Hobbes’s work that Arendt again locates the first use of this idea in order to (conceptually) erase freedom from politics. In her Berkeley lectures on Hobbes, Arendt lists four

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distinct concepts of freedom: polis freedom, which is explained as “giving commands—executing and obeying”; Roman freedom, defined as “freedom of movement: space in which I move, which is hedged in by laws and guaranteed through property, i.e. through my owning a certain amount of space”; Christian liberum arbitrium or “freedom of will: of choice between Good and Evil . . . Will understood as desire or appetite” (actually not true freedom, she notes, because the desired object determines desire); and the “freedom of beginning something new: [as in] Augustine, Kant.”47 This final notion of freedom she also characterizes as “spontaneity”; later she would refer to this freedom as the freedom of natality. The Christian reconceptualization is an essential part of the development of freedom. Because will was shown to be so impotent, incapable of generating power, and constantly defeated in the struggle with self, “the will-to-power turned at once into the will-to-oppression [and] was one of the causes why even today we almost automatically equate power with oppression, or, at least, with rule over others.”48 Yet, while the Iwill (but cannot) of Christian freedom begins to corrode true freedom of action, because it predetermines what the will should desire and usually cannot attain, only with Hobbes’s philosophy is freedom wholly swept away, as the dominating spirit of capitalism combines with the idea of will. “All four [ideas of freedom] disappear when Process appears,” Arendt writes, because “there is no longer the question of man being free but of forces which are liberated: either of acquisition or production.”49 Acquisition, she clarifies, is a “devouring process which is to be set free.”50 Process therefore appears in the culture of acquisition but is incorporated in Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty as an inevitable aspect of the modern world, and one that must therefore be managed by politics somehow. For the ruled, it appears when the solitary man looks within himself to find mankind and the forces that now compel him, as part of mankind, to act in certain ways; it appears in the sovereign, who is compelled to act in never-ending pursuit of power in order to control those actions. Hobbes even predates Hegel on this conceptualization of historical process (or progress), Arendt believes, when he claims that “Liberty and Necessity are consistent.” It is in Hobbes, she writes, “and not in Hegel” where “the double-talk about freedom and necessity” first appears.51 “The idea arises necessarily when the process-concept is introduced,” she concludes.52 We can see, therefore, three interrelated features of the idea of sovereignty in Arendt’s analysis of Hobbes that are of par ticular importance for modern politics: his rejection of freedom, the replacement of freedom in politics with a “reckoning with consequences,” and his understanding of the nature of

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power. In moving from an idea of classical freedom, even the idea of will as freedom, to an understanding of freedom as necessity, or dealing with forces or processes (freedom as nonfreedom), we move, first of all, to a political philosophy that has disregarded freedom, even disproven the possibility of freedom. Hobbes’s mechanical understanding of the universe, including the actions of the people who occupy it, transforms politics from an activity which is concerned with freedom to an activity which is primarily concerned with “reckoning with consequences.”53 This is in fact what Arendt marks out as the distinctive trait of Hobbes, his “single-minded insistence on the future and the resulting teleological interpretation of thought as well as of action.”54 Arendt contrasts the Aristotelian idea of philosophy as an investigation into first causes with Hobbes’s belief that philosophy’s purpose was to “establish a reasonable teleology of action.”55 She notes that he even attributes the essential differentiation between humans and animals to the human ability to reckon with the effects of causes.56 Finally, Hobbes conceives of power in modernity as a means to counter or restrain the capitalist spirit and which thus mirrors its qualities. Power is seen as something that we must compete against others to acquire; something that we acquire more of by depriving others of their power. But as we attain power, we desire it to an ever-increasing degree: the desire for power can never be sated. Power is acquired by dispossessing others of power, or controlling others, and those who possess power are jealously and continuously seeking out new ways to extend and entrench their power. These three elements together make up the modern notion of sovereignty as Arendt sees it, that is, as a form of (ill-)justified tyranny. And whatever their justifications, a tyrant necessarily relies on violence to rule.

From Sovereignty to Imperialism Despite locating the first really developed idea of modern sovereignty in the work of Hobbes, his idea of power exerted relatively little influence until our own time, Arendt believed. For her, the early modern period marks the beginning of the breakdown of the tradition of political thought, a breakdown that reaches its culmination in political theory in the nineteenth century. Not Hobbes, but thinkers like Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche stand at the end of the tradition.57 Arendt notes, particularly, Marx’s inversion of “the traditional hierarchy of thought and action, of contemplation and of labor, and of

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philosophy and politics.”58 Given Arendt’s concern with the problematic prioritization of thought over action and philosophy over politics, this breakdown could be seen as a chance to open up new political possibilities. Yet this was not how it seemed to Arendt. Rather, the gradual collapse of the tradition instead opened up a space for sovereignty not only to become dominant but to continuously entrench its dominance. She offers, by way of example, the way in which the concept of sovereignty was transferred, over the course of the French Revolution, from monarch to demos with barely a change in the central concept itself. “Rousseau’s notion of a General Will, inspiring and directing the nation as though it were no longer composed of a multitude but actually formed one person, became axiomatic for all factions and parties of the French Revolution, because it was indeed the theoretical substitute for the sovereign will of an absolute monarch.”59 The end of the “tradition of political thought” and its replacement by an expansionary concept of sovereignty can be seen to shape (but not determine) the political events of the West. The French Revolution, Arendt insists, is not a rejection of ancient monarchical absolutism, merely the transference of the modern notion of absolutist sovereignty to a new host—“the people” understood as one person. Regimes changed but sovereignty remained the same. Arendt is not wholly clear and is arguably inconsistent on how this breakdown takes place, as the back and forth between different events and thinkers illustrates. In part, this might be attributed to her resistance to historical analyses that rest on narratives of either progress or decline. And in part, it is because Arendt is not a historian but a political theorist attempting to explain contemporary politics by drawing on history. As Judith Shklar wrote of Arendt, “representation of the past through the chronological arrangement of all the available evidence struck her as trivial. She had no interest in explaining how something came to be, step by step.”60 She looks at the major events, ideas, and thinkers that seem to her to offer insight into the questions she is interested in answering. This makes it impossible to set out precisely how this breakdown in the tradition and its influence on political practice takes place. What can be said is that, for Arendt, the 250 years that separated her from Hobbes saw a series of interlinked conceptual and political changes. First, a tradition of political understanding with its roots in the ancient world became worn and exhausted. As the tradition began to lose its power, the idea of sovereignty in its modern form was developed (by Hobbes, but also others), and as the older tradition lost ground, this modern political concept grew, developing into an increasingly all-enveloping notion of absolute authority,

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which became embedded into political practice in Europe. To this extent Arendt is consistent in her analysis. She is consistent in one further, important respect—her claim that sovereignty is not simply about the possession of absolute power but that it describes an expansionist (and therefore absolute) power. “On Violence,” for example, written eighteen years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, outlines very clearly the dominance of an expansionist understanding of power in modernity, just as Arendt outlined in her analysis of Hobbes’s thought on sovereignty: the never-ending urge to power and the drive to absolutism and thus violence. It is the expansionist nature of sovereignty—not simply tyrannical rule but necessarily ever-expanding rule—that for Arendt enables the growth of modern imperialism. This is the political reality that Hobbes’s theory prefigures. “Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism,” she writes, and “an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action.”61 With late nineteenthcentury imperialism, expansionism became not just a means to some end but an end in itself, as sovereignty began to move beyond the bounds of the nation-state. The Western administrators of the new colonial holdings were the first, Arendt argues, who “as a class and supported by their everyday experience, would claim that power [sovereignty] is the essence of every political structure.”62 Along with this new perspective on and experience of politics came the notion that politics and political power were identical to violence. These were “functionaries of violence,” Arendt writes, “state-employed administrators of violence.”63 What is unique to imperialist philosophy is “not the predominant place it gave violence, nor the discovery that power is one of the basic political realities.” Rather, Arendt explains, “violence has always been the ultima ratio in political action and power has always been the visible expression of rule and government. But neither had before been the conscious aim of the body politic or the ultimate goal of any definite policy.”64 It did not take long, she argues, before these attitudes were adopted as political orthodoxy by the Western states themselves, in a vital evolution in the eventual development of totalitarian government. While Arendt’s analysis of the elements of totalitarianism are more extensive and complex than could be adequately elaborated here (including elements such as the individualization and atomization of political communities, the development of bureaucracies, and the technologies of states, among others), it is evident that the Hobbesian idea of sovereignty is necessary to the development of totalitarianism. Absolutist and expansionary sovereignty, seen

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first in theory and then in imperialist political practice, corresponds to what is for Arendt “inherent in totalitarian regimes,” that is, “the struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing non-political reality.”65 In totalitarianism’s “claims to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or History from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring,” Hobbesian futurity, the interpretation of politics as a mere “reckoning with consequences,” takes an extreme form.66 Here we see the elimination of freedom as a state of being that Arendt argued had always been embodied in some form in premodern political thought. The present has value only in respect to the future; the political act has value only in respect to some overarching end; neither present persons nor acts have value in themselves; therefore it is impossible for free action to possess any value. “It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule that, far from being ‘lawless,’” she says, “it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws always received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient to these superhuman forces than any government ever was before.”67 However, Arendt writes, because this strictly “rational” scheme is also absurd—there are no laws of history or nature which determine political action—in order to reinforce its authority, the totalitarian regime must undertake a constant process of making the reality that it claims exists in the world. In making a world that does not correspond to reality, and attempting to force politics to follow a model that does not reflect the way that human communities function, totalitarian governments must necessarily resort to violence, and to exert total control, the totalitarian regime must exert total violence. In an age of imperialism, in which politics had come to be understood as violence, in part because of the justification of violence that lies within the principle of sovereignty itself, this leap was not difficult to make.

Sovereignty: The Problem of Modernity Arendt positions the development of the idea of sovereignty and the resulting institutionalization of sovereignty first in European monarchy and then Western democracy, as the root of many of the problems of contemporary politics. The basic issue that she identifies in sovereignty is that it embodies an idea of power as something that can only be possessed or exercised through

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the repression of freedom and the submission of wills. Because sovereignty rests on an understanding of power as essentially a zero-sum competition between individuals, freedom itself is seen to be problematic and something to be controlled or repressed by the absolute power of the sovereign. Once politics is understood as a process of interactions between competitive forces, freedom is excluded from politics, while tyranny is not only justified but necessitated. Sovereignty thus understood opposes the value of plurality in political societies in favor of an ironclad unity; it opposes an idea of politics as a realization of freedom in favor of a politics that is understood as merely a means to an end; and it is premised on an idea that politics is a necessary reaction to certain deterministic forces which are seen to drive human nature and history. Yet, despite the dominance of this conception of politics— politics as sovereignty—in the modern world, there have been moments of opposition, Arendt suggests. Thus, one of the greatest achievements of the American founding fathers was “the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.”68 She points also to the prerevolutionary American political communities which sought to combine power through participation, rather than to institute rule by dividing people into ruler and ruled.69 The dominance of sovereignty over political thought and practice is powerful but not unassailable. Sovereignty is an inherently flawed conception of politics, for Arendt, but it is also at the heart of the most abhorrent form of politics: totalitarianism. Sovereignty is problematic in itself, but also because it has enabled the development of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism is above all else the political event that Arendt is responding to in her work because it epitomizes for her the absolute failure of modern politics. Arendt’s political thought, “is rooted in her response to totalitarianism,” Margaret Canovan writes, reflecting a widely held and well-supported view.70 The freedom that was first abstracted from politics in sovereign theory was excluded from political reality in totalitarianism, removed piece by piece from its victims: political freedoms, civil freedoms, and finally biological freedoms and the right to exist.71 Totalitarian absolutism cannot bear even the presence of potential freedom or the presence of any opposing power, Arendt suggests. “The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves. . . . Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably dominated only under global totalitarian conditions.”72 Totalitarianism’s distinctive

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quality is that it not only destroys freedom in the public realm but also seeks to control, monopolize, and destroy the freedoms of private life. Hobbes’s “lonely” modern man prefigures the way totalitarianism “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of men.”73 Not only politics but reality itself is reconstructed by totalitarian ideology. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism (along with other aspects of her political theory) has been criticized for its seeming disregard for human agency. John Stanley writes, “Arendt pays insufficient attention to the psychology of the totalitarian leaders and instead views these leaders as mere functions of an ideological movement whose very clichés the leaders do not believe.”74 While not discounting the possibility that Arendt fails to strike the right balance in her analysis, her methodology can be rationalized. We cannot afford to discard the elements of our past that shame or frighten us, she insists, “to think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.”75 It is evidently necessary to look beyond the immediate history of Nazism and the psychology of its leaders, because a narrow focus on individuals and immediate and particular realities more easily permits these events and persons to be buried or explained away as aberrations. Without denying the deviancy of totalitarian regimes, Arendt argues credibly that it is more important to understand the features of a world that enabled totalitarianism and, crucially, might again in future. However, while she underplays the importance of individual leaders, Arendt does not deny that their actions are theirs, nor does she reject their culpability, as her study of Adolf Eichmann shows. The problem is not that Nazi leaders are not individually responsible; they are clearly guilty, she stresses, and should be held responsible and punished for their actions. The problem is rather that they lack a sense of responsibility and possess a perverted understanding of politics, which can be understood in part as deriving from larger trends in modern political history and modern political thought. Arendt is concerned with the causes of totalitarianism because those same causes, still present in the world, could lead to totalitarianism again. Its emergence, she writes, was “a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization.”76 The elements that crystallized in Germany and Russia grew out of a politics common to the Western world, a politics of sovereignty which justifies the most violent kinds of tyranny. As she writes in “On Violence,” there is a modern consensus that “violence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power” and therefore (quoting C. Wright Mills) “all politics is a struggle for power [and] the ultimate kind of power is violence.”77 The

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expansionism of sovereign power is part of this modern conception of political power, too, she explains. “According to the traditional concept of power, equated . . . with violence, power is expansionist by nature. It ‘has an inner urge to grow’ . . . in the realm of human affairs power supposedly can sustain itself only through expansion; otherwise it shrinks and dies.”78 It is the expansionism inherent in sovereign politics that develops into different political ideologies and political forms that comprehend politics as tyranny and the pursuit of power, and that can be seen to drive so much of what is wrong with modern politics for Arendt. The post-totalitarian world is still a world of sovereign states where politics is understood as sovereignty, and therefore the threat of some form of totalitarianism politics rising up in future still hangs over humanity.

A Non-sovereign Politics Against and in response to the modern idea of sovereign politics, Arendt developed her own idea of “the political.” Like the prerevolutionary American political bodies, she explains that the pre-sovereign Athenian and Roman polities possessed “a concept of power and law whose essence did not rely on the command obedience relationship and which did not identify power and rule or law and command.”79 Such regimes recognized politics as an activity that does not necessarily depend on hierarchical relationships of unequal power, Arendt believed, and because they understood politics to be an activity of equal participation in power, rule exclusively by violence was not political. Arendt’s alternative to sovereign politics is her idea of the political as a place of action, and even more importantly, a space in which what she referred to as power might be enacted. In contrast to the modern conflation of power with violence, for Arendt, “power” is the operative concept in political action. “In current usage,” she writes, “when we speak of a ‘powerful man’ or a ‘powerful personality,’ we already use the word ‘power’ metaphorically; what we refer to without metaphor as ‘strength.’ ”80 The interchangeability of the two terms is rejected by Arendt, who not only insists on differentiating between the two but sets them in opposition. The modern understanding of power became increasingly conflated with strength, force, or violence in the modern era as the notion of sovereignty gained force. Instead, Arendt proposes an alternative which she believes untangles the activity of power—of which some sense still remains within the meaning of

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the word in our vocabulary—from the ideas of sovereignty and violence that have come to overlay and obscure its nature. Arendt identifies and labels as power a type of associative activity, one which she positions at the heart of politics, which has been increasingly masked through the conflation and confusion of different political concepts. Power is a force that arises between people acting together, Arendt writes. It “corresponds to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert.”81 It exists only when it is active, she argues, in contrast to the strength of sovereign rulers, which may be accumulated through the means of violence and thereby possessed by individuals or groups of elites. There is therefore a prerequisite for plurality in her notion of power, the concurrent equality and difference of individuals in a public realm, in contrast to the rule of one unified sovereign. Power is a potential which arises out of the acting together of many distinct individuals, not the unification of those individuals into one single force or voice. It is “never the property of an individual, it belongs to a group, and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”82 This idea of power depends on Arendt’s understanding of action, defined as the activity belonging to the public sphere, in which politics takes place, and which distinguishes political activity from the other activities of human life, specifically those she terms “work” and “ labor.” Action is the purest form of human activity, in the sense that it is the only activity that takes place between individuals without the medium of things, that is, through direct speech. It is this distinctively human mode of activity that gives politics its unique position in the vita activa. The sphere of labor, in contrast, encompasses activities that take place in the biological sphere of nature and necessity. Action, unlike labor, is not necessary, that is, one can choose not to undertake action in a way which is not possible in terms of the demands of labor: if one wishes to survive, one must, at a minimum, eat, drink, clothe oneself, and so on. Because the activities of action are not concerned with the necessities of bare life in this way, the sphere of action is where human beings are able to exercise freedom as natality: to act spontaneously and without external coercion. They are in this way distinguished from other animals, who exist only in the biological sphere, and so undertake only necessary activities. Individuals are freed, through the spontaneity of action, from the chain of biological necessity that defines human creatures in their natural state. The sphere of work relates to the built world, to the creation of cultural and practical artifacts that enable fuller, happier, and more secure lives. Work is the sphere of fabrication relating to the built world; it is a world-building

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activity. As an activity that is undertaken alone, without necessarily requiring the presence of others, it is a private activity, as labor is. But where labor is a cyclical, never ending, necessary activity, the activity of fabrication takes place for a particular end—it operates according to a consequentialist logic. Action differs from both labor and work because it is neither about the process (as labor is), or the result (as work is), but is valued in and of itself as an expression of meaning as that emerges through speech action. Action is therefore not for the act but is valuable because it realizes the “who” that emerges through the activity of action. It is the living space of meaning in Arendt’s work—dialogical, chaotic, and unpredictable. This tripartite structure encompasses the world of human action for Arendt. Alongside the vita contemplativa, or the life of the mind, this forms the structure of the human condition. Arendt’s motive in conceptualizing human life in this way is to mark out the sphere of the political in order to secure it by understanding what we are doing when we take part in genuine, nonsovereign politics. To do this, she first seeks to clarify the basic types of activity humans are capable of and the logical processes with which they are paired, according to the purpose and form of the activity. She then uses this basic structure as a method of marking out action as the domain of politics, in its purest sense. She thereby prioritizes the aspects of life which her theory of politics relies on: freedom as natality, plurality as equality and difference, and the activity of speech itself. Instead of these principles being embedded within all forms of individual and social life, the activity which is most essential to the full realization of human life in its entirety is marked out as something else entirely, the space in which meaning originates. Politics becomes, consequently, both the highest sphere of life and the sphere from which all that is genuinely important about human life emanates. However, there is an important distinction that should be emphasized between power and action. In The Human Condition Arendt refers to the Latin and Greek words for action, suggesting that whereas the ancients grasped the distinction between different types of action, this has been lost in modern vocabularies. Both languages possessed two distinct words describing different aspects of action, which we can usefully draw on to understand Arendt’s own multifaceted concept. “To the two Greek words archein (‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ finally, ‘to rule’) and prattein (‘to pass through,’ ‘to achieve,’ ‘to finish’) correspond to the two Latin verbs agere (‘to set into motion,’ ‘to lead’) and gerere (whose original meaning is ‘to bear’). Here it seems as though each action were divided into two parts, the beginning made by a single person and

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the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise, by seeing it through.”83 Thus action, in its more typically agonal sense, seems to correspond to archein and agere, while power bears a closer resemblance to prattein and gerere. The former refers to the practice of acting out freely, spontaneously, and individually—thus, at least in theory, coming into conflict with others—while the latter is a more cooperative, politically productive type of free action. The importance of the distinction between the two terms (and their role in Arendt’s political philosophy) can be seen in the difference between Habermas’s “communications concept of power” and Seyla Benhabib’s “narrative model of action,” with the former emphasizing the importance of power (prattein, gerere) and the latter, action (archein, agere), in their respective readings of Arendt. Habermas contrasts Arendt’s unusual understanding of power with Weber’s more conventional definition: “Weber calls this disposition over means to influence the will of another ‘power.’ Hannah Arendt reserves for it the term ‘force.’ ”84 But while Weber understood the legitimacy of power in terms of how it pertains to some particular end or in terms of its consequences, Arendt rejects this in favor of a “communicative model of power,” Habermas argues. For Arendt, he states, what is distinctive about power is that it acts toward “the formation of a common will in a communication directed to reaching agreement.”85 For Arendt, he explains, “the strength of a consensus brought about in unconstrained communication is not measured against any success but against the claim to a rational validity that is immanent in speech.”86 The immanent validity of power is interpreted as the essentially and legitimately political form of activity, and it manifests itself in a selfreinforcing manner, Habermas believes, “(a) in orders that protect liberty, (b) in resistance against forces that threaten political liberty, and (c) in those revolutionary actions that found new institutions of liberty.”87 Benhabib criticizes this approach, arguing that “the term communicative action does not quite capture the conceptual issues that Arendt, as opposed to Habermas, had in mind.”88 Instead, she argues that a “narrative model of action” is in fact closer to Arendt’s intended meaning. “Whereas communicative action is oriented to reaching understanding among conversation partners on the basis of validity,” she writes, “claims raised in speech acts, narrative action, in Arendt’s theory, is action embedded in a ‘web of relationships and enacted stories.’ ”89 Benhabib objects, first of all, to Habermas’s claim that Arendtian action is a process of moving toward rational consensus. Rather than being concerned with, or treating as viable, the validity of

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rationality in Arendtian action, she claims Arendt is more interested in how meaning emerges out of the action that takes place in a public sphere: the production of the “enlarged mentality” or “shared perspectivism” of a political community. Hence, according to Benhabib, Arendt is less interested in the consensus that arises out of action than with the possibilities that arise within action for the mutual recognition of free individuals. As Benhabib points out, Habermas’s critique is problematic, since Arendt’s understanding of human experience deliberately rejects rationality as a universally valid basis of understanding human activity. However, there are aspects of Habermas’s depiction which are more compelling. The communications concept of power he describes trains focus onto key aspects of power present in Arendt’s work. Communicative action, as Habermas uses this term, emphasizes the cooperative aspect of action: the sense in which individuals come together within shared perspectives through a communicative process. Whether the perspective that is arrived at has any “rational validity” beyond this practice does not in itself negate this principle. The two examples illustrate the wider tendency of action-oriented interpretations of Arendt to be directed toward the agonal, or to place more emphasis on the differentiation that emerges within the political sphere. Alternatively, power-focused interpretations tend to look at the incorporation of cooperation or acting together in politics, whether through the construction or emergence of political institutions or through the more diffuse idea of promising. This divergence can be seen to reflect an implicit difference between the meaning of power and action in Arendt’s work. Yet both have their place in Arendt’s work as necessarily connected, but conceptually distinct, practices. Neither can be disregarded or considered to be the lesser partner, as both agonism and cooperation are equally necessary to Arendt’s depiction of politics, although different texts can favor either one or the other. While action and speech are “the two outstanding political activities” or the components from which politics may emerge, power is the actualization of the potential for politics contained in action, and so it is “inherent in the very existence of political communities.”90 There can be no genuine politics without both. Both power and action, it should be noted, are distinct from the meaning of, or reason for, politics, whose “raison d’être . . . is freedom.”91 Power and action are simply the means by which politics is actualized and through which politics functions. “All political institutions are manifestations of power,” Arendt states, “they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”92 Moreover, this understanding

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of power, in distinction to a purer notion of action, as set out above, suggests a deeper integration into Arendt’s political theory of more pragmatic concerns: whereas agonal action relates to the creation of new possibilities of change and freedom, the cooperative potential of power relates to the realization of politics, as well as its preservation and stability (and decline or corruption) over time. It would seem, then, that Arendt’s idea of politics is consensual, cooperative, and takes place through conversation, comprising both argument and agreement. Violence, as it is defined by Arendt, appears to be part of a very different form of activity and is thus an activity which is rejected as not authentically political. “Power is actualized,” she writes, “only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”93

Violence and Power: Oppositional Concepts? Are violence and power therefore oppositional concepts in Arendt’s account? Her most famous contribution to theorizing violence certainly seems to suggest so. Arendt’s essay on violence was written in the closing years of the 1960s and was prompted, as she notes in its first lines, by recent events in American politics. It discusses the rise and evolution of the civil rights movement in its various forms: as a student rebellion against the universities and their rigid bureaucracies and hierarchies and in the black civil rights and Black Power movements. Internationally, the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the USSR is a major, existential concern. But while written as a (largely) critical response to the chaotic situation of late 1960s US politics, the essay also explicitly speaks to wider developments. All this must be seen, she argues, against the background of the twentieth century, a century which came to consider violence as the political norm and in which the development of instruments of violence has reached unprecedented peaks. Arendt’s essay was driven by contemporary concerns as well as by those which permeate her work from the very start: the problem of totalizing violence and its tendency toward totalitarianism. Even in America, a country in which Arendt saw the greatest promise for a revived republican political model, the totalitarian tendencies of modernity impose on political life.

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In “On Violence” Arendt offers a precise theoretical definition of violence. Violence is a kind of strength, she explains. More specifically, violence is the multiplication of the natural strength possessed by individuals through the use of tools. While violence is derived from strength, it supersedes it; it is strength accumulated in the hands of the few or, in extremity, the one. Arendt here contrasts violence with politics: violence is the use of brute force accumulated and controlled by the few, often against pluralistic public activity. Violence is mute, Arendt argues, inherently opposed to speech, and so can only be an essentially private, individual act. It is further distinguished by its instrumental character.94 Violent action takes place in order to achieve some end and so cannot, Arendt asserts, be a meaningful good in itself. The actions of the public sphere can possess intrinsic value, but violence, because it is mute, stands outside the only potential carrier of meaning in Arendt’s framework. Natality and plurality are, for Arendt, the two defining features of human political life, joining together the most elemental individual potentiality with the reality of human equality and distinction. The realm of the specifically political is where, through free action and discourse, a space of shared reality is realized. Whatever actions take place outside this realm of free interactions, such as acts of violence or coercion, or which take place privately, are deemed nonpolitical, strictly speaking, as they do not accord with the basic qualities which distinguish political actions. Violence rejects the equality of Arendt’s pluralism and undermines the natality of the subjected individual; it is a nonpolitical form of activity. This understanding of the political fundamentally rejects the Western political tradition of sovereignty and realist understandings of the political. Two archetypal forms of this tradition, the Hobbesian sovereign and the Weberian state, are both premised on a notion of politics based on contracts enforced through legitimate and necessary coercion. For Arendt, the sovereign state—the modern state—is simply not a political entity. Arendt agrees (e.g., with Hobbes) that political communities emerge through consent, through “binding and promising, combining and covenanting.”95 But the creation of this contract does not, in her conceptual framework, permit the political space to be thereby closed or delimited by strict hierarchical arrangements of power, for example; still less does it legitimate the continued use of unlimited violence by the sovereign for the purpose of maintaining the agreement. Arendt’s theorization of the form of the political domain as produced reflexively and continuously through discourse— rather than arrived at through recourse to universal reason, as the Hobbesian model proposes—cannot legitimize any contract which attempts to close this

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conversation through coercive means. Rather, she claims, the space must remain open to change, the expression of natality, and remain equitably plural in order to remain authentically political. The Hobbesian solution—to institute the absolute, or near absolute, authority of the sovereign to protect the political entity that has been created—is incompatible with this. Both the premises and the outcomes of these two philosophical positions are fundamentally in conflict: the premise of natural law knowable through reason is rejected in Arendt’s anti-foundationalist politics of discursive action; and the ultimate aim of politics as the preservation of peace is replaced in Arendt by the actualization of human freedom. The tyranny of absolute law, and the coercive power it wields in theories of the sovereign state, are for Arendt the antithesis of her vision of an open politics of free discourse. The equal relationships of power in Arendt’s notion of politics are very different from the sovereign-subject relations of power in Hobbesian theory.

Redefining the Borders of “the Political” As we have already seen, most (although certainly not all) scholars writing on “On Violence” have argued that Arendt reveals herself here to fully exclude violence from the political, leading many to critique her seemingly idealistic image of politics and write her off as unable and unwilling to engage with the problems of violence as they invariably arise in the real world. However, there is another way to read Arendt on this question. Her definition of violence, which bears the characteristics of the private sphere, of speechlessness, and of instrumentality, certainly positions violence outside the proper sphere of politics, strictly understood; it does not necessarily position violence against the political. This distinction belies a certain flexibility in Arendt’s theoretical definition of violence—a space in which a more politically oriented form of violence might be found. The ambiguous position of violence in Arendt’s work that exists between her description of violence and her depiction of violence in politics relates to a wider ambiguity in her political theory, and it is here that we might profitably find another way to understand the relationship between violence and politics. There are two central divisions in Arendt’s theoretical writings, most clearly explained in The Human Condition, which are foundational for her thought as a whole: first, the split between the public and private; second, the tripartite division between action, work, and labor that has already been

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briefly outlined. She is not explicit as to how these two conceptual frameworks map onto one another. In par ticu lar, the manner in which politics is constructed and preserved in practice is unclear, as is how this process fits within or emerges out of action, work, or labor, and the public and private. She defines the public sphere as the sphere of speech and plurality, and its counterpart, the private sphere, as the realm of instrumental rationality, the individual, and their inner world. Additionally, there exists Arendt’s tripartite division of the vita activa: action, the sphere of freedom, plurality, and speech; work, the sphere of means-end rationality and worldliness as the individual creative and productive activity of men; and labor, the sphere of the biological, the natural and necessary, and of consumption and economics. Action is a public activity as it requires interactions between people in order to take place, while labor is inherently private, relating to one’s own needs and desires. However, work is more enigmatic. As a mode of action falling between the extremes of free action and necessary labor, it seems to possess characteristics of both the public and the private. Arendt speaks of “isolation, without which no work can be produced,” and argues that homo faber “will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends.”96 Yet she also claims that “homo faber is fully capable of having a public realm of his own, even though it may not be a political realm, properly speaking.”97 Violence in some forms can also belong to this space of work between Arendt’s public and private spheres, understood as a practical phenomenon rather than abstracted idealization. Despite asserting the individualistic, private, and mute nature of violence, she also writes that “neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man’s faculty of action, the ability to begin something new.”98 Some practices of violence also seem to exist within the divide between labor and work, since violence is both inherent in necessary activities of life but also exists in the action of fabricating, the distinctive characteristic of work. More specifically, while violence as a self-contained and abstract concept is defined by Arendt in no uncertain terms in “On Violence,” she undeniably uses the word in a multitude of distinct ways throughout her work more broadly, to describe very different types of action. These forms include the violence of nature as an endless, overwhelming force; the violence of terror, totalizing but humanly enacted, an extreme violence repressing both the public/political

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and the private spheres; and the violence of tyranny, the total suppression of political but not all personal freedoms. A definition of these clearly antipolitical forms of violence is suggested in Arendt’s conceptualization of totalitarianism and terror. Totalitarian violence is unequivocally anti-political, and the unique nature of totalitarian violence is due not simply to the scale of loss of life and violence but to the end it seeks to attain: the total annihilation of a political community as a discrete entity; the destruction of its plurality, its potential for natality, and its capacity to offer immortality through the perpetuation of tradition and history. The radical evil of totalitarian violence is defined as a specifically anti-political evil rather than as a moral evil of the type committed against individuals. This is the kind of anti-political violence Arendt has in mind when she divorces the concept from politics, and thus the relationship or contrast between violence and politics is defined in these terms. Against these distinctively anti-political forms of violence are other forms of violence that are more ambiguous in their relationship to the public and political: the violence of the polis, that is, through law envisaged as boundary, which limits political change and thus freedom and justifies violence outside the protective walls of the city; and the violence of making or fabricating, which involves inflicting one’s will on a part of nature to mold it into some defined form. The making that belongs to the sphere of work may be an individual act, but it is also definitively a creative activity, meaning that violence understood purely in terms of necessity, which corresponds to acts of labor rather than work, must be excluded. As Arendt explains, “the violence which occurs between men who are emancipated from necessity is different from, less terrifying, though often not less cruel, than the primordial violence with which man pits himself against necessity, and which appeared in the full daylight of political, historically recorded events for the first time in the modern age.”99 Such a violence may be nonpolitical, but it is not anti-political as totalitarian violence is. Rather, here it appears as the “prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of the life for the freedom of the world.”100 This violence, positioned within the sphere of work—neither conforming to “action” nor to the natural necessity of the realm of labor—bears a much closer relationship to politics. The action of fabrication is emphatically not the same as “action” for Arendt. However, work is the means by which the worldly space of politics is produced, the physical character of the public realm. As such it is often characterized—including by Arendt herself—as prepolitical. Yet the way in

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which Arendt depicts politics as a continually evolving, self-constitutive practice poses problems in understanding the violence of work in this way. That is, law is not simply imposed by a legislator but is open to continual change by the people who constitute the power of the political body, and territorial borders likewise are subject to change over time. Thus, defining what is political and what is prepolitical becomes deeply problematic if the political and the prepolitical are temporally indistinct, and if the agents of politics and work are the same as well. If the actors who are engaged in “making” the boundaries of the political sphere are the same as those who are “acting” within that same sphere, it becomes extremely difficult to discern which of these activities embodies the essentially political aspect. Without a clear understanding of what constitutes political action, it is also impossible to definitively establish what constitutes nonpolitical action, including acts of violence or domination. The relationship between the spheres of work and political action is of particular interest in understanding the violence/politics relationship because it is here, where the public/political and private/individual converge on one another, that Arendt’s distinctions between different types of action are most ambiguous. Because the violence of political foundation takes place in this conceptual space, understanding the relationship between work and action is key to understanding why Arendt believes some forms of politics may be (to a degree) made, while sovereign politics of the Hobbesian kind, and the violence it entails, may not be legitimately considered political or even prepolitical.

A Political Violence? If it is the case for Arendt, as I will claim, that politics may justifiably involve some form of violence in some contexts—that politics itself does not by definition exclude violence—the notion of politics must necessarily include more than just power and action, because power and action, as defined by speech and publicity, do exclude violence as pure, abstract concepts. I will argue that work, in some senses, can be understood as an intrinsic part of politics as politics is realized in the world. In particular, forms of work activity that produce the tangible aspects of the cultural and historical world are important: history, law, tradition, and other aspects of world captured in the written word, in various forms of art, or in any creative and durable output. These artifacts alone are not political, nor do they hold any meaning in their own

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right. Their relevance to politics emerges through the relationship between the individuals that form the political sphere and their shared understanding of these artifacts. This forms the “living spirit” that makes artifacts meaningful, that elevates them from the position of mere dead objects by connecting them to the world through living interpretation of their place within it.101 Patchen Markell writes, in his 2011 article on Arendt’s Human Condition, of the importance of the concept of work in Arendt’s depiction of the vita activa, and that its centrality has gone relatively unnoticed. But, he argues, it has also been misunderstood in terms of its relationship with action and labor, and thus in and of itself. “The conceptual triad of labor, work, and action is best understood not as a single, functionally continuous three-part distinction,” he claims, “but rather as the fraught conjunction of two different pairs of concepts—labor and work, and work and action—which operate in very different ways and serve quite different purposes in Arendt’s book.”102 The idea of work thus serves as the meeting place for the two pairs of concepts, and so understanding it is imperative to understanding the structure of Arendt’s argument, he contends. Accordingly, “work and not action is the most important concept in The Human Condition.”103 Arendt offers us a less reductive notion of action, Markell suggests, because this understanding of work reintroduces instrumentality back into the sphere of action, or at least into a productive relationship with action. He rejects, therefore, what he considers to be the standard reading of The Human Condition, which understands Arendt to build barriers or separation between the three spheres of the vita activa, and replaces it with a reading that emphasizes the importance of the connection and fluidity of the three spaces via the specific conduit of “work.” He highlights how, particularly in the section on art as a product of work, the language proper to work and action both cross the boundaries that Arendt has formerly set for them.104 The danger of the overextension of work in the modern era that Arendt identifies in her text is thus recast in a more limited and specific manner by Markell. “The substitution of making for acting . . . is problematic in part because it reduces work itself to the production of mere use objects, disarticulating use from appearance—and thus also disarticulating work from action.”105 Work is not purely limited to the construction of use objects, but for its products to be meaningful (i.e., not simply acts of labor) it must have a connection to the space of appearance that action provides. The theme of violence, with its inherently instrumental character, demands an exploration of the role of making or work in Arendt’s thought; like Markell, I argue that the concept of work is central to Arendt’s idea of

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politics in a way that has not generally been recognized. Work and action are positively linked in Arendt’s understanding of the political, and violence as a form of work enters the sphere of the political. Arendt’s understanding of violence, as it is presented across her work, supports Markell’s reading of the political importance of work; conversely, reading The Human Condition and its idea of work in this way enables a coherent idea of political violence to be elaborated in Arendtian terms. - As Markell suggests, reinterpreting Arendt’s idea of work in this way offers the possibility of expanding her notion of politics to encompass more than it has typically been thought to include. That politics can involve violence—that is, that we can engage politically with questions of whether, how, and why violence should be enacted or how it should be responded to—is one way, but by no means the only way, in which a reconceptualized notion of work broadens Arendtian politics against how it is traditionally understood. In line with Markell’s claims, it can be said that Arendt’s public realm of politics has more than one face. It is the space of action and appearances, built from a shared perspective and cooperative power which emerges through a process of agonal interaction. But it also possesses worldliness—material culture, a physical artifice that corresponds to the shared sphere of meaning and which enables it to persist through time, to build the space where power may be realized. “Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men,” Arendt states.106 The capacity for free action therefore requires a worldly space of action to be realized: work and action both feeding into the creation and maintenance of this space. Yet all forms of making involve some kind of violence, Arendt points out. She is explicit on this point, stating that “this element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.”107 She then repeats this almost verbatim in her later essay on authority. “An element of violence is inevitably inherent in all activities of making, fabricating, and producing . . . The building of the human artifice always involves some violence done to nature.”108 Exactly what the nature and extent of this violence might be, and what this means for Arendt’s vision of politics, will be the subject of the following chapters. All this acts to degrade the clarity of the boundaries Arendt builds between the public and the private; action, work, and labor; politics and violence. I am not suggesting that Arendt’s distinctions are irrelevant.

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Distinguishing between the core meanings of these terms—action, power, politics, violence, fabricating, and work—is foundational to understanding politics and the various political experiences these words originate in. “To use them as synonyms,” Arendt argues “not only indicates a certain deafness to linguistic meanings, which would be serious enough, but it has also resulted in a kind of blindness to the realities they correspond to.”109 However, to understand what these concepts mean in practice, one must go beyond an abstract designation of determined qualities and understand the relationships between these various concepts as they are applied to particular historical constellations, as interrelated and reflexive rather than static ideas. One cannot simply theorize politics in the abstract when it is necessarily an ongoing practice, and Arendt’s own utilization of these categories in her political or historical work is the best indication of how she believed they could be used. One might simply argue that Arendt is inconsistent and incoherent in her work. She has certainly been criticized for writing in an unsystematic way, as well as for her supposed idealism and lack of realism. Yet, while her style and methodology are unusual, her range of interests exceptionally broad, and her historical analysis sometimes questionable, throughout her work she holds fast to a common core of themes and arguments. There is a consistency underlying the different analyses of politics she offers in her various works, although they were written in very different contexts. To try to understand Arendt’s work as a whole in this way, incorporating the difficult oppositions within her work, offers an alternative to approaches to Arendt that preference particular uncompromising positions on action and politics, and proposes a more rounded and viable understanding of her political thought as a whole. By seeking to incorporate Arendt’s thinking on violence into her political thought, a more pragmatic, realistic (yet not “realist”) portrayal of politics emerges.

Political Space The notion of political space brings together the oppositional aspects of violence and power in Arendt’s work by incorporating the two faces of politics. It brings together the public, as the enlarged mentality or shared perspective, with the legislative boundaries that also structure the space between people. It emphasizes the space between people—the space for freedom—as being as impor tant to politics as the relationships between people in the political

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sphere, combining to form a psychological and physical space of freedom. As Arendt described it, “to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it: the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”110 Through political space, the human artifice of work and the web of relationships of free action are knitted together. The structure of this space is the structure of politics itself, internally and in terms of political boundaries. The dualism of the political space, and the need for its dual character, is apparent in On Revolution. “The act of founding the new body politic, of devising the new form of government involves the grave concern with the stability and durability of the new structure,” she writes. “The experience, on the other hand, which those who are engaged in this grave business are bound to have is the exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning.”111 Here action is set against durability, and it is the requirement for durability which necessitates the construction of a worldly artifice. The concept of political space thus pertains to the physical space of politics: geographical, institutional, but also in a wide sense the physical spaces in which people within a political community interact with one another. Physical space is integral to the notion of political space—we cannot communicate and perhaps even more importantly “act” without a physical space in which to act, or to act on, according to Arendt—but the term also includes a psychological component. This is clear, for example, when Arendt refers to common sense as a particular way of thinking which is based on discourse in a given political community of which one is a part. Power is without question the driving force of politics in Arendt’s understanding, and agonal action acts as the creative force for politics. But the enactment of power has certain requirements, Arendt argues: a political space to act within; the production of an artificial sphere which equalizes citizens, making meaningful communication and exchange of views on a platform of equal recognition possible. The creation of an artificial space of politics, however, structures and therefore in some sense limits the potential for action. Action alone is not capable of performing such a role, because inherent in action is spontaneity and the unknown—even power is simply cooperative spontaneity. An appeal to political action alone cannot answer the question of what happens when power breaks down, such as in civil wars, and discourse is simply not an option. Nor does it provide any kind of durable guarantee against the breakdown of power. Something is needed that can offer

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continuity and resistance against action. The source of this, as is clearest in Arendt’s writings on the American Revolution, is history mediated through tradition. Whereas action is chaotic and unstable, and power not chaotic but fragile and temporary, the physical space of politics, emerging through work, is an ordered and persistent space. Where action creates and power institutes, the artifice maintains. Thus, political space as institutional structure must be realized not only through the public common sense but also in the sphere of work and through the production of a physical, sustained world of shared political culture. Without this, politics would be not only futile but impossible. All that man has, and all that he is in the world, relies on the continuing existence of the space of politics as both action and work, Arendt argues. “The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.”112 The challenge of politics is therefore in finding a way to combine the two, while retaining some degree of continuity in politics without restricting action to a point where freedom is revoked and the raison d’être of politics lost. This loss of freedom through violence need not be restricted to the most extreme forms of political violence. There are many forms of violence in the world, not simply those of totalitarianism, which Arendt would consider to be anti-political despite being commonplace. Moving from the most extreme example of this—totalitarianism—further down the scale are other forms of instrumental violence in the political realm: that of tyranny or dictatorship (in a more traditional, less totalizing form), and that of sovereignty. Both of these forms of political rule utilize violent means in order to overcome or suppress individual and group action. From the totalizing ideology of totalitarian regimes encompassing control over society, body, and mind, to modern sovereignty mitigated by rights and legislation, there is a huge difference. But the active principle is the same, and it is both antipolitical and fundamentally reliant on violence, Arendt believed. Such regimes pretend to be political, or indeed believe themselves to act in the political interest, but in opposing plurality and natality, they oppose that which is genuinely political. Violence invoked in the act of self-defense is also not a political violence, but neither is it anti-political. In this case, violence is justified in individual terms—for life, rather than public interest, and so it is outside the realm of power. Such a violence may be perfectly justifiable for Arendt on the basis of immediate and personal security, but

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the concern with private interests makes it nonpolitical as opposed to the anti-political, power-negating violence of rule-based, hierarchical forms of political organization. There are, however, a number of ways in which violence may be used that are neither anti-political nor nonpolitical, in theory. This kind of event incorporates aspects of war, rebellion, political constitution, and legal coercion; in certain conditions, I will argue, such events may be and are described by Arendt as incorporating a level of genuinely political violence. In particular, clarifying the role of violence where the locus of power is significantly less clear than in an established political community (and thus violence more likely) offers a position from which to clarify the role of violence more generally. Three examples of such events will be offered in the next three chapters, through Arendt’s work on Jewish politics, on the Greek and Roman polities, and finally on the French and American Revolutions and constitutional processes. Each of these three case studies contrasts Arendt’s preferred (but never ideal) political system or solutions against that of a problematic counterpart: the revitalization of the Jewish people contra the sovereign and territorial ambitions of mainstream Zionism; the Athenian polis of extreme agonism versus the more pragmatic and therefore sustainable politics of Rome; and the American constitutional founding against the social and unpolitical French revolutionary ideology. Each reveals something about the manner in which Arendt envisages a genuine politics emerging and thriving—as well as, crucially, the role of violence within that political framework— while revising some of the myths that have grown up around Arendt and her notion of the political.

CHAPTER 2

The Jewish Army and the Reconstruction of a People

Before Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major work, her writing was dominated by an interest in Zionism and Jewish politics in Palestine, Germany, and the diaspora. This interest is also apparent in Origins, but in the early 1950s she made a distinct and quite deliberate move away from this theme. Arendt’s early and often overlooked work provides an excellent example of what political violence might look like, through her support of the Jewish army in her Aufbau articles of the early 1940s, and her legitimization of such an army through her concept of the “Jewish people.” Her argument for a Jewish army, embedded in the broader context of her work on Zionism and Jewishness in modernity, stands in marked contrast to the sovereign and national form of Zionism that emerged over the 1940s and of which she was sharply critical. From the late 1920s, as anti-Semitism and National Socialism became increasingly pervasive threats in Germany, Arendt turned away from her early intellectual interests in philosophy, theology, and classics toward politics. Her burgeoning interest in political matters was directed through two experiences in the late 1920s: her friendship with Kurt Blumenfeld, then president of the German Zionist Organization, and no less important, her discovery of the work of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century Zionist Bernard Lazare. This twofold engagement marks the beginning of Arendt’s complex relationship with Zionism. Blumenfeld and his followers represented a form of mainstream Zionism that largely focused on a territorial, Palestinian solution, an ideology which owed much to the so-called father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. In contrast, Lazare’s form of Zionism emphasized the popular rebuilding of the Jewish community above the creation of a Jewish state. Lazare’s thought

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would later become the basis for an extensive critique of Herzlian Zionism in Arendt’s work. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, Arendt was willing to support and become involved with the activities of Blumenfeld’s German Zionist Organization—albeit as a peripheral part of the group—while still expressing a preference for Lazare’s form of Zionism. It was her work for the German Zionist Organization that led to Arendt fleeing Germany in 1933 when, as a result of researching anti-Semitic propaganda for the organization, she was arrested by the authorities. Several unpublished essays from the period of her exile in Paris indicate the start of her engagement with contemporary politics through the problem of Jewish politics, most importantly “Antisemitism” and “The Minority Question,” both of which engage with politics on a deeper level than any of her previous writings. However, it was not until after 1941, when Arendt had been forced to flee France for the United States, that she began to publish work on these questions. Her pleas for a Jewish army, a subject on which she wrote frequently for the German-Jewish journal Aufbau throughout the later years of the war, first appeared in 1942 shortly after she began working for the newspaper. The case for a Jewish army dominated Arendt’s writings during the war more than any other topic. It—and not Zionist nationalism—was no less than the solution to the Jewish question: how the Jewish people might be constituted as an independent, unified, political entity that possessed the means to counter anti-Semitism in all its forms and wherever it appeared, including at the hands of the Nazis. The absolute necessity of this army is repeated over and again in the Aufbau writings. To pursue the creation of a Jewish army was “the best of programs, the most correct of decisions,” she wrote.1 “The people have to be organized for battle today” (emphasis added).2 She repeatedly emphasized how the Jewish people must come to comprehend the singular importance of this task for the future of Jewish politics. “During this war there is for us only one single goal in the program that must be achieved if all Jewish politics is not to fail: participation in the war with full and equal rights, that is, a Jewish army.”3 Until the army is realized, she wrote, it must be “the sole mission of Jewish politics.”4 The idea that there should be a specifically Jewish army taking part in the fight against the Axis forces, drawn from both Palestinian Jews and diaspora Jews from across the world, was not unique to Arendt (although her suggestion that the diaspora should be central to this project was unusual). Two of the most prominent Jewish political leaders of the period—Chaim Weizmann and Menachem Begin—were both vocal in their support of a Jewish army.

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Weizmann campaigned in Britain, urging the support of the British government, while Begin was active in America. Arendt deliberately distanced herself from both. For Arendt, the argument for the Jewish army was predominantly that it might provide a means by which Jews might be able to reconstitute themselves as a cohesive community. The Jewish attempt to assimilate, which had grown initially out of Enlightenment ideals of individual equality, was in practice bankrupt as a strategy in Europe. Not only that, but the attempt to assimilate had broken down the communal structures of European Jewry, while Jews were still largely unaccepted as equal citizens by the wider populations they lived within. Arendt opposed Weizmann’s strategy of working with the British on the basis that it maintained and extended the dependency of the Jewish people on another, quasi-imperial benefactor. Yet it was for Begin that Arendt reserved her fiercest ire, describing him as nothing less than a terrorist leader and fascist.5 In 1948, along with other prominent Jewish émigrés in the United States, she wrote a public letter to the New York Times describing the emergence of Begin’s party as “among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time” and calling for “all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.”6 In the Aufbau pieces on the Jewish army, largely written between 1942 and 1944, Arendt actively called for the use of violence by Jews in Palestine and Europe against Hitler’s armies, as well as against other anti-Semites who would seek to harm or reject the rights of Jews. Jews ought to use violence to help themselves, she urged. Jews in Palestine, she wrote, know they can help no one if they do not take up arms on their own behalf “as Jews, in Jewish battle formations, under a Jewish flag.”7 This violence is explicitly described by Arendt as being of a political character. She writes, in 1943, of the “political instinct and cleverness” of the Jewish people (as opposed to the Jewish leadership), which is entailed by their realization that they require an army of their own.8 Furthermore, she is sharply critical of any Jewish politics which adopts a strategy of yielding to force without a fight.9 The Jewish army, as Arendt conceived it, would serve both the immediate and pragmatic needs of persecuted and excluded Jews around the world, as well as forming the basis for a new political solidarity and self-understanding among all Jews. In Palestine, a Jewish army would enable the defense of Jewish communities; moreover, it would enable Palestinian Jewry’s independence from the British authorities. It might also engender distance between the Zionist movement and Britain in a situation where “with each passing day Zionism is being forced into a vassal relationship with Britain.”10 In Germany and

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Nazi-occupied Europe, a Jewish army might join with the Allied forces against Hitler. Such an army—and Arendt does appear to consider these forces part of the same army—could be substantial, not least because Arendt believed that the army would be formed from the global diaspora and not simply Palestinian Jews, thus potentially numbering its troops in the hundreds of thousands.11 Yet even an army formed of Palestinian Jews might feasibly number one hundred thousand soldiers, if a similar proportion of the Palestinian Jews served as did citizens of other states in their respective armies (between 8 and 16 percent).12 Arendt, however, consistently portrays the Jewish army as being composed of Jews from around the world, including those already on the battlefield: “British Jews in the British Army, Palestinian Jews in the Libyan expeditionary corps, Russian Jews in the Red Army, and finally America Jews in both army and navy.”13 The solution to the Jewish question, she insists, “is not to be found in one country, not even in Palestine.”14 It was essential for the greater purpose of the Jewish army that it not be divided, for example into national or local regiments, but rather compose one unified entity. That greater purpose was that they might battle together as Jews, for the freedom of the Jewish people—not as part of a British, Russian, American, or even Palestinian force. Such a force might be deployed, Arendt seems to suggest, anywhere the war itself was taking place. She demanded, for the Jewish army, “participation in the war with full and equal rights.”15 Yet, she recognized a particular need for a Jewish army in Palestine, which would clearly be a major area of deployment for any Jewish army: to leave the yishuv (the community of Jews living in Palestine) undefended and without any possibility of self-defense, she wrote, “may look very realistic in the environs of the Colonial Office in London; everywhere else, and especially in Palestine it looks like suicide, like the destruction of one’s own reality.”16 Particular defensive ends, particularly for Jews in Palestinian territories, come together in Arendt’s vision for the Jewish army with a more idealized claim for a wider engagement in the war for the sake of defending freedom—for Jews, but also collectively, in the same way that other nations were also engaged in a collective battle for freedom. A Jewish army, however, could not be the same as the armies of other nations in several ways, regardless of Arendt’s insistence that it possessed the same claim to legitimacy and mirrored their intended goals. This army lacked the foundation of the nation-state and its orga nizational or bureaucratic elements: where nations might conscript their citizens, it was not even clear who the “citizens” in this case might be considered to be, nor was there any

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leadership with the authority to compel participation. The very fact that this was a nationless army meant that it had to be a voluntary force, as Arendt alludes to multiple times.17 Indeed, the willingness of individuals to voluntarily participate was central to Arendt’s understanding of why the army might possess such importance: it might be a focus for the development of a sense of citizenship. But this poses another question: Who might lead such an army? Arendt offers little in the way of an answer, although she is fiercely critical of existing Jewish leadership including, as noted, many of those leading the charge for a Jewish army. She rejects the supposed authority of what she refers to as “court” or “moneyed” Jews but also the Revisionist movement of Zionism— particularly the Palestinian Zionist paramilitary group Irgun—which Arendt described as a “fascist organization.”18 Arendt considered that the Revisionists had gained a level of control over the Zionist movement that was unacceptable. They had, additionally, been the driving force behind the US-based Committee for a Jewish Army. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then the leader of the more ardently nationalist Revisionist branch of Zionism, had in 1939 asked the British to form a Jewish armed force to participate in the war, a demand taken up, after his death in 1940, by his followers, who went on to form the committee. Arendt was, moreover, largely critical of right-wing Zionism and those she called the “foes of labor.”19 Yet she took issue even with less polarizing leaders—Chaim Weizmann, for example, was an ardent anti-Revisionist.20 One potentially suitable leader was identified, however: Arendt’s own friend and former leader of the German Zionist Organization, Kurt Blumenfeld. “People can be mobilized,” she argued, “when they are addressed by someone who wants to be nothing more than ‘one of the people.’ ” Writing on a well-received speech by Blumenfeld, Arendt wrote that his success was “due precisely to the fact that he spoke not as a demagogue but ‘simply’ as a man of reason. Only a few individuals find the language of the people, and do so only when they know that they are allied with the people—whereas all demagogues, who think of themselves as leaders or members of an elite, are fluent masters of the language of the mob.”21 Only such individuals possessed the authority to command and to inspire others to take part in a Jewish army and ought, Arendt implies, to take the place of the existing Jewish leadership, which was either out of touch, or (in the case of the right-wing Zionist leaders that had recently come to the fore) morally reprehensible. In the event, the Jewish army as Arendt envisaged it would not come to pass. A much-attenuated version was eventually formed as a Jewish Brigade

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within the British Army, although its impact was drastically limited by the fact that it was not created until 1944. Certainly, a Jewish army that might form a foundation for a new politics of a Jewish people did not emerge. Yet even in Arendt’s idealized image, there are problems. The Jewish army is portrayed as a means of unifying a whole people: a highly pluralistic organization encompassing “the people” as such; a means of recognizing who “the people” were composed of before or apart from “the nation.” Yet such a Jewish army is less pluralistic—and thus perhaps less effective in constituting “a people” than it at first appears—due to three factors. First, such an army would be constituted by men, a norm of the time that Arendt willingly perpetuated in the language she uses when she refers to the army. The means by which, or the extent to which women would be drawn into the political entity based on the Jewish army is thus unclear. Given Arendt’s general unwillingness to consider issues of gender in politics, this is perhaps unremarkable. But it is an unanswered question which casts a shadow over the pluralism of the resulting political entity. Second, Arendt does not address the fact that there are recognized cultural divisions between different groups of Jewish people: Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, for instance. She simply overlooks this aspect of Jewish identity. We might suppose that because she does not recognize significant differences between the Jews of the various European nations, such cultural aspects of identity might be similarly discarded. Nonetheless, her failure to address this issue also constitutes a failure of pluralism, in its refusal to recognize key aspects of Jewish identity. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Arendt refers several times to the importance of the Jewish army as a European force. This is often to distinguish it from an exclusively Palestinian force and to emphasize the importance of the diaspora, but it highlights her highly Eurocentric mode of thought—here as elsewhere. The Jews, she writes, as a unified fighting force, must enter the war as a European people, and their politics must be distinguished from the politics of Palestine.22 Later, she would write of the creation of the Jewish Brigade in 1944 that the “real, that is, political significance, of the Jewish Brigade lies in Europe itself. There it may well become a first-rate centralizing force for existing scattered units of Jewish partisans.”23 The emphasis on understanding the Jewish people as a European people clearly excludes parts of the diaspora. What of non-European Jews, in the Middle East, for example, or of course the large Jewish populations in the United States? It might be possible to consider American Jewish populations as an extension of European Jewry, considering the recent arrival of much of the population

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during the war. Even so, as a political entity, the people constructed by a global Jewish army would clearly be a European people, self-evidently excluding those Jews and their descendants who became Americans as much as Jews. Again, the seemingly pluralistic Jewish army and the consequent political entity is considerably more limited than it immediately appears. In some ways, it is clear that Arendt’s own situation is framing these ideas. The archetypal Jew is the German Jew, a clearly European Jew despite, perhaps, their forced removal or exile to foreign shores. Why should such an individual not be recognized as a member of the community of European peoples which they had been so rudely thrust out of? Arendt had been educated in Europe and felt herself strongly to belong to the culture and history of Europe—not that of Palestine, nor indeed the United States. Perhaps, one might speculate, the often hostile reaction of Americans to the many Germans seeking refuge might have colored her assumption that Jews would not be truly American but rather remain European. At the same time, she fails to take account of certain aspects of her own situation, namely her gender, opting to think in a rather stereotyped manner. Despite the clearly gendered nature of military participation and the fact that she herself—like all women—would evidently not be part of the envisaged collective pursuit, this does not appear to have been a concern. Arendt’s language around the Jewish army shows that she intended the entity to be pluralistic. In her work on the Jewish army and the Jewish community she believes might coalesce around such a force, Arendt employs the terminology of “the people,” and she does so against and as a critique of contemporary Jewish leadership in Europe and America that does not, in her view, represent “the people.” Yet, in her lengthy exposition of and case for the Jewish army and what it might entail for Jewish solidarity beyond the immediate defense of the Jews, it possesses a more exclusive or even divisive character than immediately appears. These various aspects together pose the unanswered but critical question of who must take part in a political community if it is to be considered legitimate. This question arises later in Arendt’s writings when she discusses race and political belonging in the American context, specifically after the American Revolution, when the founders are considered to have produced a truly political community, despite the exclusion of black and Native Americans (not to mention all women and large sections of the white, adult male population). Total inclusion is apparently not necessary for the creation of a legitimately political community according to Arendt, and so it might be asked, if that was the case in America,

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might it not also be the case for the Jewish people? Thus the extent of the Jewish army and the resulting Jewish people’s pluralism might be questioned, even if Arendt’s intention is to be inclusive and pluralistic. The Jewish army is not only an example of Arendt praising and indeed making a firm argument for the use of violence, but an exemplary case of her describing violence as a political act and, in this situation, an act which is essential for Jewish politics. In “political battle,” she argued, “you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.”24 And the battle for recognition that she refers to here emphatically depends on the use of violence. She considered this to be true for Jews in Palestine, who “know that they can help neither themselves nor the British if they do not take up arms for themselves, as Jews.”25 But equally, it was the case for Jews around the world. Jewish people must be “prepared by the hundreds of thousands with weapons in hands to fight for their freedom and right to live as a people,” and can overcome anti-Semitism “only if we battle . . . with weapons in our hands.”26 The recognition of the Jewish people as a people required the use of violence in a Jewish army. Conversely, the act of participation in violent action depended on the self-realization of one’s own membership in that group.27 Recognition as a political grouping and participation in violent battle are here intimately interconnected. Arendt believed this approach could succeed precisely because it took the use of force seriously, where the Jewish politics of the recent past refused to. “To the extent that one can speak of Jewish politics at all,” Arendt writes scathingly, “it clings to the basic evils of liberalism with a determination that might be of value in a better cause. Its strategy is to yield to ‘force’ without a fight, and its tactic is mindlessly to sniff out the path of least resistance.”28 The Jewish army, as she defines it, not only looks like a rather conventional army in its use of violence, but moreover, Arendt’s argument for it might seem to appeal to an ideal of the Jewish nation, even Jewish nationalism. Yet Arendt’s rationale for the army was more unusual and not, as some have suggested, nationalistic.29 In fact, the idea of Jewish politics that her work conveys comes out of a dual critique: of historical nationalism and what that has meant for the Jewish people, and of contemporary Zionism premised on the idea of the nation. First, it is essential to realize that Arendt’s argument for the use of violence in this case is not related to self-defense, that is, the right or need to fight back in the face of immediate threat to life. While George Kateb rightly points out that in Arendt there is a “tacit and . . . untheorized notion of a right of self-preservation, violent where need be,” this is not how she justifies the

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Jewish army.30 This may seem strange given the context in which Arendt’s work on the Jewish army was written and the very real threat to individual life, as well as communal existence, that European Jews faced. But when Arendt began writing in Aufbau on the Jewish question, the true extent of the threat to Eu ropean Jews was not widely known. While Arendt was aware from personal experience and the experience of friends and associates that Jews were being persecuted and threatened, and even killed, she only became aware of the Holocaust in 1943, to her total horror and disbelief. Instead, the Jewish army is envisaged by Arendt as a method by which to produce a “people.” The purpose of the “Jewish army . . . [and its] positive participation in the war” was “the national liberation of the Jewish people.”31 Indeed, “the struggle of the United Nations will remain incomplete,” she argued, “as long as those nations are not prepared to sit at a table with the pariah of all peoples and to include it in the ranks of those on the battlefront.”32 What matters for Arendt about the Jewish army is not simply its functionality as an army but its function in realizing a political people through their own self-actualization, which comes about by their taking part in an activity of shared power, in order to experience the reality of power and thereby understand that it was within their grasp. While the category of power, as Arendt later defined it, had not yet been made explicit in her work, the idea of the Jewish army clearly shows the importance of this as yet indeterminate notion, as something that embodies the shared activity of a people as opposed to the authority of a leader. Already this plays a central role in her conceptualization of a legitimate political entity. And while the concept of the Jewish army is not wholly divorced from existential concerns, it is not the instrumental importance of violence as force or the reinforcement of authority that is emphasized here, but the importance of the army as a community grouping, which almost incidentally utilizes violence to achieve not just a par ticular end but, through that end, a shared sense of purpose and commonality. The value of the army, and the violence it necessarily entails, is primarily symbolic, not instrumental (although such violence is also instrumental in nature), and it is precisely this fact that makes violence under its auspices political for Arendt—instrumental violence alone cannot make an action political. This does not in itself explain or justify how violence may be used for these political purposes, given Arendt’s later rejection of violence from politics, but it does position her idea of the Jewish army more clearly within a specifically political context, or rather, it portrays it as an essential aspect in the creation of Jewish politics. Thus, the case can be made that this depiction

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of political violence is indeed genuinely political, not prepolitical, and that its political nature can be understood in terms of making a people.

A Jewish People The idea of the Jewish people was Arendt’s response to the modern history of Jewish persecution and exclusion. Since the Enlightenment, Arendt believed—and largely as a result of it—the Jewish people had lost their sense of selfhood through failed attempts to assimilate into the various nationstates of Europe. Individuals, Arendt writes, are not isolated units and cannot be understood as such, but are the product of preexisting traditions and communities. Communities create and perpetuate customs, beliefs, and a shared world, and all individuals are born into such a shared world of some kind. Jews of the Enlightenment era, and in the centuries following, rejected this truth in favor of a notion of individualism that promised them toleration and equality, a social and economic equalizing of the Jewish people with the other communities they lived beside. Yet in doing this, Jews began to reject the basis of their own difference, a difference produced both internally (culturally) and externally (in recognition, or in the case of the Jewish people, prejudice). Enlightenment individualism recognized only the individual, not peoples, and hence was simply a new form of cultural absolutism, one which in practice results in the cultural and political dominance and legitimization of the already dominant tradition. The only difference was that now the Jewish people, in rejecting their own tradition, accepted this status quo. This not only led to a condition whereby individual Jews negated their own cultural identity in favor of a rationalized equality that did not exist, but resulted in a deeply worrying political state. Anti-Semitic prejudice did not evaporate with Enlightenment ideals but in fact (for reasons that Arendt examines in Origins) increased exponentially over time. The Jews, at least those who had attempted to assimilate, were therefore left in an impossible position: trapped between the desire to assimilate and to reject the group identity of Jewishness, but also unable to assimilate because of the continuing identification of Jews as Jews, and furthermore, of Jews as undesirable. The assimilated Jew, or parvenu, in Arendt’s phraseology, was not even able to defend themself, as a Jewish person, against anti-Semitism because they had rejected their self-identification as Jewish. There was a drastic problem of recognition and failure of recognition, where the external

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recognition was unaligned (tragically so) with the personal identification of assimilated Jews. Over time, this led to the breakdown of Jewish communities, Arendt believes, and accordingly a growing inability of Jews to recognize and thus defend themselves as a Jewish people or political entity. Margaret Canovan’s work on Arendt’s later writings on the nature of a people and the different ways this is conceptualized in Arendt’s work is helpful here. While Canovan primarily uses Origins and On Revolution, some of the ideas she outlines are also revealed in Arendt’s earlier work of the 1940s. Canovan differentiates the people, a genuinely political community, from the nonpolitical Arendtian entities of the mob, the masses, the tribe, and the starving multitude. “What makes the difference between belonging and non-belonging to the People is whether or not one shares a human ‘world,’ ” Canovan explains.33 The people have a greater claim to respect, she continues, because thanks to this shared world, they can act as one while maintaining plurality and distinctiveness. They can be mobilized more successfully in favor of the long-term common interests of their public world, and finally, they have access to multiple perspectives through reality, which tends to refute the power of totalizing ideologies.34 The Jewish people might become a people if they can constitute a shared world around which to organize themselves, and the route through which this might occur, Arendt thought, was the Jewish army, envisaged as “the living will of a majority of the Jewish people to join the battle against Hitler as Jews . . . under a Jewish flag.”35 The historical trajectory Arendt depicts, resulting in the contemporary situation of the Jewish people, is one in which the idea of a cohesive Jewish people had been increasingly diminished through assimilation, both by Jews themselves seeking to escape the social stigma they suffered, and by the influences of liberal Enlightenment individualism on attitudes toward Jews. For Arendt, Dagmar Barnouw writes, “the failure of assimilation was the coresponsibility of the Jews because, like most Germans, herself included, they had been excellent Germans and mediocre citizens.”36 Arendt outlines a further turn in the story, however. Assimilation and liberal notions of equality provoked racist backlash against the Jews. As the various legal barriers of exclusion relating to Jews were dropped, a slew of social barriers and prejudices were made visible and exacerbated by the growth of nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth century. With the rise of nationalist theories of natural racial superiority and hierarchy, the Jews had been transformed into a now supposedly biologically defined entity, thus making it both impossible

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to escape the fate into which they were born and simultaneously impossible to accept that fate, given the status of the Jews in this scheme as inferior to others. This evolved gradually over many decades, with progressive assimilation coming up against more conservative opposition, and biological racism vying with older social and religious prejudices. But both Enlightenment individualism and nationalism had the effect of diminishing the status of the Jewish people as a people. Enlightenment liberalism assigned value to the individual rather than the community, in practice resulting in the dominance of the non-Jewish cultures (e.g., German, French) that Jews were being asked to assimilate into. Meanwhile biological nationalism portrayed the Jews in a wholly different light. First, the Jews were reformed, in theory, into a unity— not a unity of power but a natural and thus inescapable unity. The second aspect of nationalism is its inherently hierarchical nature: that in relation to the non-Jewish-majority European nation, the Jewish nation took on a necessarily lower position, a supposedly natural position of inequality. Hence the Jewish people’s status as a free people possessing plurality and orga nized around a shared world was undermined. While assimilation undermined both internal and external notions of Jewishness—that is, Jewish selfperception or recognition of the Jewish people as a community, as well as the external undermining of the Jewish people as a valid grouping—biological or nationalistic racism evidently only operated against the Jewish people, as a category imposed by non-Jews on Jews. But both acted to undermine the recognition of the Jewish people, whether internally or externally. Arendt’s solution to this was a form of Zionism, but not necessarily in a (primarily) territorial or national sense. Rather, Jews must be reconstituted as a people, and for the first time take their place among others as a political people with a genuinely public sphere of action. Furthermore, the solution to the problem of Jewish non-politicism must be one which encompasses the diaspora, not merely those Jews who choose to migrate to Palestine. In the modern era, Arendt believed, the necessity of this had become ever greater as the social, psychological, and political pressures on the Jewish people increased. Yet the rise of radical anti-Semitism and the increasingly evident impossibility of assimilation in many nations also provided an opportunity: a chance for the Jewish people to realize the failure of assimilation and reject it in favor of some other, better political option. Along with the possibility of reconstituted internal recognition, the chaos of European politics also brought with it the possibility of a new constellation of peoples. “The chances are now very great for a new orientation

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of Jewish national politics,” she wrote. “We can expect more from this solidarity [with other European peoples] than from any protections granted us in the past.”37 Thus, external recognition might too be feasible in the near future. The conditions provided not only the opportunity but the pressing need for Jews to constitute themselves as a political community. Arendt’s argument for a Jewish army must be understood in this context. The Jewish army was not primarily for the purpose of taking part in the war in order to aid the Allies. It was, for Arendt, primarily a route by which Jews—the ordinary, poor, and excluded rather than the wealthy or powerful—could take part in a public, Jewish attempt at identity reconstruction, and through which all Jews, whether fighting or not, could identify with an active, Jewish political community that stood up for itself. Later, Arendt would use very similar terms to describe the Warsaw ghetto uprising and those who fought there to “salvage ‘the honor and glory of the Jewish people.’” In doing so, Arendt argues, “they ended the pariah existence of the Jewish people in Europe and, by claiming equal rights, joined the ranks of other European peoples in the struggle for freedom.”38 A Jewish army, carrying out a similar task on a grander scale, was not self-defense per se but a political defense of Jewishness itself and a rejection of the historical negation of Jewishness that had occurred through postEnlightenment assimilation. This is why Arendt emphasizes that “when one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”39 Externally, this also reveals the Jews as an independent people to other peoples of the world, including their allies, showing that they are a people to be reckoned with and who deserve recognition. The Jewish army, as Arendt saw it, was a chance for the Jewish people to take their place in the European community of nations. The argument is not about what Jews are directly fighting for (that is, life or in selfdefense), but about what can emerge through this activity. Thus far, the reasons outlined by Arendt for why Jews ought to seek to take part in the war as part of a Jewish army have been inward looking: related to the promise of restoration of a Jewish community. In part, the pressure of anti-Semitism in the world demanded such a restoration in order for Jews, like members of other peoples, to be able to take part in politics. But the question remains as to why such an engagement needed to be violent, to take the form of an army. Arendt’s emphasis on violence and the need for Jews to bear arms is also a response to the other part of the historical story she tells about the Jewish people: their lack of recognition by other peoples. The Jews were not recognized as an equal, independent people in terms of

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Enlightenment thought or the modern liberal ideology that was rooted in it, and they were not recognized as an equal people (or nation) by anti-Semites. Yet, for Arendt, a people’s identity was not simply internally or self-constituted. In an increasingly globalized world, the identities of peoples were necessarily constrained and, in some ways, partially defined by how they are understood by other peoples. This was particularly the case for the Jewish people and their position as a people integrated within other peoples or nations. The formation of identity of a people is both internally and externally constituted. Against the historical background and the contemporary realities facing European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, it was quite clear that radical action was necessary to make others take notice, to attain the degree of external recognition that was required for the Jewish people to be identified as an equal people worthy of respect. There is a psychological and a pragmatic aspect here. On the psychological level it was necessary for Jews to feel themselves to be seen and understood as equal to other peoples. And on a pragmatic level, the only way for Jews to be noticed by other nations was through taking up arms and taking part in the political action taking place in the world around them.

Arendt’s Critique of Zionism However, the purpose of recognition alone is not enough to justify violence, and Arendt’s critique of mainstream Zionist ideology over this period makes this point abundantly clear, as well as outlining what would be required for its political justification. By the mid-1940s, she came to reject and move away from her earlier stance of qualified support for Zionism. Through understanding her rejection of Zionism and the violence that occurred prior to and during the creation of Israel, the limits of political violence in her thinking are further clarified. Thus, it is useful to contrast Arendt’s argument for a Jewish army with the contemporaneous critique that she made of Zionist violence as it emerged concretely in Palestine and later, Israel, and which became increasingly widely ideologically justified in mainstream Zionism through the immediate influence of the right-wing Revisionists, and the longer-term influence of the legacy of Theodor Herzl and his late nineteenthcentury writings on Zionism. This comparison firmly delimits where Arendt believes violence may or may not justifiably be used in politics and thus where violence is nonpolitical, or in this case, anti-political. Where there is no “people,” violence cannot be political.

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Arendt’s relationship with Zionism was complex. In one sense, she praised Zionism for its role as the only mass movement that took the question of Jewish politics seriously, “the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.”40 Yet Arendt was also critical of what she saw as nationalist tendencies in Zionism, inherent in the writings of Herzl, which had been so influential for the foundations of the movement.41 For Arendt, nationalism and the violence associated with it exemplified an unacceptably anti-political form of violence in what is supposedly the political sphere. Aspects of this critique were developed prior to Arendt’s work on the Jewish army, although, from the mid-1940s onward, her criticism became distinctly sharper and she more openly defined herself in opposition to mainstream Zionism. In an undated essay written between 1938 and 1940, she wrote in reference to Zionism that the “successor to the failure of bourgeois assimilation is a failed bourgeois nationalist movement.”42 And throughout the period when she was writing on the Jewish army, she was an outspoken critic of the branch of Zionists known as the Revisionists, criticizing them for their “policy of terror in Palestine.”43 Jabotinsky’s Revisionists promoted a model of Zionism based on a strong, independent nation-state, the right of all Jews to the Palestinian lands, and the necessity of Jewish armed force against the Arabs and the British. The Revisionist movement thus placed great weight on the political value of violence for the creation of the Israeli state. This emphasis, and the rationale for violence, was carried over into their calls for a Jewish army. Up to 1944, Arendt had been broadly supportive, although not uncritical, of the mainstream Zionist organizations. However, in 1944, at its Atlantic City conference, the American Zionist Organization, the most powerful and influential voice of Zionism, adopted the Revisionist program as its own. Arendt, accordingly, broke with mainstream Zionism. She would never return, instead moving toward the binational and federalist ideas of the peripheral Zionist thinker Judah Magnes later in the 1940s. Yet the Revisionists, like Arendt, campaigned for a Jewish army and for the reconstitution of the Jews as a political entity in the form of the Israeli state. Why then did Arendt so strenuously object to this kind of violence? The Arab enemy in Palestine, after all, also wanted to evict and eliminate Jews from the Palestinian territories. On the occasion of a visit by Menachem Begin to the United States in 1948, she called for the wholesale rejection of his Revisionist party and philosophy.44 The reason

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is simply that for Arendt, Revisionist ideology and political action was unacceptable because it rejected what to Arendt was central to politics and because of that was anti-political in its assumptions and intentions. Revisionism was simply Jewish nationalism for Arendt. Thus, Arendt claimed, the Revisionists believed that nationality was premised on some kind of natural substance and took part in the hierarchizing of peoples that went along with such views, as much as any other nationalist thinkers or politicians did. They adopted the idea of a nation as a unitary entity, based within and dependent on a defined territory ruled by a sovereign authority—a nation-state in the traditional mold. Hence, power in the Arendtian sense is absent from this idea of politics because it is replaced by the authority of the sovereign, which is enforced through coercion. Aspects of these nationalist ideas, Arendt believed, were implicit in Herzl’s Zionism, which had demanded a sovereign state for the Jewish people. Herzl’s legacy, Arendt believed, was that “the ultimate goal of Jewish politics is the normalization of the conditions for the Jewish substance.”45 The “Jewish substance” idea was a problematic aspect of Herzl’s work now emphasized through the activities of the Revisionists to the detriment of the more positive, genuinely popular aspects of his Zionism and the early promise the Zionist movement held as a broader, more diverse movement than it would later become.46 “Sad as it must be for every believer in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the fact is that a political history of Zionism could easily pass over the genuine national revolutionary movement which sprang from the Jewish masses,” Arendt wrote.47 The central problem Arendt identifies here is that Revisionist Zionism had no concern for the creation of a genuinely political people based on plurality and power as that arose through a dialectical web of interactions, responses, and mutual recognition within a polity, and the equally important interactions and recognitions that must take place between one people and others in an increasingly globalized world. Instead, Revisionism operated within the problematic assumptions of sovereign and national politics, finding a place for the Jewish nation within this framework through the enactment of violence against others. The difference between Arendt’s notion of the Jewish army and the aims of nationalist Zionism, as she saw those, is clearly neither the presence of violence or call for violence, nor an argument for a Jewish state or polity of some kind. The difference, instead, is what the Jewish nation looks like and whether it is genuinely political: whether it operates on the basis of popu lar power, a power that must be self-conscious to endure. “War demands not only a

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horrible readiness to kill, but also the readiness to die,” Arendt argues. “But you can be ready to die only when you know for certain why you are fighting, and only when you are a full-fledged citizen of the community that embodies that ‘why.’”48 An understanding of that “why” was essential if the right kind of war was to be waged—not a fight against an enemy but a fight to constitute and protect one’s own political community. The two struggles went together. “We can do battle against antisemitism only if we battle Hitler with weapons in our hands,” Arendt writes. “But this battle must in turn be waged on the basis of certain theoretical insights whose consequences we wish to make a reality. The first of these insights is that we enter this war as a European people, who have contributed as much to the glory and misery of Europe as any other of its peoples.”49 When she argues that the Jewish army needs a “why,” and insists that the Jewish people must enter the war as a people like any other, she is arguing more than anything else for their recognition: internal self-recognition as a people, and external recognition as an equal people among others. This can only come about, she believed, through action in the sense earlier set out, and for the Jews, in the specific circumstances of the early 1940s, by also utilizing violence as a medium through which to express their existence as a people— as a way in which their voices might be heard. Hence, the argument for politics as power based on a foundation of plurality is here brought very close together with an argument for violence, in which power legitimates the community and the pursuit of community justifies violence. While Arendt uses the language of the Jewish “nation” in her articles in favor of a Jewish army, her critical writings on the history of Jewish politics and the rise of anti-Semitism, and on nationalist, Herzlian Zionism, suggest she does not mean to use the term in the traditional way. Indeed, a key aspect of what I have referred to as her argument for the reconstruction of a Jewish people via the means of a Jewish fighting force is that we must reject nationalist Zionism and the ideal of the nation. The premise of her arguments for a Jewish army and against Zionist nationalism is the same: a rejection of the idea of a natural or sovereign nation in favor of a participatory and pluralistic movement. She rejects top-down politics relying on coercion in favor of a bottom-up politics of the people that utilizes violence in a more democratic manner. This connects to her much clearer rejection of the idea of the nation in her later work. Despite the terminology used here, in fact there is no inconsistency— Arendt is already using the terminology of “the nation” in a sense that is all her own (while also using the term in its more recognizable sense to critique). She struggles to find the language to convey her ideas, yet the substance of her

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argument clearly suggests two very different ideas of nation: one pejorative and referring to a nationalist, territorialist and sovereign nation-state, one politically positive and akin to the concept of the people used here.

The Jewish Army: A Space for Political Action? It could be argued that what Arendt envisages to be taking place in this process is not political action proper but rather a precursor to political action. In justifying violence in the context of a Jewish army that brings Jews together as a people, is Arendt describing political action or an activity of a prepolitical nature? Are those who participate in a Jewish army simply violently carving out a space in which the Jewish people could then become a political reality? In the case of the Jewish army, a division between the two activities cannot be neatly applied. The prepolitical activities which precede the political community are an important part of the process of creating politics, in this analysis. And this activity cannot be considered to be exclusively within the domain of work in its more limited sense but is a public and participatory process. The notion of the Jewish people that Arendt uses here—and indeed which later informs her political thought more generally—significantly complicates the separation between work and action. The Jewish army is not simply justified by its being for a concrete end, such as success in war, but rather by its potential for the self-realization of the Jewish people as plural, free, and equal, and their recognition by others as the same. The purpose of the Jewish army, in other words, is not aligned with any outcome beyond the realization of these facts by the fighters themselves. Of course, their purpose is to create a space for politics, the means of which is to join the fight against fascism and totalitarianism, through which the Jewish people might achieve freedom on the same basis as other peoples. And for this reason, the creative, quasi-political work aspect of what the Jewish army is doing cannot be excluded from the clearly public, political action that Arendt believes could occur through such a course of action. In terms of what Arendt understands to be going on in the creation and actions of such an organization, this looks very much like politics. The main arguments Arendt offers for the Jewish army—self-realization and recognition—are distinctly political practices, and recognition is inextricably bound up with the practice of violence in this situation. Thus, Arendt writes: “As Jews we want to fight for the freedom of the Jewish people, because ‘If I am not for me, who is for me?’ As Europeans,

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we want to fight for the freedom of Europe, because ‘If I am only for me— who am I?’ ”50 Violence is being specifically proposed as a means by which to achieve recognition, that is, to facilitate speech and freedom rather than to undermine it. The Jewish army, in many ways, is seen to be a space in which political action might take place. In these writings, then, whether or not violence is justifiable in political terms or whether it is anti-political depends on the nature of the action that motivates violence. Yet this idea is certainly not limited to this period of her work. As she later wrote: “Every thing depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience—to laws, to rulers, to institutions—is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.”51 Power itself, while not a “means,” is the “the very condition enabling people to think and act in terms of the means-end category.”52 This is why, Arendt says, “power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities,” but does need legitimacy: it must be genuine power, not “rule” as she defines it.53 Violence, on the other hand, cannot have legitimacy in itself but can be politically justified if it is backed by power and for public/political ends. These later statements cohere with Arendt’s arguments for the Jewish army and explain why she feels she can plausibly and coherently make a political argument for the Jews’ use of violence against their enemies while at the same time rejecting the violence of the Revisionists and later, that of the Israeli state. Zionists sought to create Israel as a nation-state in the mold of other nation-states, that is, a state based on rule and subjectification, not one built on the principles of agonic action and power-driven consensus. Only when power is behind violence can violence potentially be valuable—when private interests are not involved. “Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with ends and means has taken place.”54 Politics involves stepping outside the individual into the public, stepping outside of fear, and having concern in that sphere for the world, not the individual. It is this essential connection with power that sets Arendt’s understanding of political violence apart from understandings in the realist mold, from Hobbes to the present day. Political communities organized on the principle of sovereignty are fundamentally problematic for Arendt, as we have seen. But what does it mean to say that a community based on power is legitimate, and that the violence it utilizes is politically justifiable, whereas a political entity founded not on power but rule is illegitimate, and its violence unjustified? What justifies the

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violence of power against, for example, the violence that is usually accepted as inherent to the nature of the state, or the extreme violence of totalitarianism? Both of these are, for Arendt, illegitimate and undermine the practice of politics itself. John McGowan’s claim that Arendt’s distinction between types of violence is on the basis of their connection to reality can therefore be taken further in relation to these questions. It is not only the practice of terror which lacks a connection with reality, but misplaced ideas of violence, such as that practiced within the modern politics of rule, where power is missing as an active practice. The enactment of politics—the process by which a group of people become a people—is an act with profound existential value. The ongoing practice of power by which this takes place produces a sense of shared meaning, a reality which emerges through the mutual understanding between self and others within a community, the common sense. The common sense that emerges through the interchange of perspectives when people recognize one another on a political level, as plural, both equal and different, is what enables a shared reality, the joint meaning that underpins not only the political world but ultimately the world of every individual, to a significant degree, because that rests on a common world. This common sense confers political legitimacy for Arendt because it rests on our irrevocably human condition of plurality and natality. “The reality of the public realm,” Arendt writes, “relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised.”55 Common sense begins with the sharing and interaction of perspectives, which then become a part of each individual. This kind of shared imagination provides perspective, a kind of distance from oneself: it both distances our individual thoughts from those of others—that is, we come to understand that we are not all the same—while at the same time providing a bridge to other ways of thinking. “Without this kind of imagination,” she argues, “which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have.”56 Arendt has in mind here not a general will or identical understanding, but envisages this public common sense existing between people in a contested, dynamic manner. It is “inter-est” which keeps people together, that which is between people, as she argued in her reply to Eric Voegelin on his review of Origins in the early 1950s. Common sense requires a shared focus on a common or public thing, not necessarily an identical attitude toward it, but a sense of care and responsibility toward the public, the “common

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interests [or] . . . common ‘consent’ which, according to Cicero, constitutes inter-est, that which is between men, ranging all the way from material to spiritual and other matters.”57 As Kateb argues, authentic politics is the space where the existential value of humans may be realized.58 Because the uniqueness of humanity is rooted in natality, and because this may only emerge through equal discourse in conditions of plurality, this is why only politics that takes place through a process of power may be considered legitimate politics, and why the actions that result from that process may be considered legitimate. In practice, of course, recognizing where this power dynamic exists and to what extent a political system is legitimate, or where power is absent and thus illegitimate, is difficult and invariably contested—as much as any legitimization of political action is. These various elements thus may form a cohesive, although always changing, political system. Mutual recognition of the existential qualities of other individuals is what enables the creation of meaning in human life, a meaning which is connected with the reality of the human condition. Furthermore, this meaning is the basis on which practical politics is built and maintained, including, crucially, the creation of the political space. In turn, this space perpetuates the living meaning produced through action and power, maintaining this space of meaning. If politics becomes detached from power, however—a condition which sovereign states, necessarily based on violence, tend toward—this system breaks down. The evolving, living meaning, the common sense Arendt refers to, stagnates as it becomes detached from the people, or in other words, politics then becomes disconnected from the reality of plurality and natality, and invariably evolves into the rule of the few. This is why recognition of human dignity plays such a vital role in Arendt’s politics: it is the connection between individual meaning and understanding and shared, political reality and power. Arendt’s very early work charting the life of the eighteenth-century Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen illuminates the interplay of meaning with reality, of other with self, and the critical role recognition plays in this. It illustrates the position of the Jewish people in the twentieth century and helps to explain why violence may be seen to be justifiable and even necessary for political purposes, when the recognition necessary for politics has either broken down, or never existed in the first place. Rahel Varnhagen is a story about what it is to be a parvenu or pariah. The former describes a Jewish individual who rejects their Jewish background and Jewishness in order to fit into society; the latter refers to those Jewish individuals who did not seek to reject their heritage but

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rather who simply accepted their rejection from German, non-Jewish society. Varnhagen sought social success and acceptance, struggling to overcome the social and psychological barriers to her recognition that came with being a Jew in eighteenth-century Germany. After a lifetime of mixed success, Varnhagen, at the end of her days, came to accept her Jewishness and even to love that part of herself, despite the trials she had endured as a result. For Arendt, someone in Varnhagen’s position ought to adopt the position of pariah. It is the only humanly acceptable answer. The pariah, while socially limited (and therefore politically limited), at least held true to their own (Jewish) reality, whereas the parvenu, in rejecting their own background and nature, achieved some social success but no real political virtue—the perspective of the other can never genuinely be the shared interest of the parvenu however hard they try. The parvenu thus rejects their own self—the space of common meaning in which their early identity had been forged—as well as differentiation, and thus they reject the only real ity that can make sense to them, the tradition they have been raised within. As Varnhagen says, “The history of any given individual is far older than the individual as a product of nature.”59 The parvenu is an apolitical creature, they cannot be part of a plurality because they reject their own difference; otherness cannot exist in a society of parvenus, of individuals who are always trying to take on the identity of someone else rather than seeking recognition for themselves and their views. The pariah may be rejected by the other but at least they have a home in their own community, whereas the parvenu has none. Yet where in Varnhagen’s time it might have been considered possible, even noble, for a Jew to accept the status of pariah, despite the hardships of doing so, in Arendt’s own world it was impossible. The pariah Jew of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany faced prejudice and exclusion. Yet the pariah Jew of 1940s Germany faced certain elimination not only individually, but as a community—the destruction of their entire world.

The Influence of the Jewish Writings While Arendt spent a large part of her early life, up to the publication of Origins in 1951, working on questions of Jewish politics, she moved away from directly addressing these questions afterward for several reasons, all connected to the creation of Israel and the particular political path it took. In the late 1940s Arendt became a supporter of Judah Magnes’s party Ihud

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(Unity), backing Magnes’s policy of binationalism or federation in the IsraelPalestine region rather than the formation of a new nation-state of Israel. Arendt believed that a successful federal structure in the new Israel, based on the political equality of Palestinian Arabs and Jews, as well as wider federation between Israel and other Middle Eastern states, was not only essential if the new venture was to succeed but could form a model for the rest of the world.60 In the creation of the new state, she believed the cause and ideology of the Revisionist nationalists had won out over this alternative Zionism, and their influence and eventually political dominance over the following years and decades bore this out. But not long after the creation of Israel, in late 1948 Magnes died, and with him, Arendt’s last hope for Zionism as a possible means by which to reconstitute a Jewish people. The Jewish people had been deeply altered by the war and the Holocaust, and had, as a result, become nationalist, adopting many of what Arendt believed were the most problematic elements of European politics. Yet Israel, as a political reality, was not something Arendt wanted to reject outright, although she was sharply critical of Israeli politics. She continued, until much later in her life, to maintain this critical position on Israel and Zionism as it had become, writing in 1961 that she continued to support the views she had earlier expressed in her 1944 piece Zionism Reconsidered, a sharp rebuke to nationalist Zionism.61 Yet she never wrote as openly on the question of Jewish politics again. Even her New Yorker articles on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, while critical of aspects of Israeli political life and leadership, did not engage with the same questions, or delve into the problems of Israeli politics to the same degree as her earlier writings. This was despite the fact that her coverage of the Eichmann trial provoked criticism far sharper than any she had experienced before—due perhaps to the burgeoning influence of Israel in the world and the threats it continued to face, as well as to Arendt’s increasing fame. Instead, Arendt wrote, she would simply have nothing to do with the situation.62 She had lost hope. However, the themes and ideas offered in her earlier writings are vital to and developed in her later work. Arendt’s thought about Jewish politics became, in certain essential aspects, foundational to her thought about politics in general, through a gradual process of broadening out these concepts, which can be seen particularly in Origins. The problems of the Jews came to be seen by Arendt as indicative of deeper problems in the civilization and politics of the West. Arendt was insistent, in her writings of the 1940s, that

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the problematic condition of the Jewish people—that is, the discrimination they suffered as a result of their lack of a political space or community—is not limited to them but reflects more general and widespread problems in the West. While Arendt was strongly influenced and politically motivated by the problem of Jewish politics, she believes her arguments apply to all Western peoples. In Origins, for example, she highlights the particular importance of history and tradition for the Jewish people, but these arguments are certainly not limited to them. The progressive disintegration of the Jewish people after the Enlightenment, which set the scene for a wholly weakened Jewish community by the early twentieth century, was in part due to underlying problems in the European tradition and condition of politics and society. “The comity of European nations went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.”63 Yet now, she says, “all European peoples have now been made pariahs—so for the first time the Jewish struggle is identical with the European struggle for freedom.”64 Although Arendt did not return to the topic of the Jewish army later on, or comment on her articles and argument for the army, her later work on violence supports—although, at first, not obviously—the statements she made in support of the Jewish army, and most important, her reasons why a Jewish army was needed. When she writes that “violence is a marginal phenomenon in the political realm,” it is impor tant that she says “marginal,” not excluded.65 That is, there is space for a more political violence, in the right circumstances. She also indicates that there may be a kind of violence with a public aspect, very much as has been suggested in this chapter, in terms of the connection between recognition and the Jewish army. “Neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man’s faculty of action, the ability to begin something new.”66 This chapter has laid out one particular situation in which violence is depicted by Arendt as not only justified but distinctly political. It shows that the boundaries between politics and violence are much more indistinct and difficult to differentiate than some of Arendt’s claims might lead one to suppose. It is not violence itself that is seen as either anti-political or pro-political but the power or force behind the violence—thus power and violence are, in some circumstances, positively related to one another. Her rejection of the nationalist motivation behind Jabotinsky, Begin, and the Revisionists’ plan for the Jewish army and, most important, its appeal to a false ideological and

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nonpolitical idea of the nation around which a Jewish political unity might coalesce is further illustration of this fact. What this example does not explain adequately is the question of where speech or dialogue fits into Arendt’s model of political violence. If violence is indeed mute, the violent acts of a Jewish army, as opposed to the (potentially) peaceful internal dynamics of an army, would seem to be by definition not part of the political process that might occur through the creation of an army. In short, it is still unclear how this particular case fits into the theoretical framework of political action Arendt laid out in The Human Condition and her depiction of violence outlined in her later work. The next chapter will look at where this political violence belongs within the vita activa and why violence is, even for Arendt, and even in theoretical terms, in some senses a necessary aspect of the political world.

CHAPTER 3

The Polis and the Res Publica

During the early 1950s, the classical influences that Arendt had been familiar with since her youth began to emerge in a significant way in her political thought, in The Human Condition as well as in various unpublished papers that have since appeared in print as The Promise of Politics.1 Her extended discussion of Greek political ideas in The Human Condition has often led to the claim that Arendt’s developed political thought is in truth an attempt to recover the agonal politics of Athenian democracy for the present or to set it up as an unblemished exemplar of the political. Certainly, the foundation of contemporary politics—the sovereign nation-state that concerns Arendt so deeply—is absent in these premodern states. But it does not follow that Arendt therefore proposes that we should somehow return to the Greek model, and this supposition has led to misunderstandings of Arendt’s political arguments. In par ticu lar, it has resulted in a one-dimensional characterization of the political as agonistic action, which, consequently, many have criticized. There is an equally impor tant narrative in Arendt’s work: the political tradition of the Roman Republic. In Arendt’s work on Rome a different image of the political emerges: a more complex notion of action in the political and a way to connect politics to the other spheres of the vita activa via the category of “work.” It is true that Greek philosophy was important to Arendt’s thought, as it was for so many of her peers in the German academy. Arendt had studied Greek philosophy and literature since her school days, but the most profound influence came from her teacher Martin Heidegger, with whom she studied at Marburg in the mid-1920s. At that time Heidegger had yet to publish his great work Sein und Zeit; nevertheless he had already acquired a name as a revolutionary, even visionary philosopher, and this reputation attracted many young academics to Marburg, on whom he made a lasting impression. Arendt was

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among these admiring students, and the two, it was later revealed, had also been secretly involved in an intimate relationship with one another. Heidegger was self-consciously indebted to Greek philosophy. He was in constant dialogue with the Greek philosophers and, more than any other, with Aristotle. He did not recommend a simple return to Greek philosophy or Greek politics (which some of his followers would later be accused of, notably Leo Strauss as well as Arendt herself), but Greek philosophy did occupy a position of predominance: it was the work of Aristotle that Heidegger deemed worthiest of interrogation and development. The influence of Heidegger on a generation of German philosophers shaped their relationship with Greek philosophy. It took on a position of prime importance for many theorists whose influence (along with Heidegger’s) continues to the present day. The centrality of Greece, and especially Aristotle, in Arendt’s work throughout her career can be traced largely to her formative intellectual experiences at Marburg. But Arendt’s use of Greece is—like Heidegger’s—anything but simple, despite the fact that she is frequently read as advocating Greek politics as an escape from modern ways and forms of political action. She does not advocate for a return to the Greek polis: she has serious reservations about the discoveries or claims of the Greek philosophers, including those of Aristotle, and she makes nuanced distinctions between the realities of Greek politics or action, and the ideas of Greek philosophy, with neither being idealized. Noel O’Sullivan’s article on Arendt’s “Hellenic nostalgia” exemplifies the claim that Arendt’s thought is problematically rooted in an idealization of Athenian politics.2 O’Sullivan writes that the life of the Greek polis “constitutes the focal point of all her thought. Hellenism determines even her definition of politics.”3 Dana Villa argues that “the politics of democratic Athens [was] transformed into something of an ‘ideal type’ by Arendt.”4 Thus, he writes, “The Human Condition mines ancient Greek poetry, drama, and philosophy in order to show how, in its original understanding, political action was viewed as the very opposite of violence, coercion or rule.”5 Bhikhu Parekh takes a critical position on the agonistic and individualistic view of politics that he understands Arendt to be advancing in The Human Condition through an idealization of agonic, Greek inspired political action, although he notes that in later works she turns her attention to a more participatory type of politics. He claims that her Greek depiction of action is problematically elitist, because only “the acts in which men begin something new are unusual enough to attract attention and deserve remembrance.” And he further criticizes Arendt for not

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paying attention to the “inescapable instrumental dimension” of politics, “turning politics into a theatrical and somewhat pointless activity.”6 James Tully is more sympathetic in his portrayal of Arendt’s “agonic freedom.” This was a “game-like activity” she associated with both the Greeks and with modern revolutionaries, he claimed. Citizens, he writes, “engage in agonic activities for recognition and rule in public space. . . . [They] take on their identities as citizens and peoples in virtue of participation in this intersubjective activity and, eo ipso, bring into being and sustain the field of action of the game, the ‘public realm’ in which they interact . . . the activity is political freedom.”7 Yet, while recognizing that agonic action is unique in embodying both beginnings and actions that carry through, Arendt does not associate “a change in the rules with agonism.”8 Rules (or laws) are the framework, Tully argues, not the activity.9 Seyla Benhabib, meanwhile, identifies an irreconcilable tension between Arendt’s modernism and anti-modernism. “The unresolved contradictions in some of her formulations can be traced back to this twofold spiritual-intellectual legacy,” she argues, contrasting the “persecuted Jew . . . the philosophical and political modernist,” with the Heideggerian influenced “antimodernist Grecophile theorist of the polis.”10 Jürgen Habermas likewise claims that many problems derive from her commitment to “the historical and conceptual constellation of classical Greek philosophy.”11 Not least among these, he argues, is the instability of praxis, due to the “unimpaired subjectivity” Arendt demands of political action; her exclusion of social issues; and a failure to engage with the modern (complementary) relationship between state and economy.12 Arendt’s depiction of the Greek concept of action does emphasize the heroic and elite qualities of politics as an agonal community; and along with this, enforces an absolute separation of politics from the law which structures the polis. For the Greeks, Arendt believes, politics was their solution to the unpredictability of human action, that one’s destiny is not within one’s control.13 This is why, for the Greeks, a life can only be fully understood (and judged) after it has ended. The Greek answer to the vagaries of fortune, Arendt writes, was that “whoever consciously aims at being ‘essential,’ at leaving behind a story and an identity which will win ‘immortal fame,’ must not only risk his life but expressly choose, as Achilles did, a short life and premature death.”14 This is because “only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness, because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began.”15

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The Greek life Arendt praises is older than Athenian democracy, as the example of Achilles suggests. It is this ancient spirit of action that she believes shaped Greek politics through to its decline in the era of Plato and Aristotle. “This concept of action is highly individualistic,” she writes. “It stresses the urge towards self-disclosure at the expense of all other factors and therefore remains relatively untouched by the predicament of unpredictability. As such it became the prototype of action for Greek antiquity and influenced, in the form of the so-called agonal spirit, the passionate drive to show one’s self in measuring up against others that underlies the concept of politics prevalent in the city-states.”16 The prioritization of action as the most important activity in the polis, and its resultant distinctiveness from all other activities, shaped the Greek belief in the absolute separation of politics and legislation. “To them, the laws, like the walls around the city, were not results of action, but products of making,” she writes.17 Because action could not be end-oriented but sought to escape the mortal world, a concern with making was outside its proper sphere. Therefore, “before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law.”18 In this image of Athenian political life and the spirit that defined it, one can see two distinct and in some ways conflicting ideas, both important to Arendt’s idea of the political. The first was the intensely individualistic action of the Greek hero desperately seeking to overcome his mortality by achieving immortal greatness through his own glorious death. The second, quite different concept of action Arendt draws from Athenian political life is that of power as the mainspring of politics: an idealized coming together of the citizens in open discussion and persuasion in the agora and the public spaces of the polis. Athens typifies at the highest level the pure idea of politics as conversation in the public sphere. Isonomia, the Greek term for a free constitution, does not mean equality before the law, Arendt claims, “but merely that all have the same claim to political activity, and in the polis, this activity primarily took the form of speaking with one another. Isonomia is therefore essentially the equal right to speak.”19 This idea of action as speech produces the common sense that enables power and thus, politics. The two connect in their shared reliance on discourse: to produce power, and to make immortal through narrative. Platonic and post-Platonic philosophy, however, born out of a critique of Athenian politics, stands against the virtue of the polis as Arendt understands

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it. Plato and Aristotle wrote at a time when “Greek political life was indeed approaching its end.”20 In fact, she writes, “in the whole tradition of philosophical and particularly of political thought, there has been perhaps no single factor of such overwhelming importance . . . than the fact that Plato and Aristotle wrote in the fourth century, under . . . a politically decaying society.”21 In seeking to overcome the problems of this decaying political system, Plato introduced a philosophical solution premised on the realization of an abstract good, achievable not through action but only through philosophical knowledge. Thus, he introduced his fundamental division between action and thought, or politics and philosophy, and the hierarchical superiority of the abstract realm—an idea which Arendt believes would have been quite incomprehensible in the golden age of Greek politics, when action was revered. Plato opened an “unbridgeable abyss” after which, she writes, the dominance of the contemplative life became an assumed truth in Western thought.22 She traces this division through the tradition of Western politics and political thought and its increasingly anti-political evolution. Plato’s abstraction of the good from action removes the necessity of power from the idea of politics and introduces, devastatingly, the concept of “rule”—the precursor to sovereignty— into Western politics. The primary political elements of natality, action, and power, the very essence of politics, are, in this worldview, derogated to a secondary role, below the good of the philosopher. This idea took different forms through the tradition of political thought in the Western world, from the Romans, who adopted Greek philosophy routinely into their culture (while standing aloof from it in their political practice, as will shortly be outlined), into the Christian church and its notion of authority, through to the modern age and its conceptualization of sovereignty. The gap between the contemplative life and the active life gradually widened over time, and the dominance of the contemplative life further entrenched itself across political life. This narrative, along with Arendt’s claim that Athens stands at the origin of Western politics, and her use of Athens to illustrate fundamental political qualities, including action, has led many to equate Arendt’s ideal politics with her depiction of the golden age of participatory Greek politics. But the “highly theatrical individualism” of the Greek polis does not, at least not wholly, define politics for Arendt.23 There is, alongside Arendt’s praise of Athens, a critique of Greek politics (separate from her critique of Greek philosophy), which is itself important in understanding how she interprets action and its role in politics. As Margaret Canovan writes, “for all Arendt’s undoubted admiration for the Greeks, she did not regard Athens as a political

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model in any exclusive sense.”24 Arendt’s “theory of action, like the rest of her political thought is rooted in her response to totalitarianism and is not an exercise in nostalgia for the Greek polis.”25 If we look instead at Arendt’s portrayal of the Roman Republic, alongside her work on Greek politics, a different story emerges. Although neither Arendt’s depiction of the Roman Republic or Greece can be considered exclusive models of the political sphere, still less models suited to the modern world, there are good reasons to examine and compare these two political worlds in Arendt’s thought. Greece and Rome stand at the beginning of our tradition, for Arendt, as the period in which many of the foundational political concepts of Western politics were created. By examining these two worlds Arendt believes we can grasp—and thus judge—these concepts (and their function) more clearly, without the blurring effects of centuries of conceptual evolution. Roman politics, in particular, is of foundational importance to our own world in another way: in the adoption of Roman ideas and the Roman spirit of politics by the founding fathers of the United States in their constitution, a connection which will be dealt with in more detail in the next chapter. Athens and Rome, although not exclusive models, are useful for understanding politics, Arendt thought, because in Athens and Rome, politics was created as we understand it, or more precisely, it was there that our concepts of politics were created. By comparing Arendt’s writings on these two classical worlds, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of both, and of how she understood the essential framework of politics, and human experience, to be structured. The Greek example is ideal only in a highly abstracted sense, and Arendt’s depiction of political practice is in truth much more complex. Her praise of Roman political practice opposes key elements of Greek politics and shows that the divisions between the spheres of the vita activa and, connectedly, between violence and politics, are more porous than generally recognized. Violence may in itself never be inherently political, but that does not exclude the possibility of a relationship between violence and politics that acts for, not against, genuine politics. In Rome, this can be seen clearly in the relationship between the spheres of action and work, whereas in Greece, the separation of these spheres is more evident. Just as Patchen Markell writes of The Human Condition (written at the same time as many of these essays), it is important to recognize that there is more than one way to read the relationship between action and work in Arendt.26 In her writings on Greece and Rome, as in The Human Condition, we find that she seeks to separate the two, or set up boundaries

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between them, but also that she elucidates what a productive political relationship between action and work might consist of.

The Critique of Nomos Arendt’s criticism of the Greek polis is independent of her much more severe criticism of Greek philosophy and relates to the pre-Platonic political life, which she supposedly idealized. Although the Greeks succeeded in positioning action at the center of political life (as Arendt believes it should be), this understanding of politics was still flawed. This is often missed, as Roy Tsao points out, because most understandings of Arendt’s opinion of Greek politics are limited to her first discussion of the Greek world in The Human Condition, where she discusses the distinction between the public and private spheres, rather than her later comparison of Greek and Roman law in the same text, which is all too often overlooked. The collection of works from the 1950s, unpublished until recently, in which she writes at length on the Greek and Roman systems of politics supports the claim that her opinions on classical politics are rather more ambiguous than routinely supposed.27 “Throughout The Human Condition,” Tsao writes, “Arendt deliberately— and systematically—attributes to the ancient Greeks a set of beliefs about the nature of politics that are at odds with her own theoretical claims in this same book.”28 Where she makes this important distinction between Roman lex and Greek nomos, Arendt comes down firmly on the side of the Romans against a Greek conception of law and its relationship to politics. As noted, the pre-Platonic Greek conception of politics conceptually excluded legislative and constitutional creation from the act of politics. And while, Arendt writes, Plato and Aristotle “elevated lawmaking and city-building to the highest rank in political life, this does not indicate that they enlarged the fundamental Greek experiences of action and politics to comprehend what later turned out to be the political genius of Rome: legislation and foundation.”29 Instead, the philosophers replaced praxis with poesis (making), suggesting that citizens should renounce their capacity for action in favor of greater stability for the political body. A solution based on the renunciation of action, Arendt argues, can only ever be destructive of politics.30 Neither the Greek philosophers nor the Greeks of an earlier era ever realized how to legitimately connect legislation and foundation with action, Arendt argues. She undermines the Greek understanding of action by implying that it is inferior to the

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Roman because it is not capable of incorporating legislation. She reinforces this in her essay “Introduction into Politics,” where she contrasts the “extraordinary political fruitfulness of the Roman concept of law” with the Greek conception of nomos, which is “both father and despot in one.”31 The Greek notion of law thus introduces a problematic note into politics, which bears a close resemblance to the reviled notion of rule. “The citizen of the polis was a ‘son and slave’ his entire life,” Arendt writes, “they all feared the law of their polis every bit as much as the Persians feared their king.”32 Tsao argues this critical note is introduced by Arendt because she believes the Athenians conflated the realms of action and making, whereas the Roman understanding of politics does not. However, while questions of the nature of “making” of this kind, and its relationship with politics, are indeed key to understanding Arendt’s perspective on Greek and Roman politics, Arendt’s position as it emerges in her texts of the 1950s is considerably more complex. Dean Hammer also notes the difference between the Greek and Roman political spheres in Arendt’s work and believes that her understanding of the Roman world had a greater influence on the structure of her wider thought than is often realized. Like Tsao, Hammer recognizes the importance of the different relationships between political “making” and “acting” in these two worldviews and also believes that the Greek idea of the relationship of making to politics is problematic for Arendt. Whereas in Greek politics, the political space is simply made by a legislator, before the activity of politics commences, Hammer explains that for Arendt, “the Roman conception of founding is distinctive and in fact points to a significant departure from a Greek conception precisely because founding is not seen as a ‘once-for-all’ affair. Founding appears much more as an incremental process.”33 This process is thought to occur very differently in Roman political thought, not as a single event but through its tradition, as an ongoing process that reinforces, while at the same time reimagining and reconstituting, the original foundations. Through this practice, Hammer argues, “the animating forces of politics are not just recounted but relived.”34 As Hammer and Tsao explain, it is evident that for Arendt the nature of the legislative boundaries of the Greek polis are problematic—or rather, that the Greek understanding of these boundaries was problematic. That the Greeks conceptualized politics in an extremely limited manner had seriously detrimental results for the practical success of the polis. The polis, the Greeks believed, was predefined: before “action,” the politics of the polis, could take

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place, a supreme legislator was required to define the political space territorially, legally, and demographically. Within this space thus cleared for politics, citizens could then talk, persuade, and act in a public, political manner; politics was therefore seen to rest on the distinctly prepolitical productive activity of the legislator. The polis was understood to be the people, Arendt writes, but at the same time was peculiarly bounded by its law. “The law is, so to speak, something by which the polis enters its political life, something it cannot abolish without losing its identity, and violation of the law is an act of hubris, the overstepping of a limit placed on life itself.”35 This is problematic for Arendt in two respects. First, it meant that the Athenians understood a central component of political practice primarily in terms of boundaries rather than relationships—anathema to Arendt’s understanding of politics as free action between people. This self-understanding also prevented the Greeks from adapting their politics as internal and external conditions developed and changed. Hence, for example, the Athenians’ relationship with their colonies could never develop into a political relationship but could only ever be one of dominance and rule—politics itself could not expand beyond its fixed, original limits. Internally, the boundaries of free action were fixed by the laws of the lawgivers, and their legislative ability to deal with the demands of a changing internal scene was severely curtailed. The importance of this becomes clear once one compares this with Arendt’s depiction of the more legislatively flexible Roman political space. While she praises the understanding the Greeks had of the priority of action within the political sphere, and their understanding of the fundamental importance of natality to politics, her description of Athenian politics also identifies the innate danger of this quality. “One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less surprising decline in the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.”36 While the polis was fixed by its legislation, within these immovable boundaries action itself was irrepressible and spontaneous, and this conflict is identified by Arendt as a major factor in the decline of the polis. The individualistic and heroic action that played such a vital role in Greek politics succeeded in overcoming the fragility of fortune because it focused on self-disclosure, not outcomes, “and therefore remains relatively untouched by the predicament of unpredictability.”37 While the agonic mode of politics in Athens did incorporate a notion of action as discussion among equals, the individualistic element is identified as problematic.

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Arendt’s essay “Introduction into Politics” explains why. Freedom of opinion and its expression, she writes, is distinct from freedom as natality, or “action’s ability to make a new beginning,” because it relies on others to a far greater degree. Granted, she says, “action likewise can never occur in isolation, insofar as the person who begins something can embark upon it only after he has won over others to help him.” All action is action “in concert” in this sense, she writes. Yet prattein, the carry ing out and completing of actions, although only one stage of human action, “is the most politically important stage.” The stage of action that precedes it, the archein, which corresponds to spontaneous initiative or natality, is far more of an individual action. “Although all freedom would forfeit its best and deepest meaning without this freedom of spontaneity,” she continues, it “is itself prepolitical, as it were; spontaneity depends on organizational forms of life only to the extent that it is ultimately the world that can organize it.”38 Thus, there was an element of Greek political action that preceded the discursive, intersubjective action of the democratic polis and was, although necessary for politics, in reality prepolitical. Yet the founding aim of Greek politics was to raise up this aspect of action, to “make the extraordinary an everyday occurrence.”39 What resulted was both Athens’s genius and the ultimate cause of its downfall. The boundlessness of the action that drove Athens forward ultimately pulled it apart from the inside. Such action conflicts with the legislative, prepolitical, and therefore unchanging boundaries of the polis. On the one hand is the polis as a defined creation of the legislator, on the other, the polis shaped by the heroic individual. The former activity is concerned with the end product, and the latter entirely concerned not with worldly consequences but rather with the individual initiation of action. In constantly trying to enact the extraordinary, the Greek heroic attitude toward action results in the implosion of the polis. Constant attempts to introduce the new act in opposition to the stability of a state. Power, that is, action as prattein or carrying through, as opposed to action as archein, or pure initiation, is a necessary juncture between the individual and legislation. Prattein embodies the action of the group, rather than the prepolitical initiatory action of the individual into the group, and is thus, Arendt remarks, the most politically important form of action.40 But power is diminished by Greek heroic action. Heroism disempowers the people. Pursuing the extraordinary resulted in the remarkable achievements of Greek culture and politics and, it could be said, the immortality of those achievements. But in political fact it resulted, Arendt is clear, on the swift collapse of the polis as it became disconnected from power.

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Yet, as Arendt makes clear, there is nothing natural or necessary about the existence of any particular polity. Politics neither emerges nor exists naturally, but must be created anew, or transmitted by the actions of individuals over time. Power is the driving force of politics, but it does not guarantee the maintenance of the political. Unlike individualistic action, the politics of power operates in a truly plural manner through political equals acting and talking with one another, producing a common sense. This multiplicity of perspectives coexisting within each citizen and within the political sphere of action and power forms the essence of the shared political life. The coming together of individuals to act in concert—moving from action to consensus—is what Arendt understood power to be and is essential to politics if the political community is not to simply fall apart. Thus, relationships of power have a binding force and contingently sustain the living space of politics, but that space, as Athens shows, can deteriorate rapidly through the influence of internal or external change. Yet while power stabilizes politics and enables political life, a pure conception of politics as power and action remains to some degree unstable, because below power there is always the unstable, unpredictable existence of human freedom as action. Arendt describes the ethereality of the political space of appearance: “unlike the spaces that are the works of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.”41 Yet if “making” is excluded from politics, as Arendt claims it is, how can power be maintained? A politics based exclusively on power relies to an unreasonable extent on cooperation, within a system that operates through difference and disagreement, rooted in individual action. It is implausible in the extreme to argue that all action, or all agonal interaction in the polis would result in consensus, even to the limited degree that individuals are willing to agree to disagree. And of course, Arendt does not make these claims: she is clear that in Greece, the polis was defined and bound, though inadequately, by its foundational legislation, which produced the space within which this kind of politics could take place. In making the claim that Arendt understood the polis as a great but essentially flawed political entity, I do not suggest that Athens was without importance in her work. Her criticisms do not detract from the fact that she depicts the Greek political system as a shining example of pure heroic action in the political sphere, but they do point to the fact that such a system is

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unstable and unlikely to endure, particularly when conjoined with a rigid legislative framework. Not only did this system fail, moreover, it produced its own antithesis in Plato’s work, fostering the emergence of an anti-politics that has come to shape the modern world. It is also worth noting that Arendt herself recognizes many of the problems with Athenian politics that some of her critics have identified in her notion of politics. That she recognized and accepted the difficulties that inhere in the Greek idea of politics undermines the claim that Arendt’s politics is an idealization of Greek politics. She did not, as Parekh suggests, adopt an individualistic and elitist notion of politics from Athens, but rather identified this kind of action as not wholly political, strictly speaking, and as such, the root of fundamental problems in the polis.42 And the accusation which is often leveled at Arendt, of the “pointlessness” or anti-instrumentality of the politics she depicts, is somewhat undermined by her portrayal of power: first as the truly political form of action, and second as the form of action that carries through, or achieves a purpose.43 It points to power as an action that is not untouched by consequence, as heroic action is, but equally that cannot be understood in the same way as the utilitarian logic of work, still less labor. Arendtian politics is not equivalent to Greek politics. One might therefore assume, reading Arendt on Greek politics, that she believes there is little to be done to protect the political space as the space of power—that only good fortune could result in the perpetuation of an actionoriented, genuinely political entity. Yet her work on Rome suggests there is more that we can draw from her thought than just this pessimistic conclusion, and that there are ways the space of action may be protected, not forever, but certainly for generations and even centuries.

The Genius of Roman Politics For Arendt the polis exemplified certain political concepts in their pure form. Yet in practice, excessive idealization of these forms created problems. Arendt’s work reveals a preference for the Roman political system as a lasting, practical political entity, above that of the Greeks. It was the Romans, not the Greeks, who she refers to as “perhaps the most political people we have known.”44 Rome appears as a better exemplar of politics as a whole than do the extremes of Athenian ideology. Yet this has rarely been recognized. As Hammer explains, “even when scholars have noted Arendt’s mention of the

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Romans . . . they have been reluctant to assign conceptual form to Roman thinking and, related to this, to explore the significance of their influence on Arendt’s thought.”45 But the conceptual form of Arendt’s thought on Rome offers a new perspective on Arendtian action, which answers the question of how a political system can both embody action while also enforcing the structural conditions for action. “The polis was for the Greeks,” she writes, “as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals.”46 But the success of this guarantee differed drastically from the uncertainty that plagued the Greek polis, in terms not only of Rome’s longevity but its much greater internal stability. For Arendt, this durability was a result of the Romans’ superior political understanding and implementation of politics. She speaks often of the Romans’ “extraordinary political sense,” their “political genius,” and their deep understanding of political relationships, over and above and in contrast to that of the Greeks.47 And in On Revolution, her praise for the achievements of the American founding fathers is rooted firmly in what she sees as their adoption of a specifically Roman understanding of the political sphere. The Romans succeeded, to a greater extent and for a longer period of time, in achieving the primary purpose of the res publica and polis, indeed any political community: maintaining the political space of action. This success was due, in particular, to their understanding and positioning of legislation and foundation in politics, namely how these activities became distinctly political in nature rather than prepolitical or extra-political. It is this that Arendt speaks of as the political genius of Rome.48 While Arendt praises the Romans for developing “common sense” into “the highest criterion in the management of public-political affairs,” in the same breath she praises foundation, or tradition, for its stabilizing qualities in politics, a notion which incorporates aspects of “making.”49 Indeed, she writes, “the genius of Roman politics—not only according to Virgil but, generally, according to Roman selfinterpretation—lay in the very principles which attend the legendary foundation of the city.”50 And this authority, she argues, “resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone, gave the world the permanence and durability which humans need because they are mortals.”51 In making this claim, she positions Rome as a polity which is based on the power of the people, while at the same time one whose legislation is in some sense fixed but also a part of the political process itself. This not only differs sharply from

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her portrait of the polis but from her understanding of politics more generally, as it has come to be understood. The res publica managed to unite permanence with action and power, strengthening the political space without constricting it. And the key to understanding this lies in Arendt’s conceptualization of tradition and the way in which tradition, as an interpretation of foundation, came together with power and action to underpin both the political nature and authority of Roman legislation. The Romans, Arendt writes, “invented” tradition, in the sense that they were the first to incorporate into their political self-understanding the principle of the sacredness of their city’s foundation and the necessity of its continued integrity in the res publica. The centrality of the Roman foundation resulted in an understanding of political action as the preservation of that foundation. Roman tradition is not merely static preservation of the past but was enacted through “augmentation.” Tradition kept the foundations alive in the continual re-creation of the past in the present through, for example, the retelling of histories, and their relevance to the present. Hammer writes that for Arendt, “this notion of a coincidence of foundation and preservation by virtue of augmentation . . . was deeply rooted in the Roman spirit and could be read from almost every page of Roman history. The coincidence itself is best illustrated in the Latin word for founding, which is condere, and derived from an early Latin field god, called Conditor, whose main function was to preside over growth and harvest; he obviously was a founder and preserver at the same time.”52 Hammer believes that this analogy illuminates Arendt’s idea of political principles (as drawn from Montesquieu). Principles cannot be expressed in the abstract but only through recounting par ticu lar events. This activity “perpetuate[s] a common world by simultaneously making a past alive in the present and by making a contemporary audience participants in the past.”53 Roman historians convey a “sense of actuality,” Hammer writes, “the portrayal of great words and deeds in which the meaning of the event is both embedded in the performance of the act and also experienced, again, by the spectator.”54 The making of the world in this sense occurs primarily through the preservation of past action through the written word, rather than the construction by a lawgiver of a future political world. Instead of the creation of the political space being understood as the activity of a legislator projecting forward and fixing legislation and the borders of the political space into the future, the Romans understood the creation of the political space to be an

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active process of augmenting a sacred foundation. It was political because it rested on action and power, and durable because it was linked to a particular understanding of the past and the role of the past in the present. In this way, the continual re-creation and stabilization of the political sphere could be enacted. The foundation acted as a limiting institution to counter the agonal, destabilizing nature of action, while still permitting change and thus a connection to power, the driving force of politics: power was maintained. For Arendt, the example of Rome shows that politics should be considered as a relationship between structure and action, constructed in such a way that the actions of the political space ought to enable the continual evolution of that space, without destroying it altogether. Without such an understanding of politics, Athens was unable to incorporate political change into the political space itself. In Rome, even the foundation of the city was seen as a continuation of the true beginning, Arendt observes. In the Roman historical narrative, Rome “was the resurgence of Troy and the reestablishment of some city-state that had existed before and of which the thread of continuity and tradition never had broken.”55 This gave an aspect of stability and continuity to Roman politics which was lacking in Athens, where the stabilizing factors of legislation were outside politics, and politics itself was dominated to a greater, and ultimately unsustainable, extent by individualistic action. “The Roman feeling of continuity was unknown in Greece,” Arendt writes, “where the inherent changeability of all things mortal was experienced without any mitigation or consolation; and it was this experience which persuaded the Greek philosophers that they need not take the realm of human affairs too seriously.”56 The past became a part of the living tradition of Roman politics: the common sense of the political sphere nurtured tradition, while tradition bounded the instability of action behind the political shared world. There is something unique about tradition, which, unlike institutions of rule, does not deny action but mitigates its more dangerous aspects, because it contains or limits action without enforcing absolute rules.

The Embodiment of Tradition A political world in its idealized form, for Arendt, is a community of plural and equal actors who share a common understanding of the meaning of the shared space they live in. But the Roman political world is about more than this intangible common sense. Tradition is, and must be, realized within the

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common sense if it is to have any influence on the actions of the community, by framing which actions are seen to be legitimate according to the founding principles. But it is also part of an institutional and cultural fabricated world which is not itself common sense but influences and confirms it. The sustaining of the past in the present, and for the present, has to be in part entrenched in a physical world if it is not to suffer the same problems of discontinuity and spontaneous change inherent in the sphere of action. Physical things are required to “give the human artifice the stability without which it could never be a reliable home for men,” Arendt states.57 “Life . . . manifests itself in action and speech, both of which share with life its essential futility,” she writes. “The ‘doing of great deeds’ and ‘speaking of great words’ will leave no trace, no product that might endure after the moment of action and the spoken word has passed.” Because mortal man needs a home, the artifice that enables stability and continuity, “acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them, the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.”58 Yet, she writes, “this reification and materialization, without which no thought can become a tangible thing, is always paid for, and that price is life itself: it is always the ‘dead letter’ in which the ‘living spirit’ must survive, a deadness from which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it, although this resurrection shares with all living things that it, too, will die again.”59 The boundaries between the spaces of the vita activa are thus rather more permeable than Arendt sometimes suggests. She first separates the political artifice from labor or the biological, “the sheer functionality of . . . consumption,” and then from work, the “sheer utility of objects produced for use.” Yet she goes on to explain how homo faber, “in his highest capacity”—that is, through work that involves the written word, or the reinforcement of meaning—is required for politics to transcend any particular time. But this requires an ongoing relationship between the written word or “dead letter” and the action that can only be embodied in the “living spirit” of the individual, which is to say the reader, who has agency, but not total liberty, to interpret the words as they understand them, and in fact must do so, if these words are to remain relevant to the world of the reader. For Arendt, the writer, poet, historian, and monument maker are an integral and necessary part of the stabilization of the human artifice: they

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establish in perpetuity an understanding of the various concepts, stories, and categories that have first been created through lived experience. This understanding of work, then, aligns with her conception of tradition in at least two key ways. First, the examples Arendt offers of the politically relevant artistic-productive aspect of homo faber are deeply historical in nature: from monument building, to historiography, to poets in the form of heroic storytellers—all are artists who seek to preserve history for the future, framing events as exemplary or authoritative experiences. Second, the manner in which this comes about closely resembles the dual aspect of tradition for Arendt: it is a fixing of action but also relies on an integration with action in order to maintain its authority. The “dead letter” relies upon the “living spirit” to reify it, yet that does not mean the letter itself is without force. Both are required for meaningfulness: action and work; stability and movement. Within the production of political works, there is a spectrum of types of productive activity that are either more or less closely connected to the world of action. Physical art has a relative permanence of character; its fabrication is closer to a utilitarian making than some other forms of culture production. In art, Arendt writes, “it is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality . . . something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.”60 At the other extreme is poetry, in which “remembrance, Mnēmosynē, the mother of the muses, is directly transformed into memory.” However, she continues, “of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem . . . will eventually be ‘made,’ that is, written down and transformed into tangible thing among things.”61 But in all these forms, it is meaningful language that is made durable, speech action fixed in memory but open to interpretation. These forms of art are the medium through which tradition, an attitude of sanctity toward the past, is entrenched in a society over time, and as such, tradition is as much part of the world of homo faber—albeit at its most political extreme—as it is of the world of action and politics. The two simply cannot be drawn apart. Tradition incorporates the two worlds of work and action in a way that is absolutely necessary to its existence. The balance, however, is a fine one. When tradition is seen as a dialogue between past and present it brings action and durability together. Too much emphasis on the past, and one risks limiting free action; too much on the present, and politics falls into the problem experienced by the polis of the instability of unrestricted natality. Hence tradition

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is envisaged by Arendt in its Roman guise as a living re-creation of the past: the use of the past and its meanings and exemplars in the context of the present, not just as an authority set in stone but a pragmatic and valuable political resource.

The Political Nature of Lex The most obviously political medium through which this operates is in the making of legislation, in the Roman rather than Greek sense, as Arendt distinguishes them. While tradition in a broader sense might be seen as an informal, overarching cultural idea that is physically manifested in a number of ways, legislation uses many of the same principles in a more formalized manner within and in relation to the sphere of politics. Furthermore, the difference between Greek law, or nomos, and Roman law, or lex, illustrates the way in which violence plays a very different role in their political understandings, which in turn is directly related to how each understands the position of work, in the form described above, in relation to the political sphere. Arendt distinguishes the Roman idea of legislation not only from the Greek idea but from the modern sense of the term. The simplistic idea that legislation is equivalent to politics is a postclassical idea, she argues, which emerged through Christianized concepts of law, whether divine or natural, as being given by a higher and absolute authority. Legislation understood to be outside politics or to be prepolitical, where it forms the “wall-like law,” is the specifically Greek notion.62 But in both cases, law is unchangeable by the citizens; it is given by a nonpolitical lawgiver (neither God nor the Greek legislator were subject to the forces of politics), and so legislative change is not within the remit of the citizens or the polis. The Roman understanding of legislation is that it neither forms the whole of politics nor is strictly prepolitical. The Roman sense of lex corresponds to Montesquieu’s idea of “rapports,” Arendt argues, “the ‘rules’ or régles which determine the government of a world and without which a world would not exist at all . . . the relations which exist and preserve different realms of being.”63 She claims, in fact, that only Montesquieu ever used the word law “in its old, strictly Roman sense, defining it . . . as the rapport, the relation subsisting between different entities.”64 Like tradition, or rather, as part of tradition, legislation helps to create the “world” or political space that enables and stabilizes action. Like tradition it is an act of making in a limited sense.

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But importantly, this idea of legislation is not conceptualized as a boundary around the political space but is understood in terms of a structure of relationships between people in a political community and so is positioned within politics. In fact, Arendt argues, “the Roman politicization of the space between peoples marks the beginning of the Western world—indeed, it first created the Western world as world.”65 That is, rather than Greek nomos, which bound politics to a small, intense field of action, Roman lex opened up the political space to genuine expansion and change. The political benefit of understanding law as a set of malleable relationships, rather than a fixed boundary structure, is most apparent in the Romans’ ability to expand their political territory through war and treaty making, as Patricia Owens explains.66 Roman political expansionism was simply not a possibility open to the Greeks. While the Athenians could aggrandize themselves by expanding on a purely military level, thereby winning both glory and tribute, they did not incorporate their conquests into their polity, as Arendt believes the Romans did to great success. The territorial state, the legislature, and the citizen body could not change with circumstance and thus became disengaged from power. Instead, this weak but brilliant state was at the mercy of its heroes, whose extremes of action led to its downfall. To counter political decline, the Greek philosophers looked to a making they understood to be outside politics—but the Romans brought it into politics through their innovative use of legislation as a way of extending politics through postconflict treaties. As Owens writes, Arendt “condemned the ancient Greeks for building their polis around the ideals of agonistic contest whilst simultaneously excluding all legal and political recognition of the ‘barbarians’ outside. . . . The Romans by contrast, endowed the ‘other’ with a legally recognized status.”67 Roman politics was, in fact, rooted in this notion of legislation, which was a notion of alliance between intrinsically different peoples, inside and outside Italy. “The Roman Republic, resting itself upon the perpetual alliance between patricians and plebeians,” writes Arendt, “used the instrument of leges chiefly for treaties and for ruling the provinces and communities which belonged to the Roman system of alliances, that is, to the ever-extending group of Roman socii, who formed the societas Romana.”68 Where the Greek legislator and the Greek polis are portrayed or understood in the Greek mind as two opposing poles representing the unchanging past and the mortal sphere of agonism and chaos, Roman lex and the res publica itself are both understood to be, in a real sense, public things. Legislation, like

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politics itself, is here focused on the relationships between people, not the walls dividing them, and the space that emerges as a result of these relationships, through power. The Romans brought legislation together with power in a manner that permitted the constant creation and recreation of the res publica, thus merging power and action with durability through tradition: the Roman “political genius.” Thus, against the readings of those such as Tsao, who argues that Arendt criticized the Greeks because they conflated making and action, in fact the problem was rather that they possessed a flawed understanding of the role of making in politics. Instead, Arendt appeals to an idea of making that took place in Roman politics through tradition and legislation. This differs from the Greeks in terms of the perception of time and the presence of power. Legislation is seen not as a making of the future but as a preserving or augmenting of the past. The original root, Arendt writes, of the term authority “derives from the verb augere, ‘augment,’ and what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation.”69 In this sense, power is embodied within the legislative activity while maintaining a sense of tradition, or the sanctity of the past. It is an active engagement with the past in the present, as opposed to the passive involvement of the Greeks in their political submission to the legislator of the past.

“Work” and Violence in the Ancient World Owens uses Arendt’s work on Greece and Rome, and her comparisons between them, to argue for a much closer understanding of the relationship between war and politics in Arendt’s thought, in establishing new public spaces through violent resistance.70 However, it is possible to go further than this and use the distinctions Arendt identifies in the Greek and Roman political spheres, including her understanding of tradition, foundation, legislation, and the limitations of the polis, to make the case that work—and thus an element of violence—is in practice necessary to successful politics. It is true that, as a critic of modern politics, Arendt sometimes recalls Athens as an idealized illustration of what has been lost to modernity. She uses the extremes of action in Greek politics to illustrate her arguments against a modernity that neither understands nor seeks to create action through politics—that has lost an understanding of politics. But in practice Rome forms a more complete (although by no means wholly ideal) political model.

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What is of particular importance in Arendt’s writings on Rome, and absent if one simply understands her work as an idealization of Greece, is the insight that politics, although in essence defined by action, also rests on a human artifice created through certain kinds of political fabrication. Her analysis of Roman politics emphasizes the importance of a counterpart to action in politics, understood as tradition, legislation, and the continual making and remaking of history and law for the present. Not only is the Roman system pragmatically preferable; tradition and legislation, as forms of authority that do not deny action, are required for everyday political life, and moreover, as part of the common world, are themselves political. These claims can be found elsewhere in Arendt’s work and prominently in her writings on the American Revolution, which amply illustrates that tradition and the form of fabrication it requires is not specific to the Roman res publica. The political world thus comprises power, action, and, in a limited sense, work. It is work that produces and maintains, together with action, the human artifice and the political world. But in Arendt’s depiction of work, the activity is deeply wound up with violence: “an element of violence is inevitably inherent in all activities of making, fabricating, and producing.”71 For Arendt, making is a process of construction but also, as a process of change, a kind of destruction. This is where violence is involved in the making process. It clears a space for the new by rejecting and destroying the old. Human action, Arendt points out, does not “start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed.”72 Given that work is in some sense a part of the political sphere, a sphere defined by its commitment to action, its relationship to politics requires further clarification. Even if violent work is in aid of the political, or even necessary for the political—that is, violence by the individual but for the public sphere—it still follows the logic of work. Hence, Arendt states, “the law produces the arena within which politics occurs, and contains in itself the violent force inherent in all production.”73 However, this political form of violence must be distinguished from the primal violence of nature, the necessary violence of the biological sphere, with which it shares no connection. In fact, the political acts as a safeguard against this violence, which is inherent to the sphere of labor. Arendt distinguishes between the two types of violence: “This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature. . . . The experience of this violence is the most elemental experience of human strength and, therefore, the very opposite of

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the painful, exhausting effort experienced in sheer labor. It can provide selfassurance and satisfaction, and can even become a source of self-confidence through life.”74 Arendt typically states that the nature of making is that it is individual, or private. However, there is another aspect of making that is important here, the making of politics that takes place through power as opposed to action, understanding power as a cooperative activity which drives politics: a legitimate activity of change in politics, arrived at through the process of agonic action but distinct from it. It is a making that in a limited way can incorporate violence as a political force. Thus, in her understanding of tradition, political action is entrenched in the written word of legislation, art, and culture, but equally, the preservation of this past relies on a living interpretation of tradition which is guided by the power of the citizen body acting together to produce meaning. Augmentation joins together the spheres of politics, or action, and work, incorporating the private (through “fabrication”) and the public (through interpretation), uniting past with present. This form of making reaches into the past for examples rather than seeking to produce the future; it is public in the sense that it is oriented toward making or maintaining the public space of politics. Most important, it is engaged with (although not identical to) power, in that it is a chosen violence rather than an inevitable one, and insofar as that choice is associated with power, not rule or sovereignty. The violence of work is therefore not inherently antipolitical. As Arendt writes, “neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man’s faculty of action, the ability to begin something new.”75 It is only when violence becomes disengaged from power, from the primacy of action, that it takes on an anti-political nature. Conceptually this is what Arendt describes in “On Violence,” and in practice, this excess and misunderstanding of violence is what she believes has occurred in most of the sovereign political systems she criticizes. To return, finally, to the ancient Greek and Roman political worlds, a comparison by Arendt between the two offers an example of a more political violence in contrast to a distinctly nonpolitical or anti-political violence. “It is true that struggle, and with it war, marked the beginning of political existence for the Greeks as well,” she allows, “but only insofar as they became themselves through conflict and then came together to preserve their own nature.” Yet in Rome, “this same struggle became the means by which they recognized

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both themselves and their opponents. Thus, when the battle was over, they did not retreat inside their walls, to be with themselves and their glory. On the contrary, they gained something new, a new political arena, secured in a peace treaty according to which yesterday’s enemies became tomorrow’s allies.”76 She clarifies precisely the importance of this distinction. “In political terms, the peace treaty that binds two nations allows for a new world to rise up between them or, more precisely, guarantees the continuation of a new world that they share in common, which arose out of their meeting in battle, where deeds and suffering brought forth one and the same thing.”77 How violence and its relationship to politics was conceptualized by the Romans, and incorporated into their political activities, was an impor tant and necessary element of their political success over such a long period, in Arendt’s view. The next chapter will examine the role of violence in a very different context, but one which is for Arendt directly linked to the Roman political understanding: the conceptualization of violence and politics in the largely nonviolent situation of the American Revolution and constitutional creation, and its failed European counterpart, the French Revolution. Even here, we will see, it was not the lack of violence that ultimately led to the success of the American Revolution, although that played a part, but the much more important fact that the Americans understood what politics was. On the other side of the ocean, it was the absence of such understanding that ultimately led to the failure of the French Revolution, and the very different and dangerous form of violence that arose out of it.

CHAPTER 4

Revolutionary Politics and the Unleashing of the Social

In Greece and Rome we find the beginning of Western political thought and practice, Arendt believed, which emerged through the new kinds of worlds they created and sustained. These societies produced the words and concepts that would be used down the ages—albeit in an increasingly confused sense— to describe and to understand politics. While we cannot and should not attempt to simply return to the experiences of the Greek polis in order to realign ourselves with genuine political experience, by examining these concepts in the context of the experience in which they emerged, at least we are able to understand these concepts more comprehensively and to assess what they can offer—or not—to contemporary politics. From the Greeks, importantly, a notion of politics as freedom emerged, Arendt wrote, from which “the idea that politics and freedom are bound together . . . threads its way through the thinking and action of European culture down to recent times.”1 Rome was where the structural framework of future political systems, up to the twentieth century, would emerge, in the shape of the self-legitimating trinity of religion, tradition, and authority. “The strength of this trinity lay in the binding force of an authoritative beginning to which ‘religious’ bonds tied men back through tradition.”2 This structure remained fundamental to Western political systems despite the changing forms these elements took: from republican to imperial authority, pagan to Christian religion, and the different traditions they accordingly looked to. The trinity “penetrated wherever the pax Romana created Western civilization on Roman foundations.”3 Yet the Greek philosophers, and Rome’s unquestioning adoption of Greek philosophy within its own cultural (although not political) tradition, produced a very different, parallel influence on the West in the Platonic tradition of philosophical

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thinking, which separated thought from action, and in the appeal to a notion of hierarchical political rule based on absolute truth, as opposed to horizontal, equalizing power based on opinion and plurality. The overwhelming importance of Rome in Western history is therefore traced by Arendt to its political structures, while the unique importance of Greece to Western politics can be found in its lost traditions of agonal political action, but also in its countervailing tradition of anti-political philosophy. Both the Greek and Roman worlds molded the conceptual heritage of the West, most importantly passing down a notion of the centrality of freedom to politics through the ages. “This remains a compellingly valid part of our concept of politics and has thus survived all historical reversals and theoretical transformations,” Arendt writes. “Not until totalitarian regimes and the ideologies congruent with them did anyone dare to cut this thread.”4 But in the modern age, the influence of the Roman trinity, which actualizes the potential for freedom by the continual augmentation and thus perpetuation of the political space, has become increasingly undermined, Arendt claimed. Meanwhile, philosophy’s understanding of politics as rule has expanded, resulting in its “logical conclusion” in Marx, who completed the modern intellectual revolution by turning Plato on his head. Marx concludes the tradition of Western philosophy which Plato initiated, Arendt writes, by formalizing Hegel’s dialectic as a “self-propelled process.”5 After this, she claims, “there is only one step left for the Marxist concept of development to become ideological process-thinking—the step that ultimately leads to totalitarian coercive deduction based on a single premise.”6 It is at this point in history that the “thread of tradition” is truly broken, “when logic unleashed from the idea, seized the masses.”7 Arendt does not suggest—or believe it to be possible—that we resurrect the politics of either the ancient Greek citystate or the Roman Republic. She is acutely aware of the ethical and political problems inherent in both classical political systems, not least the slavery and institutionalized inequality on which both systems were predicated.8 But as older ways of doing politics lost influence and became fragmented and less relevant to the lives of Western peoples, genuinely new political ideas have emerged in the modern era. The most impor tant of these is the notion of revolution. Revolution in its modern sense, as the creation of a completely new political entity, is a historical novelty, Arendt claims. “The revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is, the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, is unprecedented and unequalled in all prior

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history.”9 The birth of this unprecedented movement is dated to the French and American Revolutions, which she compares in her 1963 text On Revolution. Yet what is for Arendt a specifically modern phenomenon is still framed in many of the same terms that she utilizes in her work on ancient political systems. What these are and the reasons for this continuity even in the face of radical change will be explored in this chapter. Her emphasis on the space for politics as the foundation for freedom is, as ever, at the core of her argument. “The central idea of revolution,” she wrote, “is the foundation of freedom, that is, the foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear.”10 Revolution, the period of change from the old to the new, must be Janus-faced: destroyer and liberator but, at the same time, a creator of a new political space of freedom. “Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of new beginning should coincide. . . . [It is] a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative. And hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom.”11 Thus, in revolution violence and politics are, once more, linked. Historically, this has been borne out time and again. But, in On Revolution, Arendt contrasts the earliest examples of modern revolution: the extraordinary violence of the French Revolution but also the relatively peaceful American rebellion and the constitutional process that emerged out of it. On one level it appears that violent revolution is, as we might expect, depicted by Arendt as politically problematic or anti-political, while nonviolent revolution produces a more successful or authentic kind of politics. Indeed, Arendt writes that it “seems certain that the relatively nonviolent character of the American Revolution, where violence was more or less restricted to regular warfare, is an important factor in this success.”12 What I will argue in this chapter, however, is that it is not violence in revolution itself that is the problem for Arendt, but a particular type of violence, as indicated by her distinction here between “regular warfare” and some other form of violence. The anti-political violence that proved so catastrophic for the French Revolution is specifically modern in nature, but it may be understood in the terms that have been laid out in the previous chapters, that is, in terms of Arendt’s division of the vita activa into action, work, and labor, and the position of legitimate politics in relation to these three categories. It also bears an impor tant connection to Arendt’s understanding of Roman politics and tradition.

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There are two reasons for this latter point. First, as Arendt points out, the founding fathers were themselves influenced by their reading on Roman politics. The second, closely related, but much more important aspect, is why the founding fathers were so influenced by this. Arendt attributes this to the shared elemental political experiences both Americans and Romans experienced: the experience of beginning, or natality. Arendt refers to this as the “fundamental political grammar”: some basic understanding of how politics should be done, what the experience—and the process—must be. The Americans, Arendt writes, understood the notion of action and power and managed to incorporate it, to a degree, into their revolution. The French Revolution, however, although it started with the best of intentions, failed to produce a successful political system because it failed to embody action and power. Violence played a part in this. But it was not violence in itself that was its downfall; rather, it was a certain anti-political violence which emerged from a flawed political ideology, itself emerging from the particular socioeconomic context of the French Revolution.

Necessity and Violence: The Anti-politics of the French Revolution The French Revolution, in Arendt’s eyes, was an authentic revolution, but it led to an inauthentic politics. This was why it failed so miserably and destructively. It was genuinely revolutionary, as no revolution had been before, in that it sought not only to overthrow and replace the hated ancien régime but to replace it with some entirely new political formation, something that was historically unprecedented. But the regime that was attempted was doomed to failure, Arendt believed, because the revolutionaries who were engaged in this process failed to understand and embody the essence of politics within their constitution. In Arendt’s terms, it failed because it did not manage to constitute a political space for freedom in which action could take place; indeed, over its course, this constitutive mission was almost entirely lost, she argues. Instead, the French replaced one politics of rule with another— arguably worse—in quick succession, through violent revolutionary action. This violent action must be more clearly defined, however, if its role in Arendt’s explanation of revolution is to be understood. For Arendt, the violence of the revolution was not prepolitical or nonpolitical but distinctly antipolitical. The root cause of this, Arendt argues, is that the French Revolution

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was never entirely a political revolution but also a social one, and the social aspect became more dominant over time. What Arendt means is that the French Revolution was driven by desperate need, poverty, and want. These problems are social rather than political, because they are not, she asserts, concerned with freedom or action but with need, with biological essentials.13 This is a problem not of the political sphere but of the sphere of labor, and for Arendt, problems of labor are simply insoluble by the political means of speech. “Poverty is abject because it puts men under the absolute dictates of their bodies, that is, under the absolute dictates of necessity as all men know it from their most intimate experience.”14 Equally, politics cannot be reduced to labor, because the necessity and circularity which characterize labor entail the rejection of freedom as Arendt understands it. As soon as they began to look to politics to resolve the problems of the economic sphere, the French revolutionaries began the process that would condemn their new politics. Because of this, “the new republic was stillborn; freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself.”15 A politics that concerns itself predominantly with finding a solution to the social problems of labor is destined to fail, Arendt indicates. The limits of speech, in the face of grinding poverty, very quickly show themselves— words cannot solve hunger. True politics is impotent here. But more importantly, this situation lends itself to a growing disregard for genuine politics and a consequent misinterpretation of what politics is. The revolutionary understanding of the political becomes inextricably bound up in the logic of the labor sphere, in which politics is understood in terms of historical necessity. True politics is therefore understood to be something “natural,” a rejection of the illegitimate artifice of the monarchy and aristocracy. “When the men of the French Revolution said that all power resides in the people,” Arendt writes, “they understood by power a ‘natural’ force whose source and origin lay outside the political realm, a force which in its very violence had been released by the revolution and like a hurricane had swept away all institutions of the ancien régime.”16 In their ignorance and inexperience of power, Arendt explains, instead of replacing the monarch with a genuine plurality, they replaced the monarch as head of state with what they understood to be the unified, natural body of the people. All the people are united in their need, their biological or natural sameness, and thus the volonté générale as an abstraction took on the mantle of ruler—in practice, meaning the person or group who claimed

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to act in the spirit of the general will took on an almost unlimited power of rule. In this situation, power—relying on difference, common sense, and the willingness of citizens to act freely and individually—could not emerge. “No such multitudes would ever give birth to power,” Arendt argued; instead, the revolutionaries’ “strength and violence in their pre-political state were abortive.”17 In rejecting plurality as the basis of power and politics they unconsciously and unintentionally reaffirmed the very problem of French politics before the revolution: the problem of rule displacing power. The primary reason that the French called on these ideas was the reality of French social conditions. The driving poverty and want felt by the majority of the French people meant the revolution was motivated by passion. Not simply selfish passions but, on the contrary, compassion and pity for one’s fellows: the kind of pity for the “common man” that is expressed by the revolutionary leaders and the philosophers and writers who spurred on the revolution. Yet passions do not speak and they cannot persuade: they revert instead to an idea of the natural person. The human heart, Arendt writes, is “a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can penetrate.”18 Hence power is ejected from an idea of the political, and politics becomes anti-politics. Instead of seeking plurality, the people seek to replace one absolute rule with the absolute and necessary rule of their own general will. Out of this is born the idea of historical necessity, that the people must liberate themselves from politics in order to find a better ruler, one which emanates from the nature (general will) of the multitude of the people. Political progress is thereby framed as a return to nature, a rejection of the hy pocrisy and artifice of the ancien régime. These ideas can be seen more widely in Arendt’s discussion of modern (i.e., post-1789) revolutions, in which, with the notable exception of the American Revolution, the social appears as a major driver of change—this is, in fact, one of the predominant problems of the modern political era as Arendt understands it. The attempt to produce a constitution was based on these principles. The French revolutionaries understood themselves to be stripping away the artifice of the ancien régime and to be engaged in building a politics that was in keeping with the natural order. “It was in the nature of their experiences to see the phenomenon of action exclusively in the image of tearing down and building up,” Arendt writes.19 What is missing is the action that comes about through speech, and the replacement of both common sense and power with a faith in the unity of mankind and moreover, a faith in its natural ability to rule. Yet instead, Arendt writes, “the chaos of unrepresented and unpurified

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opinions, because there existed no medium to pass them through, crystallized into a variety of conflicting mass sentiments under the pressure of emergency, waiting for a ‘strong man’ to mould them into a unanimous ‘public opinion,’ which spelled death to all opinions.”20 What was needed was not for politics to be stripped back to its natural form, but for a new political artifice to be constructed that embodied the principles of action as freedom, leaving room for new beginnings and spontaneity, while also expressing firm limits on action to act as a counterbalance to unmitigated action. The French were simply looking for a “natural” politics which was not there. Instead, they found themselves thrust deeper into the cycle of violence inherent in nature. What Arendt rejects in the French case is not the attempt by the French revolutionaries to liberate themselves from the ancien régime nor their attempt to create a new kind of politics. The French Revolution does not show humans in the aspect of homo faber, nor does Arendt depict the violence of the French Revolution as emerging from an engagement in the activity of work, at least not solely. The French were not engaged in work but were trapped in an attempt to resolve the problems of the sphere of labor. This was a particular form of “making” politics, and one which was specifically modern, Arendt believes. Although attempts to “make” politics had been problematic in the past, because they tended to institute deterministic ideas and ideals while failing to consider adequately the role of action, the French Revolution brought to life a new conception of what it was to fabricate politics. In France, a mode of thinking which had been slowly emerging in the West over the preceding centuries exploded into the political sphere quite catastrophically: the notion of natural progress. Once, homo faber had fabricated according to a fixed idea, yet the idea of process and progress, inspired by modern science, now meant that homo faber had come to model his making activities on the ongoing processes found in nature. The scientific revolution and its new understanding of the processes of nature found their way into political science through the work of Hobbes and those like him, Arendt argues, via a politics of power based on bourgeois ideas of the accumulation of power and the perpetual war of all against all.21 “Processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models and shapes of the things to be, become the guide for the making and fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age,” she writes.22 This specifically modern attempt to “make” politics models itself on nature as an ongoing process, one which is not within the capacity of humanity to control or even to act on (as one might act into a genuinely political space without necessarily defining the outcome

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of the action). In the French Revolution, it is not even conceived as an attempt to make politics but rather to strip away the artifice of politics to get to a more genuinely representative and harmonious form of “natural” political life. Stripping away the artifice, or rejecting the old, was a fundamental part of revolution, even in Arendt’s terms. But what the French revolutionaries did not understand was that a political body is wholly artificial, she insisted. If a new political body is not deliberately constituted, politics is absent. The impossibility of ever getting to politics via nature forced the revolutionaries into a spiral of violence, in which their actions were all purportedly for politics but could never emerge as politics. Instead they became more and more deeply entrenched in the logic of labor and its much deeper violence of necessity. By bringing necessity into the supposedly political realm, the revolutionaries had simply expanded the sphere of labor into every part of life—the start of a totalizing politics or more properly, anti-politics. It was not, therefore, violence in itself nor merely the attempt to make a new politics that caused the failure of the French Revolution. An overwhelming force of violence might indeed prevent politics from emerging in such a fragile situation, and the force of the people’s poverty and need could indeed embody the kind of violence required to destroy the fragile body politic as it emerged out of the revolution. But the story Arendt tells is more complex. She wants to explain why the revolution was so extraordinarily destructive and so anti-political in form as well as practice. And the problem is not violence in itself or that the revolutionaries sought to make politics using violence. The problem is that the revolutionaries precisely did not seek to make politics but to liberate it from the ancien régime through increasingly desperate violent action. It was the idea of politics as a force of nature, a force that once stripped of its shackles would necessarily and inevitably produce freedom and happiness, which resulted in the cycle of violence that emerged. Violence and making became wrapped up with one another, yet it was not the presence of violence that condemned the French Revolution but a new acceptance of the violence that emerged out of an ideology of the necessity of progress toward the “natural” end of politics—a violence connected not with work but labor. The French, Arendt writes, looked to “necessity and violence, violence justified and glorified because it acts in the cause of necessity, necessity no longer either rebelled against in a supreme effort of liberation or accepted in pious resignation, but, on the contrary, faithfully worshipped as the great all-coercing force which surely, in the words of Rousseau, will ‘force men to be free.’ ”23

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Yet Arendt remains skeptical that things could have been otherwise. “The concept of historical necessity,” she claimed, “did not so much spring from the experiences and thoughts of those who made the Revolution as it arose from the efforts of those who desired to understand it and come to terms with a chain of events they had watched as a spectacle from the outside.”24 There was an intrinsic problem of violence in France resulting from the poverty and desperation of the people. This elementary need broke into violence almost as soon as the liberation began, infecting the actions of the revolutionaries. This violence demanded from politics resolutions that politics could not provide. But rebellion and violence, even the elemental violence of necessity and need, were hardly new phenomena. In another time, perhaps, the state might have returned to some alternative form of rule and the violence might have been quashed. What was different here, and what made the French Revolution truly unique—both bloodier and more influential than any revolution before—was the notion that nature, and the violence that emerged through nature, could and should be the model for politics. It was the conjoining of natural violence with the ideology of politics as natural that made the French Revolution so deeply anti-political and incredibly violent. Both violence and ideology had a part to play in the anti-political nature of the revolution, but the violence of work—of making—is notably absent in Arendt’s depiction of these events.

The Elementary Grammar of Political Action: The Success of the American Revolution The American Revolution, and the constitutional founding that followed, diverges from the path of the French Revolution in profound respects, not least in the disparity between the levels of violence involved. Yet, just as it was not violence itself that resulted in the ultimately anti-political outcomes of the French Revolution in Arendt’s analysis, neither was it the absence of violence that produced the success of the American Revolution, but a combination of fortunate circumstance and political wisdom. In On Revolution, Arendt presents a version of the American founding that is close to her ideal of republican constitutionalism in many ways (but also not without its problems). In this, she incorporates a notion of making that was not understood to be necessary, or part of a natural process, but which sprang from action and the demands of a “political grammar”—the foundational concepts and principles of politics—rediscovered by the early American settlers and

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adopted by the founding fathers. Discussion and persuasion, power, and action were directly at the center of American political experience, Arendt argues. But Arendt’s depiction of the American Revolution and the founding of the Constitution also has a distinctly Roman element to it, and it is this aspect which brings the different elements of politics together in Arendt’s story: stability with freedom, and work with action. America’s social conditions—the absence of great wealth and poverty, and the absence of severe inequality among its citizens—were its great good fortune, Arendt believed. Unlike in France, where good intentions had been diverted by the force of social pressures, the American Revolution remained focused on politics first and foremost rather than economic matters. While Americans were not free from poverty, they were fortunate enough, Arendt believes, to be free from “misery and want.”25 The Americans, unlike the French, “were not driven by want,” because they were in a condition of greater economic and social equality.26 This questionable assessment ignores the fact that the vast majority of the population had few social or political rights thanks to their race or their gender, while a substantial portion of the population were without even the most basic rights, let alone economic or social equality. It also overlooks the historical fact of considerable economic and social inequality among even the relatively privileged white male citizen body.27 Arendt’s point, if it is to be considered reasonable in any way, must be taken in a very specific sense, as applying only to those who were at the time deemed to be full citizens, and second, applying only to the degree that the dramatic and vividly felt inequalities of French society were not felt in America. This is a more plausible historical claim, even while still questionable in various respects. The absence of want does not imply perfect economic or social equality in America but a relative sense of equality. America, in this sense, therefore was devoid of the more extreme social conditions and, to a large extent, the ideological background that had produced the violence of the French Revolution. The conditions for what Arendt claims was the most successful of any revolution in history could not have been more fortuitous, in her opinion. “The reason for success and failure,” she writes of America and France respectively, “was that the predicament of poverty was absent from the American scene but present everywhere else in the world.”28 However, leaving aside the substantial problems with Arendt’s assertions in this regard, while the absence of want was a necessary condition for the success of the American Revolution, it was not analogous to the absence of violence, nor was it sufficient to produce a successful political revolution. The

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revolution and Constitution were the result of both political and intellectual endeavors: first, the revolutionary decision of the American people to start their polity anew, rejecting not only their colonial occupiers but the model of the European political sphere altogether; second, the conceptual leap whereby they stepped outside the great Western tradition of political thought leading back to Plato and the notion of politics as rule, instead looking to their own experience of beginning as settlers in the New World. “No theory, theological or political or philosophical, but their own decision to leave the Old World behind and to venture forth into an enterprise entirely of their own led into a sequence of acts and occurrences in which they would have perished, had they not turned their minds to the matter long and intensely enough to discover, almost by inadvertence, the elementary grammar of political action, and its more complicated syntax, whose rules determine the rise and fall of human power.”29 These ideas were hardly new, Arendt writes, “but to find experiences of equal import in the political realm, and to read a language of equal authenticity and originality . . . one might have to go back into the very distant past indeed, a past, at any rate, of which the settlers were totally ignorant.”30 Through these experiences they rediscovered politics, and specifically, the “few elementary truths” on which a social contract might be based.31 The source of these elementary truths, Arendt explains, and what gave them such vitality was the experience of the “public happiness” citizens felt when taking part in political activity in America. The local township councils in which they came together to participate in politics formed “the citizen’s right of access to the public realm, in his share in public power—to be a ‘participator in the government of affairs’ in Jefferson’s telling phrase.”32 This public happiness was understood to be quite distinct from the rights of citizens to be protected in the pursuit of private happiness, Arendt claimed. The revolutionaries did not, in fact, set out to initiate a wholly new kind of politics, Arendt writes. The founding fathers, she states, “prided themselves on having only applied boldly and without prejudice what had been discovered long before.”33 Yet the experience of taking part in politics, an experience which long predated the American Revolution, was heightened by the revolutionary experience and came to be foundational to the spirit of postrevolutionary America, and set the New World apart from its European predecessors.34 Although the conditions for politics were present prior to the revolution, under the system of colonial rule the political sphere was incomplete at best. And, Arendt notes, “while power, rooted in a people that had bound itself by mutual promises and lived in bodies constituted by compact, was enough to

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‘go through a revolution’ (without unleashing the boundless violence of the multitudes), it was by no means enough to establish a ‘permanent union’, that is, to found a new authority.”35 The essence of politics was present in the action and power of the American people, but the conditions for sustaining this political space still needed to be created. Action alone, even that which is confirmed through promising—on which Arendt admittedly places great emphasis—is simply not enough. “Neither compact nor promise upon which compacts rest are sufficient to assure perpetuity, that is, to bestow upon the affairs of men that measure of stability without which they would be unable to build a world for their posterity, destined and designed to outlive their mortal lives.”36 Lisa Disch notes that the sometimes idealized concept of promising Arendt uses in her work was not reflected in the reality of seventeenth-century America, where rather than thinking of civil covenants as “mutual promises,” most Americans “experienced them as agreements scripted by others and executed elsewhere” (i.e., by state institutions). “By 1789,” Disch writes, “the elementary republics that Arendt claims funded revolutionary authority were extinct.”37 However, Arendt’s understanding of the success of the American Revolution does not rely solely or even predominantly on these acts of promising but incorporates a distinctly more institutional claim. “The fences inclosing private property and insuring the limitations of each household, the territorial boundaries which protect and make possible the physical identity of a people, and the laws which make necessary its political existence,” Arendt writes, “are of such great importance to the stability of human affairs precisely because no such limiting and protecting principles arise out of the activities going on within the realm of human affairs itself.”38 Thus, although a major reason for the success of the American Revolution was the absence of the elementary violence of poverty and want that would undermine the French Revolution, Arendt is claiming here that something else is required apart from the presence of action and power. Politics requires the construction of institutions and authorities which operate through, but also stabilize, the fragile world of action and power. “Revolution, on the one hand, and constitution and foundation on the other, are like correlative conjunctions,” Arendt wrote.39 Whereas the French were engaged in an unending struggle to liberate the people—from the monarchy, from poverty—the Americans achieved liberation in one swift stroke, and moved their attention quickly to freedom and the question of how to sustain political freedom. This freedom they understood, most fortunately, not in terms of the freedom of the general will but in terms of the action and power bound

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up in the pursuit of public happiness, that is, the fulfillment arising from taking part in the activity of politics. The founding fathers, then, were confronted with the problem of not how to create the political space but how to protect it. The classically educated founding fathers looked to the history of the Roman Republic for inspiration. “When they turned to the ancients,” Arendt claims, “it was because they discovered in them a dimension which had not been handed down as tradition—neither by the tradition of customs and institutions nor by the great tradition of Western thought and concepts.”40 Yet, she goes on to claim, rather than copying the Roman example, they “rediscovered” the elemental truths embodied within the Roman experience through the parallels with their own experience of acting politically. “Hence it was not tradition that bound them back to the beginnings of Western history but, on the contrary, their own experiences, for which they needed models and precedents. And the great model and precedent, all occasional rhetoric about the glory of Athens and Greece notwithstanding, was for them, as it had been for Machiavelli, the Roman Republic and the grandeur of its history.”41 Both the historical claims Arendt makes here, about the experiences of the American Republic and its unique adoption of the Roman tradition, are potentially problematic. Disch argues that the council politics that Arendt locates power in did not persist to the time of the American Revolution but had already become much more centralized.42 Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen write that the “claim they [the founders] did without the concept of popular sovereignty is simply too sweeping.”43 And John Sitton and John Medearis both make the point that the councils had impor tant socioeconomic functions and aims, as well as those Arendt might consider genuinely political.44 The councils, the space Arendt identifies as that in which the experience of politics is occurring, were thus arguably not as decentralized and participatory as Arendt suggests, nor as uniquely “political” as she portrays. Meanwhile, Arendt largely overlooks the equally substantial influence of Roman history on the French revolutionaries and their use of Cicero and the Roman historians in their speeches and writings.45 The historical claims Arendt makes here are exaggerated, as is not uncommon in her work, in order to draw her point more clearly and to exemplify the differences she believes separated the French and American revolutionary experiences. She sees the Roman idea of tradition, as she understands it, echoed in the American Constitution, and so she emphasizes the genuinely Roman type of politics in America, above what she presumably, given her exclusion of it from On

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Revolution, believes to be a more superficial French interest in Roman politics. Judith Shklar writes that it was “one of . . . Arendt’s distinctions to be able both to analyze monumental history and to practice it,” to be both critical and creative.46 In On Revolution, she argues, Arendt did the creative work.47 It is in this context that On Revolution must be viewed, neither as wholly ahistorical nor as a work of pure history but rather as a creative analysis of revolutionary politics viewed through the lens of Arendt’s own understanding of political action. The founding fathers, Arendt writes, were faced with the problem of how to build a durable political system from the changing actions and interactions of a people. But the problem is by its nature insoluble. “This latter part of the task of revolution, to find a new absolute to replace the absolute of divine power, is insoluble because power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute.”48 This problem of the absolute, and even the American founders’ desire for an absolute to enforce their political sphere, is inherently problematic, since absolutes, of course, are incompatible with action and tend to violence. But when the founding fathers drew on the Roman ideas of tradition and legislation, they found a way of mitigating the problem of the absolute (although not avoiding it altogether). The political genius of the founders, their way through the extremes of action and absolutism, was in drawing on the Roman model by fabricating “tradition” in the Roman sense through the placing of authority in the Constitution. Thus, the Americans removed the source of law from the people and “power,” recognizing politics as not simply action or power, but also the artifice structuring the political space of action. Where the French placed the source of law in their mistaken conception of the people as a fundamentally unitary body or will and so combined nature with total political power, the Americans saw law as a positive restriction on politics, limiting and thus defining the political space. The success of the founders, Arendt claims, “the simple fact that their revolution succeeded . . . in founding a new body politic stable enough to survive the onslaught of centuries to come . . . was decided the very moment when the Constitution began to be ‘worshipped,’ even though it had hardly begun to operate.”49 It was this specific act of foundation which separated the American Revolution from all other (failed) revolutions, Arendt believes, and “the authority which the act of foundation carried within itself,” rather than belief in a God or even the truths claimed by the Declaration of Independence.50 The

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authority within the act of foundation “assured stability for the new republic,” Arendt continues. “It was ultimately the great Roman model that asserted itself almost automatically . . . in the minds of those who, in all deliberate consciousness, had turned to Roman history and Roman political institutions in order to prepare themselves for their own task.”51 But it was not the content of Roman history that provided the political model so much as Roman concepts, and specifically the Roman idea of tradition, or how to utilize the past. Tradition is not history, but a constructed interpretation of the past; it “orders the past, hands it down (tradere), interprets it, omits, selects, and emphasizes according to a system of pre-established beliefs.”52 Thus, the success of the American Revolution is attributed by Arendt to two distinctly different and in some sense opposed elements of the process. First, the founders grasped through their own experiences of public action, both local and ordinary and then revolutionary, the centrality of both action and power to the political sphere, and the nature of freedom as natality implicit in action. Freedom was not solely liberation from an oppressor, nor could it be understood as freedom from social and economic forces. The American prerevolutionary experience, both in terms of the relative prosperity of the nation and the public spaces that had sprung up between those living together far away from the traditional institutions of the West, had created a situation whereby the Americans avoided the misidentification of natural or economic need as a political question, the notion of politics as rule, and the anti-political violence that accompanies both of these ideas. Yet, at the same time, Arendt attributes the stability of that republic directly to the Constitution, or more specifically, the legitimacy with which the Constitution was endowed from the very beginning. J. M. Bernstein writes that, for Arendt, “being a citizen is the promise to all other citizens to uphold the founding promise through which we have all become politically united.”53 Yet he believes that the consequent fabrication of law and state “will inevitably over time detach power from the people and rigidify validity into habit, command and coercion.”54 As a result, he claims that the only value a constitution can have for Arendt is as an exemplar. If it is true that constitutional foundations are simply promising, and therefore an aspect of action, constitutions will remain vulnerable to the fluctuations of action. On the other hand, if legislation is wholly divided from power, surely it will indeed “rigidify into habit,” as Bernstein claims. But this jars with the central importance of constitutional authority which Arendt attributes to the foundation or fabrication of the Constitution, and the way in

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which the Constitution is a coming together of the making aspect of politics with action and power. Institution building was essential for the success of the American Revolution, in Arendt’s portrayal. “Opinion was discovered by both the French and the American Revolutions,” she wrote, “but only the latter—and this shows once more the high rank of its political creativity— knew how to build a lasting institution for the formation of public views into the very structure of the republic.”55 When the founding fathers sought to imbue the Constitution, instead of the people, with legislative authority, this enabled the construction of authority in a quasi-Roman sense. A constitution may be understood, as it was in America, as a sacred foundation, as a past. “If their attitude towards Revolution and Constitution can be called religious at all,” Arendt argues, tellingly, “then the word ‘religion’ must be understood in its original Roman sense, and their piety would then consist in religare, in binding themselves back to the beginning of Roman history, the foundation of the eternal city.”56 While the French revolutionaries invested themselves in the idea of freedom as liberation and the general will as the absolute in their new politics, Americans created for themselves a more durable world, binding themselves henceforth to the past, that is, the foundation of the American Republic, in a way that would be impossible in the French case, where legitimacy lay solely in the people. The founders sought to produce a balance, not simply in the separation of powers, but between the stabilizing force of work, by creating a durable political institution rooted in the past, and the empowering, driving forces of action; between the spirit of the revolution and passing that spirit on in a living tradition, or “augmenting” in the Roman sense.

Work, Violence, and Constitution Making Thus, the founding fathers “worked” as well as “acted” in their creation of the republic. This positions work, and the violence inherent in work, within the realm of the political, as in Arendt’s writings on the Roman Republic. But in America, the violence of the political realm seems largely absent when contrasted with the violence of other revolutions, not least its French counterpart. What does it mean to say that violence was part of the revolutionary process, and how does this appear in Arendt? Violence is deliberately underplayed in Arendt’s telling of American history, in part to contrast the American Revolution with the French Revolution. Of the many attempts at revolution

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throughout history, she writes, “only one, the American Revolution, has been successful: the Founding Fathers as, characteristically enough, we still call them, founded a completely new body politic without violence and with the help of a constitution.”57 The absence of violence within America was certainly an enabling factor in the creation and perpetuation of a free space within which individuals could be involved in politics—the absence of violence enables common sense and power to be realized through the activity of speech, without being overwhelmed or corrupted by violence. This still stands, for Arendt, despite the deep violence being done by and to a large part of American society through slavery. Although the public space was only open to an elite, it was still political to the extent that within the space of politics, the necessary conditions were present. Inequality in society does not necessarily undermine the equality required in the political sphere—it simply shrinks the size of the political sphere by reducing the number of legitimate citizens. Arendt’s republicanism should not be mistaken for democratic, universal suffrage—it merely involves ensuring a political sphere is enacted by some. Perhaps even more important, the conditions which led to such terrible violence in France were absent in America, which meant the Americans did not have to deal with the ideological errors that drove French violence to extremes, and the derailing of politics as a result. The absence of violence in America was one causal factor contributing to the success of the revolution, but it was itself the result of other factors, all of which combined to offer a promising environment for the politics of the young republic. However, the role of violence within the American Revolution was neither negligible nor irrelevant, if we examine Arendt’s words closely. The interrelatedness of wars and revolutions, she writes, “is as old as the revolutions themselves.”58 Revolution and war, she admits, are both phenomena which are “not even conceivable outside the domain of violence . . . violence is a kind of common denominator for both.”59 Why, then, such emphasis on America as a nonviolent revolution? On Revolution is introduced with a discussion on war and revolution, and the subsequent statement she makes about the text—that she is “not concerned here with the war question”—has more to do with authorial intention than the nature of revolution.60 The justification of violence, she argues, can only constitute political limitation, hence “in so far as violence plays a predominant role in wars and revolutions, both occur outside the political realm, strictly speaking.”61 But this statement does not reject the relevance of violence to revolution or even politics; what it opposes is the predominance of

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violence in politics. Of course, if violence is so great as to dominate the process, drowning out speech or making discussion impossible, it cannot be political. But the more complex aspects of the relationship between politics and violence in its different guises, as has been discussed in previous chapters, are not thereby rejected. “Only where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government,” Arendt writes, “to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution.”62 There are at least two forms of violence present in the American Revolution as Arendt depicts it: the violence of liberation and the violence of constitution—and it is the latter that comes closest to a form of justifiable, political coercion. However, it is worth noting that the supposedly prepolitical violence of liberation is deeply entangled with action as well. “The breakdown of authority prior to the revolution . . . is the condition for the revolution. No revolution can succeed where the loyalty of the armed force, police and army is intact,” she writes.63 “The armed uprising never occurred except where the army joined (or could reasonably be expected to join) the rebels. This is the condition sine qua non.”64 The reason for this is not simply due to the nature of modern warfare, she argues, but “has always been true.”65 So power plays an important role here, even though it is not always consciously realized. The breakdown of authority is as important to Arendt as the practicalities of fighting, because it indicates a wider consensus among the people. Yet, she continues, “no revolution ever came about through the disintegration of the body politic. On the contrary, these disintegrating bodies . . . can be of extraordinary longevity. There must also be men—eager and prepared to take upon themselves the responsibilities of power—waiting in the wings.”66 Revolution, then, must not only pair violence with power, but Arendt makes the case for the importance of political elites willing to fight and lead on behalf of the people—that is, to move outside the sphere of political action but for political motives and legitimized through the political sphere. Those who take upon themselves the responsibility of fighting against an oppressor are seen to be doing so, at least at first, with the authority of power. This is the same for the French and the American Revolutions, which, however, quickly took drastically different directions. But the “regular warfare” and the “relative nonviolence” of the American Revolution cannot avoid the fact that there was indeed violence, and a violence which she appears to twin with power. Yet no extent of liberating violence can produce politics, and the key importance of the constitutional foundation in enabling and enforcing the

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space of politics, understood in its fullest sense, cannot be overstated. It is in this sense, the process of making the political sphere stable through the activity of fabrication—of producing the worldly aspect of politics—that violence becomes more relevant. In the creation of the American Constitution, legislation rooted in the promises and contracts the American revolutionaries made among themselves clearly conjoined work with power and action. Arendt adopts a broadly Lockean social contract theory, using her own notion of power to explain the legitimacy underlying the American founding. This social contract took place between individuals, and the mutual contract forming the community “is based on reciprocity and presupposes equality.”67 The result is an alliance between people, binding them into a new power structure to which each has consented. She contrasts this horizontal social contract with a vertical contract made between a people and a ruler, which she depicts as the Hobbesian version of social contract theory, explaining that in this case, “far from gaining a new power . . . he resigns his power such as it is . . . he merely expresses his ‘consent’ to be ruled by the government, whose power consists of the sum total of forces which all individual persons have channelled into it.”68 The two social contract theories are sharply distinguished, with the principle of the first being power and of the second, rule. “As far as the individual person is concerned,” Arendt argues, “it is obvious that he gains as much power by the system of mutual promises as he loses by his consent to a monopoly of power in the ruler.”69 But in seeking to define and protect the new space of power through legislation, the potential for future natality was inevitably constricted. The payoff was the protection of the republic, but in practice, this protection, although it sought to retain political activity within the sphere of the legitimately political by the balance of powers, was delineated by violence or at least the potential for state violence against threats to the constitution, if legislation is to have any effect. Arendt recognizes that social contract alone is unable to overcome the problem of change over time that inheres in action. The founders thereby sought to balance action by introducing tradition and augmentation along with foundation. Indeed, Arendt writes, the idea that foundation, augmentation, and conservation are interrelated “might well have been the most important single notion which the men of the Revolution adopted.”70 And so she describes the American revolutionary thus: The revolutionist, as a founder, is a kind of architect who builds the house in which future generations, his posterity, will live. This house

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must be stable precisely because those who inhabit it are futile, come and go, in an infinite process of succession which may or may not be ruled by the law of progress. These revolutionists, because they knew that theirs was a novus order saeclorum, were of course by the same token conservatives, because how could they not hope that their new work would be preserved, that this new building, the new body politic, the new institutions of liberty, would prove stable enough to withstand the onslaught of time, and of changes to which all things mortal are subject. . . . The sphere of the social is by definition the sphere of life and of change, the sphere of the political is there to house this life and the change of life.71 In seeking to conserve the newly made constitution and thus react against action, violence was, in a limited and pro-political form, implicit in the construction of the American Republic, as a form of state coercion in pursuance of its constitutive legislation. It must be noted, however, that this violence— the limited violence of the work sphere, which seeks to fix or preserve some par ticular end—remained very distant indeed from that of the French Revolution: the cyclical, unrestrained, and chaotic violence of the sphere of labor confused with the political, as Arendt depicts the two. And likewise, the American founders managed to avoid the problematic equation of politics with sovereignty or rule through the Roman-inspired notion of augmentation: “a coincidence of foundation and preservation.”72 It was this idea, Arendt wrote, that was able to bring together “the ‘revolutionary’ act of beginning something entirely new, and conservative care, which will shield this new beginning through the centuries.”73 The Americans combined action and power with preservation and conservation in augmentation, and in doing so found a way through the danger of pure rule, on one extreme, and unmitigated action, on the other. The violence of the government in such a republic, in this light—as the authorized protector of a politically constituted and continually evolving legislation—looks to be a violence that is not divorced from power, but intimately and legitimately political.

Revolutionary Ideas in the Contemporary World Arendt’s histories of the two revolutions, and their respective successes or failures in their own time, were written with her own political era in mind. The

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ideas that emerged from these two revolutions—the very first revolutions in the specifically modern sense that Arendt defines—have come to play their parts in our own political world. From the French Revolution came the idea of politics as a natural, necessary process leading to some absolute, an idea that became central to Hegel’s philosophy and, after Hegel, Marx and his followers. “Theoretically, the most far-reaching consequence of the French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in Hegel’s philosophy,” Arendt claims, and his truly revolutionary idea that “the old absolute of the philosophers revealed itself in the realm of human affairs.”74 The French Revolution may have failed in Arendt’s terms of producing a politics of power based on action, but it was extremely successful in influencing successive generations of Europeans and politics globally by articulating a new form of sovereignty based on “progress.” The American Revolution, on the other hand, for all its insight into the “elementary truths” of politics, ultimately failed to pass its legacy on to the world. While the founding fathers attained a degree of durability for the US Constitution, the political truths that they had rediscovered were forgotten. There are two distinct reasons for this failure. The first, and the reason for what Arendt sees as the decline of the revolutionary (i.e., truly political) spirit in America, was the failure by the founding fathers to incorporate what was for Arendt the most important of the prerevolutionary institutions, the township. Lewis Mumford, she wrote, “recently pointed out how the political importance of the township was never grasped by the founders, and that the failure to incorporate it into either the federal or the state constitution was ‘one of the tragic oversights of post-revolutionary political development.’”75 The founding fathers grasped the nature of power and understood the need to institute bodies that could perpetuate power over time, but they failed to recognize and protect the institutions that could achieve this in reality. The prerevolutionary local councils—the grassroots spaces of political power, below federal and national institutions but essential to both—were the only places where actual power, rather than representations of power, could appear. “If the ultimate end of revolution was freedom and the constitution of a public space where freedom could appear, the constitutio libertatis,” Arendt argued, “then the elementary republics of the wards, the only tangible place where everyone actually could be free, actually were the end of the great republic whose chief purpose in domestic affairs should have been to provide the people with such places of freedom and to protect them.”76 The founding fathers simply misunderstood which institutions or political spaces were genuinely foundational

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to American power, and which should therefore have been protected and preserved as a priority. Instead, they sought to build national institutions, neglecting local institutions that by fostering power in the prerevolutionary era had brought about the revolution. There was, Arendt writes, “nothing that could compensate for this failure or prevent it from becoming final, except memory and recollection.”77 Yet it was not the institutions of the American Revolution, flawed though they were, that would be remembered, but those of the French Revolution. This had little to do with the quality of political practice in the latter, in Arendt’s opinion, but rather the extent of the intellectual endeavor and theorizing that emerged around and after the French Revolution, and the absence of such theorizing in post-revolutionary America. “If it is indisputable that booklearning and thinking in concepts, indeed of a very high calibre, erected the framework of the American republic, it is no less true that this interest in political thought and theory dried up almost immediately after the task had been achieved,” Arendt argued. “I think this loss of an allegedly purely theoretical interest in political interest has not been the ‘genius’ of American history but, on the contrary, the chief reason why the American Revolution has remained sterile in terms of world politics.”78 Political genius does not guarantee success, still less in the case of the problematic institutions of the American republic. Individual agency, whether the creation of the new, or the preservation of the old, reigns supreme. Institution building, the emergence of tradition, the construction of a political “world,” may all help shape the actions of individuals. Yet ultimately, Arendt argues, “political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being. Independent existence marks the work of art as a product of making; utter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.”79 That the politics of the American Revolution failed to spread to other nations or even perpetuate itself over time within America, in part because of the failure by the Americans to theorize their experiences, is mirrored in an argument Arendt makes elsewhere on the perpetuation of the Greek and Roman polities. Rome, a republic engaged in political action, where tradition and legislation was rooted in the specifics of Roman life, activities, and political relationships, failed because of this to create a political philosophy of its own that could counter the philosophy developed by the Greek world. “The Romans paid a steep price for their contempt of philosophy, which they held

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to be ‘impractical,’ ” Arendt writes. “The end result was the undisputed victory of Greek philosophy and the loss of the Roman political experience for occidental political thought.”80 Rome “left its own specifically political experience without adequate interpretation.”81 The Greek philosophers—who in the main, it must be remembered, promoted political models that for Arendt were anti-political—made their ideas felt through the millennia, shaping political ideology and understanding. There is danger implicit in a politics of action that an excessive concern with action tends to result in a failure of engagement with the world of theory that might engage the attention of other times or other peoples. Tradition, in the Roman sense or in the sense that the Americans managed to produce in the constitutional foundation, is internally powerful, but its authority, rooted in the past, does not translate to other peoples—because of the par ticular importance attributed to the Constitution as a specifically American political foundation—in the same way that more abstract political theory is able to. Both France and Greece, Arendt argues, were remembered not because of the political acumen of their philosophers but for the fact that they sought to preserve and communicate their supposed political truths to a wider audience, by abstracting them into conceptual structures that might transcend their own par ticular time and place. The power-focused polities of revolutionary America and of the Roman res publica, on the other hand, saw no need for such abstractions, because they were concerned with experience and action above contemplation. America thus failed both on a practical and intellectual level: doubly undermining politics through a failure to protect the most significant institutions of popular power and by failing to perpetuate the understanding of politics they had gained through their unique experiences.

Instituting a Space for Action The claim that emerges through Arendt’s story of the two great eighteenthcentury revolutions is that the activity of politics, in modern revolution just as in ancient times, must be a balance between structure and action. The specific forms might change but the essential grammar of politics, its most basic realities, does not. What sets politics apart from other activities, that which defines it as the space of freedom, is that politics is where spontaneous action and freely constituted power are enacted. Equally, any political community that does not create a defined, delimited political space to house

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freedom and protect it from the other spheres of active life will become a victim of its own action over time. The two elements interact, and this is where violence, specifically the violence of work, becomes, at least potentially, more political. Power, that most political of concepts, is a form of action which requires, Arendt argues, a political space to act within: an artificial sphere which equalizes human beings, making interaction and communication on a platform of equal recognition possible. Yet, the creation of an artificial space of politics structures and therefore in some sense limits the spontaneity and potential of action. It is only work that is able to fulfill this role in Arendt’s framework. Neither the activities of action or labor are concerned with permanence in the world. Action is inherently agonistic and individualistic, and power, though deeply political, is inherently a temporary force which is subject to action. A society of laborers “dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never-ending process, would no longer be able to recognize its own futility—the futility of a life which ‘does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject which endures after [its] labor is past.’ ”82 Neither action nor labor provides a means by which to escape from such futility. Thus, political space as durable institutional structure must not only be realized through the power and common sense of a community but also through actual world-building activities: through acts of written legislation, histories, monuments, and the creation of physical spaces. But most important of these are those elements of political culture which are physical manifestations or interpretations of political action or speech. “The whole factual world of human affairs,” Arendt writes, “depends for its reality and continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.”83 These are the elements that cross the divide between work and politics, and which therefore bring in notions of violence: to create but also to preserve. The challenge of politics is finding a way in which the political space required by action can emerge and be sustained. This often requires both clearing a space for action, against the status quo, as well as some method of sustaining action, often against powerful forms of anti-politics which repress action. The conservation of power over time should be particularly emphasized above the initial creation of the political body as a place where violence and power meet in a political sense. This is because, while the creation of the polity often requires acts of liberation before the new political body can

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be established, this is not necessarily political—that is, liberation may conceivably be the result of nonpolitical or individualized violence or strength rather than the result of power. However, in the act of seeking to preserve a constitution over time, politics and violence necessarily combine, because it is here that past action, or that power which first causes and defines the original constitution, is used to restrict present and future action. The disconnect between the power of the founders and the power of the people in subsequent eras causes the emergence of violence if the original constitution is upheld, because it then becomes necessary to protect the constitution through coercion insofar as it cannot be sustained through power alone, because that is rooted in the spontaneity of individual action. This is where the notion of augmentation becomes impor tant. Violence neither can nor should attempt to uphold a constitution against the united power of a people. But power over time dissipates and changes. Augmentation, understood as the process by which a political community looks backward and to the present at the same time, respecting limitations but also reinterpreting them, is the means by which past power and present power are brought together. This can be understood as an internal legitimizing process within the individual, or, more relevantly, in the common sense of the political community, but it also needs to be understood as a factor that legitimizes the work that upholds the physical world of politics, because the physical world is also necessary for politics. Thus legislation, public spaces, and products of political culture can and should be protected by the violence of work, for specifically political reasons. This, however, assumes that the space in question is indeed political, that is, whether it truly represents a space of freedom—something which Arendt believes is extremely rare. This criticism of politics means that the relationship set out between politics and violence, and the limited justification of state (and other) forms of violence, is inapplicable to most, if not all, modern states. Only where power is the driving force of the political organization does the relationship still hold. The case studies that have been examined in the last three chapters, on Jewishness and Zionism, the Greek and Roman worlds, and the French and American Revolutions, indicate that there is some elemental “political grammar” that can be found in history and even recreated in some sense for our own time. These foundational elements are premised on the idea that speech is at the center of what it is to be human and to be free. But genuine politics is rare, and furthermore, this understanding of politics has been largely lost to the twentieth century, in Arendt’s view. Arendt’s critique of violence—as

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opposed to her understanding of the real relationship between violence and politics—is ultimately bound up not in historical examples but in her criticism of what she terms “the social.” The social, which first made its presence felt in politics though the French Revolution and its aftermath, has become increasingly important and increasingly destructive of politics through its rejection of the political as an independent sphere. It is the violence of the social which Arendt primarily rejects when she rejects the role of violence in politics: a modern violence which indeed, for her, has nothing to do with politics as such.

CHAPTER 5

Political Violence in Modernity

By looking at Arendt’s accounts of violence in politics from the ancient to the contemporary world, two facts become evident. First, despite common assumptions to the contrary, Arendt does not believe that politics and violence in practice always negate one another. She sets out a number of cases where violence and legitimate politics go side by side and where violent action is required for and justified by legitimate political purposes. However, a further argument can be made that even in Arendt’s conceptual framework, politics is not intrinsically opposed to all violence. Rather, “the political” relies on some forms of violence operating in alliance with power in order for political power to preserve itself. And because Arendt does accept that there is a role for violence in politics—and a necessary one—a rather different idea of politics emerges from the more usual readings of Arendtian politics as a space of idealized action. Many types of violence can be found across Arendt’s work possessing radically different properties, some of which can be described as unambiguously unpolitical. The political justification of violence rests on the legitimacy of the political sphere and the form that violence takes. The violence of the Greek polis was one such form, directed as it was toward maintaining the separation between citizens and “other,” it is largely prepolitical rather than an expression of constitutionally or politically productive power. The violence of the French Revolutionaries, originating in their desperate passion to destroy the ancien régime, was anti-political because it sought to sweep away the artifice of politics without constituting a new political form. The Zionist violence that Arendt criticized was anti-political, because the Zionists’ aim was to constitute a form of nationalist sovereign politics that rejects plurality. In these cases, the ends direct the means: nonpolitical ends drive non- or

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anti-political violence. Yet in the cases of the more expansive Roman notion of treaty making, America’s constitutional politics, and Magnes’s federal solution for Palestine, violence—while likely, but not guaranteed, to be less brutal than in the former cases—can be genuinely pro-political. However, while different forms of violence are recognized by Arendt, across her work she consistently identifies that there is a role for violence in the political sphere and differentiates between political and non- or antipolitical forms of violence. She consistently claims that violence is not, in itself, anti-political; that it can be positively political or politically beneficial; and that politics often (and in the long term, always) requires power and violence. Equally, she highlights that there are particularly problematic forms of violence which can be considered politically dangerous, notably those she describes in terms of sovereign violence or the violence of the social. In the 1940s she expressly argues that the Jewish army is a political entity, moreover, that it is an essential political goal for the Jewish people and that it requires power to be combined with violence acts in order to achieve the goal of the (re-)creation of the Jewish people as a polity. Contra to this, her critique of Zionism emphasizes the problematic nature of sovereign politics and violence, and particularly the violent tactics espoused by Revisionist Zionists. In her 1950s work on Rome and Greece, Arendt, rather remarkably, sees the violence of Roman expansionist war to be a kind of political activity, made so by the form of Roman law: law understood in terms of relationships, or the connections between people and peoples. Rome could “make” violence political because its conceptualization of law was such that it enabled the incorporation of new groups of conquered people into the Roman political entity. The centrality of the justification of this kind of violence was nothing less than the creation of “the Western world as world.”1 Against this, the Greek nomos, premised upon a strict boundary—and thus hierarchization—between the Greek polis and its foes, did not permit the violence of war to be transformed into a political action. The Greeks simply could not comprehend their enemies as equals; they remained the conquerors and the conquered. Again, in the 1960s, as Arendt wrote on the seemingly very different theme of modern revolution, the same ideas are expressed. In the American Revolution, Arendt locates a genuinely political form of action connected irrevocably to the violence of revolution. This is, again, contrasted to the nonpolitical violence of the French Revolution, where a particular type of social violence is highlighted as being problematic because the French revolutionaries falsely believed power to be a natural rather than man-made, thus political, force.2 Arendt believed that the

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Americans, by contrast, had understood and therefore embodied political power in their revolution and subsequent constitution. From this, it emerges that there is a form of violence Arendt believes to be characteristic of the modern age, closely connected with the rule of sovereignty: a particularly pernicious type that might be defined as social violence. This kind of violence is rooted in the specifically modern phenomenon that she referred to as the social. When Arendt discusses the problems of violence in politics it is often this that she has in mind, because this kind of violence is fundamentally anti-political, but also because it is highly prevalent in the ideology and practice of modern politics. It is social violence, and the dominance of “the social” as a sphere of action in the modern world that is the key to understanding why Arendt is so often concerned with emphatically rejecting the (commonplace) conflation between violence and politics rather than elucidating the more nuanced idea of violence that can be found in her thought. “The social” immediately strikes one as an awkward term. It is not immediately apparent what the social might be, nor is Arendt’s explanation wholly coherent. She seems to amalgamate under this heading a set of seemingly unrelated qualities of the modern world. The “social question” in Arendt’s work on revolution refers to the problem of poverty. In her controversial essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” the social refers to the quasi-public, quasiprivate space of school, a buffer between the public and private world where individuals need not act for the public good but rather for their own (or, in this case, their children’s) interests. In The Human Condition, where her most extensive treatment of the social appears, she sets out a more abstract notion of a space that has emerged in modernity and embodies aspects of both public and private, in which the private sphere tends to eclipse the public sphere and where plurality and natality are thus absent. The most important feature connecting these ideas is that Arendt consistently describes “the social” as something that characterizes a type of community where public action has lost its distinctiveness and is instead conflated with individual, or private, actions based on interest, and where experience and understanding of genuine power and political action is accordingly rare. Annelies Degryse even argues that the social can be seen to emerge much earlier in Arendt’s work; she points out that Arendt sees Hobbes as the father of both totalitarianism and the social and that her reading of Hobbes and the rise of the bourgeoisie in The Origins of Totalitarianism is in line with C. B. Macpherson’s slightly earlier interpretation of Hobbes.3 However, despite the importance of Hobbes in Arendt’s historical framing of the development of the social, it is not until The

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Human Condition that her idea of the social is really outlined, some fifteen years after Origins. In The Human Condition, Arendt explains that the social is something between the public and the private, both historically equally legitimate but distinct forms of life, each with its own spheres of interest and ways of living. The emergence of the social is “the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems and organizational devices . . . from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere.”4 Prior to the modern era, the private realm encompassed solely that part of life concerned with meeting the necessities of life: food, shelter, procreation: man’s basic interests.5 But “the private” today, she writes, has a “peculiar manifoldness and variety . . . certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age.”6 The social has developed through the intrusion of traditionally private concerns and interests into the public sphere of politics and eventually the equation of private interest with political concerns. When private interest, far more immediately urgent to the individual citizen than the more diffuse concerns of public good, is permitted to take center stage in politics, interactions between citizens deteriorate into an intractable clash of zero-sum interests. The growth of the social sounds the death knell for the possibility of plurality. This has had dramatic consequences for the ability of citizens to engage in a politics of cooperative power and even to understand what such a politics could be. “The emergence of society,” she writes, “has not only blurred the old borderline between public and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen.”7 The social, despite its individualistic orientation, is also the enemy of natality, that other cornerstone of any genuine politics. “It is decisive,” Arendt explains, “that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead society expects from its members a certain kind of behavior.”8 When the activities of the private, the necessities of life, are thrust into the public sphere as its predominant focus, natality’s role as the distinctive activity of the political is challenged. “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”9 This does not mean, Arendt explains, that every single member of a socialized society is a laborer, but that each individual in such a community considers their actions primarily as a means to sustain their own and their family’s lives.10 We behave in equivalent ways because we all follow the logic of natural necessity in our political demands and

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decisions rather than being enabled to pursue actions that are untethered by these limitations. The “unnatural growth of the natural” in society therefore results in a deep conformism in the public sphere, in contrast to both the agonal individualism of the Greek public sphere and the Roman desire for personal distinction.11 The social ideal, Arendt writes, is that members of a political community must “act as if they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest.”12 This tendency expanded over the modern era, Arendt argues, until “with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength.”13 The social acts against plurality and therefore against power; at the same time, it makes natality, and therefore agonistic action, increasingly difficult. In this way the distinct character of the political world—that we live together with each other and that we possess agency to act spontaneously and freely—is lost to modern comprehension, and we find ourselves bound together not by power but in the endless war of all against all.

The Origins of “the Social” The social is peculiar to the modern world. Although its linguistic roots are Latin, the Roman societas was a far more limited idea, Arendt explains, indicating “an alliance between people for a specific purpose, as when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime.”14 Over time this specificity would be lost. Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, wrote that Aristotle’s zoon politikon shows that man is political or, he adds, what is the same thing, social. Arendt takes this “unconscious substitution of the social for the political” as an indication of the extent to which the older Greek idea had been lost.15 Yet while the political had begun to be equated with the social by this time, a distinction between the public and private spheres still remained. “Its disappearance . . . is an essentially modern phenomenon,” Arendt writes.16 Arendt claims that the emergence of the social can be traced to the three events which mark the beginning of the modern age: “[the] discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the Reformation, which . . . started the two-fold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth; . . . [and] the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.”17 The exploration of the globe began a process by which the earth began to shrink;

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“nothing can remain immense if it can be measured,” Arendt writes.18 Man “disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with what is close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from every thing near him.”19 This produced a kind of world alienation, the rejection of immediate worldliness for the promise of a new world. At the same time, the Reformation produced another kind of alienation, Weber’s “innerworldly asceticism,” identified by Arendt as the “innermost spring of the new capitalist mentality.”20 In the classical era, property—and most relevantly, slave ownership—was the means by which one might transcend the everyday demands of life, enabling the owners to take part in politics. In contrast, “society, when it first entered the public realm, assumed the disguise of an organization of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth.”21 Meanwhile, “the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation” kickstarted the accumulation of “social wealth.”22 Capitalism demands not respect for private property, Arendt claims, but rather the accumulation of wealth. “It is actually in the very nature of this [capitalist] society that privacy in every sense can only hinder the development of social ‘productivity’ and that considerations of private ownership therefore should be overruled in favor of the ever-increasing process of social wealth” (emphasis added).23 The social thus continuously seeks to undermine the status of the private as a separate or protected sphere of action. If we look at the world around us, it “feeds not on the abundance of material goods or anything stable and given, but on the process of production and consumption itself.”24 In modern terms, then, it is conservation, not destruction, which causes ruin, because the durability of objects acts as a barrier to the continual growth process.25 Property can no longer provide a means of rising above the allconsuming circularity of mere living, or necessity, in a capitalist world where perpetual profit growth, not fixed security, constitutes the value of property. “The eclipse of a common public world . . . began with the much more tangible loss of a privately owned share in the world.”26 Finally, alongside the driving geographical expansionism and the development of the capitalist mentality, a new science “ushered in the modern age.” This began with the “astounding human capacity to think in terms of the universe while remaining on earth, and the perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as guiding principles for terrestrial action.”27 Galileo’s telescope placed the secrets of the universe within “the certainty of

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sense-perception.”28 Man became, through the development of the new science, able to “place nature under the conditions of his own mind . . . a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.”29 The remarkable discoveries of the natural sciences set in motion a revolutionary approach toward understanding. What distinguished this new science from those that came before it, Arendt writes, was “the assumption that the same kind of exterior force should be manifest in the fall of terrestrial and the movements of heavenly bodies.”30 The “earth alienation” that grew out of this new science, the idea that one can stand outside nature and the world itself, became a hallmark of modern science.31 These events initiated the process by which Western man would come to demand and claim, with increasing vigor, greed, and terrifying efficiency, possession of the world, its wealth, and knowledge. It was this third aspect which, despite at first having the “least noticeable impact . . . has constantly increased in momentousness as well as speed until it has eclipsed not only the enlargement of the earth’s surface, which found its final limitation only in the limitations of the globe itself, but also the still apparently limitless economic accumulation process.”32 These three events, and the historical trends they precipitated, all combine toward an understanding of man’s activity in the world as inherently working to the end of ever-increasing processes of expansion: into the world, accumulation of wealth, of truth itself. This new world of modernity is dominated not by men or events but by processes, invariably based on the principles of the social: expansion, individualism and rationalism, and necessity. To think in terms of “process” rather than action radically changes how we understand the world and our relationship to it and to each other. We see this, Arendt writes, in the application in philosophy of the natural sciences to human nature and action. In this new, surprising world, where previous commonsense understanding had been swept away, what could one rely upon? Descartes asked this question, Arendt points out, and “concluded that those processes which go on in the mind of man himself have a certainty of their own, that they can become the object of investigation in introspection.”33 “Common sense,” once derived from the common knowledge of the community one was part of, now simply came to mean the faculty of reasoning that was common to, and essentially identical in, all men.34 But, in this inner world, men found “not an image whose permanence can be beheld and contemplated, but, on the contrary, the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind.”35 Humans came to find their certainty in the shifting sands of change itself, the “processes” of reasoning, the accumulation of wealth, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

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Initially, in this process, it was the status of homo faber that rose: science was an activity of fabrication—in the creation of its necessary instruments but also in the construction of experiments themselves. Yet this is already a corrupted notion of work, Arendt suggests. In modernity, “it was as though the means, the production process or development, was more important than the end, the finished product.”36 What was really valued in the new science was not its output or product, but the processes by which scientists undertook to discover. Accordingly, the rise of the homo faber was short-lived. By the nineteenth century, new scientific and political ideals more suited to the new dominance of process emerged: specifically, the claim that life, or the life process, was the highest good. The principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number,” Smith’s invisible hand, and Marxist dialectic are examples Arendt gives of how science and politics combined to create new ideals and ideologies. And as “individual life . . . now came to occupy the position once held by the ‘life’ of the body politic,” the animal laborans became the political actor.37 The life process itself, mere living, had come to be understood as the substance of political action. “What was left was a ‘natural force,’ the force of the life process itself,” a force which demands and compels conformism and rejects plurality and freedom.38 By the nineteenth century, the primacy of the social was well established. “That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, is not a discovery of Karl Marx,” Arendt wrote, “but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age.”39 The social outlook perceives the world in terms of economic activities and actors. Marx built on claims, such as those of Adam Smith, that the sphere of economics endows the human world with value.40 He adopted, and simplified, Smith’s scheme of economic actors to just two, Arendt writes, the worker and the capitalist, and so created “socialized man” from “economic man.”41 Furthermore, Smith’s invisible hand and ideas such as the general will are both expressions of a claim to the natural organization of societies; both claim or assume a natural unity within particular societies; and both are ultimately focused on questions of economic need or wants and interests, which are presumed to be identical. Such ideas litter the philosophy books of late modernity, Arendt believes, if one only looks. It was merely a matter of time before these ideas infected political practice. The French Revolution, for Arendt, is an unquestionable example of this. It saw the initial ascendency of the animal laborans in politics as the corrupted

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notion of homo faber and his “work” was replaced by the notion of man as essentially (and wholly) animal laborans. The French Revolution was driven by a passion for “natural” politics: the idea that one had to strip away the artifice and hypocrisy from politics in order to get at true politics and the universal nature of man. Yet without the institutional form that is required to structure politics, all that is left is the private world of individual interests. In the French Revolution, the people—thinking and acting as individuals but engaged in making the political—gave birth to a full-fledged “social” politics. Yet naturally divided individuals cannot rule without something to unite them as one. Accordingly, Arendt writes, the French saw “a multitude—the factual plurality of a nation or a people or society—in the image of one supernatural body driven by one superhuman, irresistible ‘general will.’”42 In doing so, the new politics of the social rejected plurality and natality for unity and determinism.

“The Social,” Sovereignty, and Violence “The social,” then, is Arendt’s term for a kind of community that is prevalent in the modern Western world: a form of social organization in which the classical separation between public or political spaces and private or economic spaces has been dissolved. The social is a form of social organization where private interests and economic concerns have come to dominate political discourse to the extent that formerly public ways of acting, which recognized the dual priorities of freedom and the recognition of plurality, have been lost. This is not a wholly accurate description, however, because when the activities of the private sphere are transferred to the public, they take on monstrous proportions and bring about fundamental internal contradictions. The social, Arendt claims, emerged through the unfortunate but contingent combination of a series of major events which occurred in close succession at the start of the modern world. These world-shattering events appear to have sparked or driven the growth of a new way of thinking about the world around us and about ourselves and what we are doing, in which we think in terms of process. This new ethos comprises a number of interlocking elements: its activities are expansionary—there is an urge to grow or accumulate ever greater power or assets; it is individualistic, and connected to this, rationalistic, that is, “men” are replaced with “man” as we look to inner reason itself for ultimate direction. This ethos gains its drive from the private desires and interests of man, but unrestrained, it has developed into its own par ticular

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form of action. The fundamental conflict that inheres in the social is that, if individuals always act in their own interests—and note, for Arendt, this is not free action but rather behav ior, because it is the pursuit of the necessities of life—then these interests, inevitably at odds with one another in the battle for ever-greater resources and assets, will necessarily conflict. Sovereignty is the form of political organization that has grown out of the social. Sovereignty is a flawed attempt to deal with the problems that result from the rise of the social. If we think about sovereignty in Hobbesian terms— as we know Arendt did, although critically—“the social” parallels Hobbes’s state of nature. In the state of nature, individuals act exclusively (and necessarily) in their own interests, fueled by their own inexhaustible desire to gain wealth, glory, and power. Such a state of society, Hobbes and Arendt agree, is inevitably a state of permanent conflict. In Arendt’s narrative, the social was not yet wholly dominant when Hobbes wrote his political tracts. Hence her claims of Hobbes’s prescience and her description of Hobbes as a bourgeois philosopher before his time. Since the individualism of the social ethos does not permit power to develop through the recognition of others as equal, an alternative to politics proper must be found in order to manage this conflict. In the absence of power, Hobbes’s solution to conflict is the repression of the plurality that (in the social world) fuels conflict and the creation of an absolute unity: the sovereign. Hobbes’s sovereign is, of course, a form of artifice: it is not a natural creation. Yet for Arendt it is still nonpolitical, and indeed anti-political, because sovereign power necessarily and exclusively operates through the means of violence. Only the use or threat of extreme violence is powerful enough to tame the forces of individual desire for expansion and growth in this new social world. Violence is structurally inextricable from sovereign power— sovereign power is violence—and therefore, sovereign politics is not a genuine form of politics because it acts against power: it does not operate through plurality but through the attempted monopolization of control. Sovereignty also refutes natality: only the sovereign is permitted to act, in the Arendtian sense, and thus make meaningful decisions in the political domain. And yet, sovereignty is not itself totalitarianism, and Hobbesian sovereignty is not totalitarian, and Arendt would not claim that either were. Yet the logic of the social, combined with sovereignty as a mode of rule, produces a tendency in human society to move toward this end. The spirit of the social, and especially the expansionist drive that relies on the natu ral human activity of labor in its unnatural public role, is not

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transformed by the creation of the sovereign, it is merely cowed or restrained. Moreover, the sovereign is a creation of the social, in the sense that it has been designed to do battle with the forces of the social, and so we see it take on certain qualities of the social. Notably, sovereignty in the modern world became increasingly expansionist, not least in the form of imperialism and later, totalitarianism. This does not merely mean geographical expansionism, although that is part of the story, but expansionist in the reach for total power: sovereign power over subjects is perpetually expanding. As the sovereign claims an ever-greater level of control, the space for freedom shrinks. In modernity, the logic of the social has permeated every aspect of political action and thinking in substantial and deep-rooted but, even so, still not irrevocable ways. The violence of the social is therefore a violence that is characteristic of modernity and of sovereign politics. Since the social operates according to an ethos opposed to plurality, it disables the possibility for freedom (as natality, but also in a broader sense) through either permanent conflict or the institution of sovereignty. Violence is therefore not only inseparable from the social, it is its single and essential means of action. This is a violence that is natural, derived from how man acts in the social sphere: as animal laborans. The individual self-interest expressed in this action and the necessity of pursuing such ends are normal and inevitable. But alone, self-interest produces only perpetual conflict and violence. Through the institution of political spaces of power, these demands can be managed, to some extent, in order to provide a space of freedom secured from violence. Because the social has driven the growth of these kind of spaces and this way of thinking about politics, the only solution to political conflict is violence, and that is itself a violence without end. This is the form of violence that Arendt most fears because of its infinite potential for destruction and its dominance in the modern world. The existence of social violence, which is essentially the idea of violence as we use it in politics today, is thus dangerous in the extreme. Hence, Arendt focuses her analytical and polemical efforts on this form of violence, above all else, and the existential threat it poses to politics as an intrinsically anti-political form of violence. The social, dominated by the logic of necessity, is incapable of encompassing a political violence of the kind depicted in the previous chapters within the realm of work, and in fact embodies a wholly anti-political logic and form of violence. This culminated, for Arendt, in totalitarianism, a political regime which is nothing but violence. Thus, the ultimate end of the social can be described as the negation of politics, with the

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activity of boundless violence justified as necessary, usually rationalized, ironically, in the name of progress.

The Plausibility of “the Social” as a Concept The concept of the social in Arendt has been an object of criticism, more so, in fact, than almost any other single element of her work.43 These critiques can be broadly grouped into two major strands of criticism relating, first, to the question of agency in relation to the social and, second, to the need to consider structural economic inequalities in any reasonably just political arrangement. Hanna Pitkin has written critically and astutely on the problems of Arendt’s notion of the social. It is depicted, Pitkin argues, as some impersonal force of nature driving modern politics, which somehow acts without human agency. She terms Arendt’s idea of the social “the blob” and describes it as a “collectivity of people who—for whatever reason—conduct themselves in such a way that they cannot control or even intentionally influence the large-scale consequences of their activities.”44 Pitkin rejects as impossible the idea of the social as a force that empowers itself, and moreover, she argues that it stands in complete contrast to the idea of natality, that quality of the human condition that was so precious to Arendt. On the latter point, numerous critics take issue with the idea of the social and Arendt’s seeming disdain for political thought that arises from social considerations because they believe that it excludes from her politics any discussion of social aspects which they see as the root cause of some of the greatest injustices in modern politics. “Arendt’s attack on the social is untenable,” Eli Zaretsky asserts. “For every oppressed group in modern society, economic issues are fundamental.”45 George Kateb claims that in Arendt’s rejection of the social as the space between public and private, she has “decried tendencies that actually are signs of the vitality of the democracy: the will to extend its spirit throughout the democracy and not restrict it to the public realm.”46 And Jürgen Habermas writes of the “curious perspective” that the social offers: “a state which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a politics which is cleansed of socio-economic issues . . . a radical democracy which inhibits its liberating efficacy just at the boundaries where political oppression ceases and social repression begins.” This is, he concludes, “unimaginable for any modern society.”47

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These criticisms are not without merit. However, Arendt’s idea of the social, unwieldy as it is, can be defended at least to some extent against these critiques. While the social seems to have a certain inevitability to it, the trends and events that led to its emergence are both contingent and the result of men’s actions, as are the results of the social’s influence on the actions of politicians and other political actors. “Neither science, or scientists, or academics led to death factories,” Arendt writes. “The ideas came from politicians who took power-politics seriously, and the techniques came from modern mob-men who were not afraid of consistency.”48 The social, and its expansion, is the result—and continues to be the result—of the actions of men. It is not action itself, or the possibility for action, that the social undermines, but an understanding of what action is. Arendt argues that we need to “think what we are doing.”49 But the social promotes and perpetuates an inability to think about what we are doing through the conflation of what Arendt believes are the foundational categories and concepts of human life—the public and the private; the spheres of action, work, and labor; the nature of freedom— and by the same means, makes it almost impossible to talk about what we are doing, to communicate with one another in a meaningful sense, employing meaningful concepts. Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann depicts how the social influences individuals in the context of a totalitarian regime. “The social” itself is very clearly visible in such a regime as an advanced form of “process-thinking,” as Arendt has elsewhere specified it. At the heart of Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism is the idea that these regimes are based on certain ideologies which reduce political action to predetermined courses of action: the natural racial and biological hierarchy of Nazism or the historical materialism of Soviet Marxism. But “what distinguished these new totalitarian ideologies from their predecessors was that it was no longer primarily the ‘idea’ of the ideology—the struggle of classes . . . or the struggle of races . . . which appealed to them, but the logical process which could be developed from it.”50 Totalitarianism was the realization of one singular, internally consistent way of understanding the world, which accordingly expunged diversity and plurality from political, social, and private life. It was the extreme realization of the solution sovereignty offered to the challenge of living in a “social” world: how to make a unity out of a disassociated mass. Totalitarianism thus differed from tyranny in its attempt to realize a totally comprehensive political ideology over every individual in their private,

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public, and social life. But it also, importantly, differed in its nature as a movement. Totalitarian ideology orients itself not by some fixed goal, but envisages politics as a continual movement of nature, or history. The movement can never be satisfied, and so totalitarianism is a self-destructive political form, though no less dangerous for that. Totalitarian regimes exist to increase their control, and given the nature of humans as creatures of natality, the only way that they can permanently extinguish action is by murdering their citizens.51 It is the most extreme realization yet of the principles of sovereignty and its social underpinnings. We can see the importance of individualism in totalitarianism as well. The emergence of totalitarianism relies on the isolation of modern man in his increasingly private, nonplural condition within the capitalist, social structure of modern life. “The masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership of a class.”52 As Margaret Canovan explains, the masses are distinguished from a political people because they lack a world: the web of relationships that constitutes a people, and the commonsense understanding that emerges between them as a result of those relationships.53 The masses lack a public space in which to engage with one another and, as a result, are particularly open to manipulation; this is because they are unable to act politically but also because their understanding—not only of right and wrong, but also of what is real or plausible and what is impossible—is severely weakened in the absence of a common sense. In a way, totalitarianism fulfills a demand for some form of social order that modern societies lack. But the isolation of the masses offers no possibility for communication or, therefore, political action. Because the masses neither know what to think or how to act, it is possible for the absurdities of totalitarian propaganda to be imposed on and adopted by the masses. Political rule is a matter not of power or consensus but of imposing an ideology, and as a result, the movement is driven predominantly by the threat of violence. Violence alone, virtually absent of power, becomes the means of totalitarian politics. “Total terror,” Arendt writes, “the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of nature or history with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement.”54 The social is the precursor to totalitarianism, integral to the logic of totalitarianism, although not identical with it. The existence of the social, while not political, does not necessarily preclude some aspect of the political from

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continuing to exist, as it does in most societies. But in totalitarian societies, the most perfect realization of the principles of the social, Arendt writes, “all men have become One Man . . . all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature or history . . . every single act is the execution of a death sentence which Nature or History has already pronounced.”55 And yet, even here we can see that men are not simply acted on by social forces but are the driving force of the social. As a senior SS official, Eichmann was responsible for the transportation of Jews in Eastern Europe, journeys which led many to their death or to years of unimaginable suffering in concentration camps. He sent hundreds of thousands of innocents to their death. Yet, he would argue, while standing trial for his crimes in 1961, after he was finally caught: “With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter—I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a nonJew; I just did not do it.”56 The judges assumed, Arendt writes, that Eichmann must have been aware of the criminality of his actions. In doing so, they “missed the greatest moral . . . challenge of the case.”57 In her work on Eichmann, Arendt explains the relationship between the individual and the social forces acting on him: the ascendency of radical individualism and the influence of “reason” in the form of ideology. Arendt’s profile of Eichmann is based largely on his own testimony, gathered in extensive detail by Israeli authorities from their extremely cooperative prisoner. His life before he joined the Nazis was unremarkable, his career a patchwork of modest successes and failures, but he possessed a desperate ambition to succeed. Arendt surmises this from his frequent exaggerations, revealed by inconsistencies in his testimony and by the failure of his assertions to match evidence from earlier in his life. Socially, Arendt writes, he was “the déclassé son of a solid middle class family,” and this is crucial in understanding his motivations.58 When, in 1932, Eichmann joined the Nazis and the SS, Arendt claims, “he did not enter the party out of conviction, nor was he ever convinced by it.”59 When he lost his former job as a traveling salesman, he opted to embark on a military career, a choice due more to his lack of options than anything else. From “a humdrum life without significance and consequence, the wind had blown him into History,” wrote Arendt, into a movement in which “somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well— could start from scratch and make a career.60 The politics meant nothing to him; what mattered to Eichmann was his own personal success: his social

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and professional ascent. He could see no further than his own ambition, and throughout his trial, he spoke with pride of the efficiency of his work, with a chilling inability to empathize with his victims. He was so deeply entrenched in his private world that he had become blind to the moral reality of his actions in the world around him. More than that, there was no reason why he should be woken from this private world. “As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.”61 What this resulted in, for Eichmann and for the German people as a whole, was the complete abdication of personal responsibility for anything apart from one’s own concerns. “That German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality.”62 What Eichmann and the German people shared was a fatal inability to think, speak, and act independently—the three being interdependent. Eichmann was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” Arendt wrote in amazement.63 For Arendt, there is nothing unusual in taking our social and moral cues from society; indeed, that is at the core of her idea of political community as a structure of common perspective. But totalitarian regimes differ from a normal political structure because their citizens are, first, wholly nonpolitical (as in any tyranny) and, furthermore, ideologically manipulated through the use of terror and propaganda, a process which destroys truth itself, as a concept, and thus any connection between political ideology and the fabric of reality. Eichmann’s “inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt emphasizes. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”64 Eichmann was so deep in his own world, buttressed by the ideological fictions of the regime, that he simply could not think from any other standpoint, could not communicate on any other terms, and certainly could not see that he had done anything wrong. Yet, while elements of totalitarianism are coercive and manipulative, Eichmann’s actions were not represented as the actions of some force acting through him. Rather, his decisions were the decisions of a man who, in some respects, was not fully human because he did not have access to a genuinely human world. Arendt’s defense of Eichmann’s execution is perfectly consistent

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with this. Although he posed a legitimate legal challenge to how such people should be prosecuted, Arendt believed, ultimately, it was justifiable to put him to death because, as he did not want to share a world (with the Jewish people), no one could be expected to share the earth with him. It was not the force of the social that was responsible for his actions, but the development of the social had helped to create a world in which Eichmann could become “worldless,” enabling him to make the decisions that he did.

Economics, Poverty, and “Behavior” A second common point of criticism relating to Arendt’s seeming refusal to consider economic inequalities or injustices as belonging to the proper realm of politics is harder to refute. The critique must stand, to some degree. Yet two points temper the strength of these criticisms. First, Arendt, in taking aim at the social, is not simply rejecting private concerns in politics but addressing a particular formation of economically based outlooks on politics that has emerged in the modern world. Part of what she is doing with her critique of the social is criticizing the nondemocratic and sovereign impulses of modern politics, a claim to justified tyranny on the very model of acquisition that promotes economic inequality and poverty in the modern world. Second, Arendt does not necessarily refuse to accept social problems (or poverty) as political problems, but rather rejects a form of politics that thinks in only these terms, believing that this reinforced the very problems that a social politics seeks to address. The problem of the social is not the existence of social problems but of understanding the political as the social. Just as violence in the modern world is given its par ticular character in Arendt’s work because of the prevalence and qualities of social violence, so too does the question of poverty and economics take on its particular character because of the influence of the social on this sphere of life. To reject the social is not necessarily to reject the suitability of questions of poverty in politics but simply to reject the social as a particular ethos of modern politics. The social has occupied—and indeed shaped—the science of economics. This is apparent in Arendt’s discussion of Smith and Marx. But it is also evident from her analysis of the modern human and social sciences in America, where we see most clearly the element of necessity, a necessity that comes in terms of thinking primarily in terms of processes, and specifically, the familiar idea that we can look within ourselves—to reason itself, and not

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experience—to find answers to political or social (or any) questions. The American policy architects of the Vietnam War, “who lost their minds because they trusted the calculating powers of their brains at the expense of the mind’s capacity for experience and its ability to learn from it, were preceded by the ideologists of the Cold War period,” she wrote.65 Arendt’s rejection of the attitudes of the policy makers of US policy in Vietnam is derived from her critique of behaviorism and the rationalization of the political through the social sciences, stemming from the fetishization of the domain of science in modernity. For Arendt, the intrusion of rationalism into public life and the coercive turn in modern politics cannot be separated, either in the American system or more generally in modern politics. Cold War anticommunist ideology, she writes, expressed “sheer ignorance of all pertinent facts and deliberate neglect of post-war developments became the hallmark of established doctrine within the establishment. They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory,’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored.”66 This speculation about hidden causes has the tendency to “make us forget the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are,” Arendt writes. In an essay from 1975, she claims: “This natural human tendency has grown to gigantic proportions during the last decade when our whole political scene was ruled by the habits and prescriptions of what is euphemistically called public relations . . . the wisdom of the functionaries of a consumer society.”67 This bloated rationality divorced from experience results in ideology, and Arendt directly connects these events with the outcomes that totalitarian regimes had sought earlier in the century. “In our case,” she writes, “not terror, but persuasion enforced by pressure and the manipulation of public opinion is supposed to succeed where terror failed.”68 The science that embodied the social was economics, and later, other social sciences that adopted economic methodologies. Economic thinking, in the modern sense, is intrinsic to the social, as we have seen. In the twentieth century it is this economic form of rationality, promoting the social, that Arendt takes greatest issue with in terms of how it has shaped our thinking about politics. Modern economics reflects a fundamental alteration in the way men understand themselves as rational and the invisible hand that produces economic systems out of this form of rationalism.69 “Based on the assumption that men act with respect to their economic activities as they act in every other respect,” Arendt wrote, economics “could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered

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to be asocial or abnormal.”70 A series of contingencies came together to enable this: not only the radical events of the early modern era but the shape of modern nations—the larger the community, the more likely conformism is to be impressed upon their character, Arendt believed.71 And where a modern nation did take the form of a more authentic politics, in postrevolutionary America, social and intellectual trends leaned in favor of the dominance of the European and social way of thinking. The science of economics thus promoted a certain perspective on not only human character but the character of human interactions, prioritizing notions of predictability over spontaneity, behavior over action. In this way, modern economics is in conflict with the idea of politics that Arendt promotes. “Statistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal,” she insists. “It is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.”72 What Arendt objects to is that economics does not simply reflect and uncover social truth, as it claims, but creates it through the discourses and assumptions it perpetuates and extends. What realizes and perpetuates the social is the scientific-economic modern mind-set which prioritizes, or tends to prioritize, a certain approach toward politics: the use of universal natural frameworks to explain or prescribe political action—that is, the law of history of nature and consequently an emphasis on the future instead of the past, on progress instead of tradition. The resulting (supposed) predictability of politics and human activity results in an idea of that activity as “behav ior” rather than action, that is, as conforming to a natural pattern rather than acting spontaneously and independently into the unknowable future. Early economics, “which substitutes patterns of behav ior only in this rather limited field of human activity,” was followed, Arendt writes, “by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as ‘behavioral sciences,’ aimed to reduce men as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.”73 Arendt is, on occasion, directly critical of the social approach of specific authors—John Dewey is one prominent example.74 But she is more usually critical of the social sciences as an overall form of thought, as a rationalizing urge of modern science which “has changed and reconstructed the world we live in so radically that it could be argued the layman and the humanist, still trusting their common sense and communicating in everyday language, are out of touch with reality.”75 The result for the individual she describes in her depiction of the scientist who “leaves behind a part of himself and his own power of understanding, which is still

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human understanding, when he goes to the laboratory and begins to communicate in mathematical language.”76 There is something deeply dehumanizing about the activity of science for Arendt, and so she rejects what she sees to be the growing dominance of the scientific method within the political and social sciences. While the individual scientist might be able to bear losing a part of his human understanding within the limited sphere of his professional life, when this scientific mode of thought comes to be the mode of thought for political life as a whole, that power of human understanding risks being lost entirely. “Hell,” Arendt writes, “can only be established through . . . scientific planning.”77 The hell of the death camps was a result not just of the growth of bureaucracy in technical terms, nor even the dearth of responsibility which accompanied this development, but the emergence of a new way of thinking about humans that set aside their humanity in favor of supposedly greater concerns. This is what can result from thinking about politics in modern economic terms.

Violence as Both Means and End The growth of the natural sciences and their intrusion into other spheres of life had thus proved damaging to the way in which politics was understood in the modern age. As well as helping to produce a way of thinking about politics that was more violent, it also led to the production of new technologies of violence and war. Chief in importance among these was the creation of nuclear weapons, which, Arendt believed, had fundamentally changed the dynamic of conflict in politics. The technological achievements of the American military and scientific establishment, which had brought about the nuclear age, led to the technological possibility of a war in which the whole world could be destroyed. The result, she thought, was that war in the traditional sense simply could not continue according to the old rules of engagement. The use of violence or war to resolve political conflicts—which, while not necessarily political, had always been a part of politics—could no longer be considered a reasonable political approach when the final outcome of such a war was the total destruction of both sides in the conflict, if not the world. “We can scarcely imagine a war between Russia and America in which the American Constitution or the current Russian regime would survive defeat. But that means that a future war will not be about a gain or loss of power, about borders, export markets, or Lebensraum, that is, about things that can

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be achieved by means of political discussion and without the use of force. . . . What is now at stake is something that could, of course, never be a matter for negotiation: the sheer existence of a nation and its people. It is at this point . . . that war first truly ceases to be a means of politics and, as a war of annihilation, begins to overstep the bounds set by politics and to annihilate politics itself.”78 Thus, the development of science was a problematic kind of anti-political rationalism in itself, but its success in its own right also brought about the development of technology as a product of science, which literally changes the condition of man through the creation of new destructive possibilities. The belief that politics is a process involving both necessity and violence in its essence, together with modern technology, combined an apocalyptic attitude with the means of destroying the world itself. Mutually assured destruction at the time of Arendt’s writing could only be the outcome of superpower war, given the limited nuclear capabilities of the other nuclear nations at that time.79 That is not to say, of course, that such a war would not be prone to extend itself. But wars between nations without nuclear force could still take place on a somewhat more rational basis (this will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter). Nor did unilateral possession of nuclear weapons guarantee success, as Vietnam would show. For Arendt, this simply proves the very real importance of political power in practice, in the sense of people acting together freely. “We have seen in Vietnam how an enormous superiority in the means of violence can become helpless if confronted with an ill-equipped but well-organized opponent who is much more powerful.”80 While nuclear weaponry, together with the failure of political understanding in the social way of thinking, most likely led toward civilizational destruction, the recovery of politics certainly possessed the potential to overwhelm technology. Vladimir Dedijer, who Arendt quotes approvingly in “On Violence,” makes this point: “A well-organized guerrilla movement in a country of reasonable size, based on popular support, is indestructible except by enormously costly and protracted infantry warfare which is almost beyond the resources of even the biggest nation. In this sense it represents the eternal truth that you cannot destroy a political belief without killing, one by one, all the people who possess it. That is something no scientific advances in weaponry can alter, even though they make the killing easier to accomplish.”81 The violence of the modern age, at least in the Western world, is therefore largely unconnected with genuine politics as Arendt understood it. The form of violence Arendt is most concerned with, and which she most vehemently rejects, is very distinctly the violence of the social. In all the activities of violence

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that most concern her, past and present, we see some or all elements of the social very clearly: whether in a nuclear-enabled politics and the will to destroy that appears to accompany the development of such power, the Vietnam war and its wholly illogical procedure, totalitarianism and its all-pervasive ideology that prevents men from even thinking for themselves, or the expansionism of imperialism and its endless violence, right back to what is perhaps the first, explosive realization of social violence in politics: the French Revolution. That Arendt sees violence in the modern age as somehow different from the violence of the premodern past is evident. “Anybody looking for some kind of sense in the records of the past was almost bound to see violence as a marginal phenomenon,” Arendt writes. “The emphasis is on . . . the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded violence.”82 In modernity, violence has instead been relocated to the very center of what is supposedly the political, and “all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable,” she claims.83 Instead, violence is glorified as politics: the necessary accompaniment to a politics of sovereignty based on the continual expansion of power, a politics driven by an unswerving drive to rationalize and unify a world that, for Arendt, cannot and should not be rationalized and unified but gains its legitimacy in conflict and plurality. That politics is now a drive to further power and perfect unity means we now think that these processes are politics, that they are necessary, inevitable, and justify all violence—that violence is therefore, in this ceaseless progression toward more of every thing, intrinsic to promoting that so-called progress and ensuring that it continues. Violence has replaced action in our understanding of politics, Arendt claims. It is not simply the role of violence that has shifted, but its nature. The modern faith in progress—an unlimited progress, rather than the more complex and shifting notion of power—makes violence appear not only as political but as the very function and purpose of politics. “Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place,” Arendt argues. “The means of destruction, now determine the end—with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power.”84 The extreme of this in politics is terror, which is “not the same as violence; it is rather, the form of government which comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate, but, on the contrary, remains in full control.”85 The continuous quality of this violence, its characteristic natural principle of movement is clear in Arendt’s statement that “the climax of terror is reached when the

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police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. And this is also the moment when power disappears absolutely.”86 Power and violence are always theoretical opposites, but only in modernity has the dichotomy been implemented in its most extreme form in political practice, unleashing the most excessive and anti-political violence imaginable. It is only this form of violence, brought, unnaturally, into the public sphere, which is capable for Arendt of destroying power altogether, and it is this specific violence and its position in the understanding of politics in the modern world which Arendt opposes in her exposition of political violence—not violence per se or violence in some other relationship with politics. The social has submerged both the public and private spheres, Arendt argues, conflating “man” and “men,” individual and all, freedom to act with the necessity to survive, and introducing “the utter extinction of the very difference between public and private realms.”87 But her cynicism is moderated by the advanced progression of this event. “By the same token,” she claims, “we are in a far better position to realize the consequences for human existence when both the public and private spheres of life are gone, the public because it has become a function of the private and the private because it has become the only common concern left.”88 The trends of the modern age have chipped away at our understanding of politics and its core concepts, or rather, these terms lack contemporary shared meaning and leave the individual in modernity incapable of understanding public discourse and thus political action. However, what Arendt is suggesting is that the conspicuous absence of both private and public spheres, the withering away of not only the public sphere but its counterpart, the private, from which action originates, may lead us to realize their nature. This alone is not politics but simply a spur to action; the absence or emptiness of political space in the contemporary world has brought us face to face with the reality of the human condition. Politics is still an activity which relies on communication and therefore shared, common understanding, and this must be reconstituted.

Violence in Modernity In purely theoretical terms, violence is outside the realm of the political; it is, as a pure action, mute, and as such is the antithesis of the speech relations that form the inner structure of the political. Yet this theorization of violence

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leads us to an interpretation of violence as something that is in itself nonpolitical but not necessarily anti-political. Arendt’s depiction of the Greek world and the conceptual positioning of violence as something definitively outside or before the political exemplify this. Violence is everywhere in Greece apart from the small, carefully bounded area of the public and political. Violence is present in the prepolitical act of constitutional legislation as the Greeks understood it; it is present in the exterior, international sphere in the guise of war; and it is present within the territory of the Greek states in the private sphere in the form of slavery and, to a lesser degree, the other relationships of the household and the economic sphere. Violence itself does not necessarily undermine politics. What disrupted the balance of violence and politics in Greece, in Arendt’s story, was the failure of the Greeks to properly incorporate violence into politics, the excessively unbounded action of the political sphere, and the impossibility of reconceptualizing the space of politics in order to expand. The Romans, in Arendt’s analysis, were capable of maintaining a more stable political system due to the flexibility inherent in their understanding of politics, which combined power with an element of violence through the incorporation of work in their concept of tradition. In practice, this means the political sphere is not exclusively formed of speech action, although politics is fundamentally structured around discourse and action. Politics is also a worldly space—a physically created space—as well as a space of relationships and shared perspective, and these two elements must be combined. This space of politics is created through the bringing together of a people and a world, or through the combination of power and work, as Arendt’s American example illustrates. Prior to the revolution, the American people possessed a certain level of power, which had been discovered through their active participation in local political communities. After the revolution, when authority had fallen away from the British colonialists, the founders filled the void of authority with the Constitution: a creation not just of action but of work, and a creation which became seen as foundational and the root of a new authoritative tradition, just as the Romans viewed their tradition. The founders, Arendt argued, recognized the need to produce a legal structure by which to limit and thus to maintain the power that existed between the American people. In doing so, they limited the potentiality of action and power itself, through the authority of the new constitution but also the coercive apparatus that necessarily accompanies legal frameworks. Unfortunately, Arendt argues, despite the

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best efforts of the founders, the partly flawed institutional structure of the new republic and the anti-philosophical attitudes that pervaded American culture would cause the slow decay of the very power structures that had initially enabled the revolution and informed the Constitution, leading to the increasing dominance of sovereign structures. Both the institutions of power and the understanding of power would thus be undermined. But while the implementation was flawed, the Roman principles which combined tradition and politics are not considered to be at fault in Arendt’s assessment of the American Revolution. This creation of political world can therefore be justifiably violent, in some limited senses. In America, the “normal violence” of warfare around the revolution is considered perfectly acceptable, and when understood as a violence of liberation, it may be seen as prepolitical. However, it is not only necessary for politics, it is deeply entangled with action in times of revolution. The power held by the agents of violence of the old regime must be changed if the revolution is to succeed—the action of the military or police in refusing older authorities thus undermining the authority and capabilities of the old ruler, instead supporting the rebellion militarily and through their increased power.89 More distinctively and uncomplicatedly political is the creation of a constitution or legislative framework which is specifically not a thing of the people—that is, whose authority is not derived directly from power. The creation of a legal framework forming the worldly political structure of the republic—open to augmentation and translation through power, but not total change—necessarily relies on the institutions of state violence in order to be upheld. The vicissitudes of action and the instability of power resting on action meant that while power was necessary, and authority must have power behind it in a truly political system, it must also be bounded by another force: the coercive power of the republic—a positive and political violence because it was backed by the power of the people. It is to similar principles that Arendt appeals in her work on the Jewish army and her claim that violence is not only justifiable but necessary to recreate a political Jewish people. Such violence is political because it would be backed by the power of the Jewish people as well as oriented toward the reconstruction of the Jewish people as a political community. And such action was necessary, Arendt argued, because in the dual context of the war and postEnlightenment anti-Semitism, violence was a way and, it seems for Arendt, the only way of Jews being recognized as a political people worthy of respect who could stand with any other European people. These claims support, in a less

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developed manner, the more sophisticated theoretical claims Arendt makes later about violence and its relation to politics. Violence as a political act is thus made political by the nature of the action and its public status, not the rights of the individuals or group undertaking the act, whether that be the state itself, a civil rights minority group, or a people not recognized by the state. The principles are the same and justify violence for politics in the same degree. Violence may be political if paired with power and if aimed at creating or maintaining the public political space of action. Political violence may be radical and revolutionary, or it may be conservative and concerned with stabilizing the current sphere, or, as Arendt’s essay on civil disobedience shows, it may seek to augment the political sphere according to the spirit of the laws. In themselves, these actions may be political. But when absent from power, violence invariably becomes anti-political, as Arendt’s critiques of both sovereignty and the French Revolution show. It is not violence but power at the core of politics, and violence alone cannot absent power from politics. Accordingly, only the absence of power, and not the presence of violence, makes actions unpolitical or anti-political, a principle which applies to violence as well. This must be seen in the context of Arendt’s critique of modern social politics. Sovereignty in the modern era began as a prioritization of making above action, so it introduced an inherently problematic element—not the inclusion of making in politics but its prioritization above action. Work and action continued to exist alongside one another in political understanding and practice for a considerable length of time. But the spirit of the social also began to develop, inspiring a sovereign European political system, which in turn entrenched social attitudes and ways of life. This introduced an essential problem or misunderstanding into politics: the replacement of action and power as the essence of politics with an idea of politics as natural process. The three events at the start of the modern age that Arendt identifies—the Reformation, the discovery of America, and scientific investigation into the universe—are each events which individually, but in support of one another, led men into processes of expansion: across the world, of capital, and into the universe and nature itself. In the emerging states of early modern Europe, these ideas took shape in politics in the form of sovereignty, fostered by the amalgamation of smaller populations into the state system we know today. A larger population, Arendt writes, produces conformism, as the authority of the majority becomes too

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weighty to reject.90 The diversity and difference possible in smaller states is repressed as a state becomes larger. And the state was to a large degree the agent in these world-changing processes that were taking place, such as the emergence of imperialism and the progressive dominance of the Earth that was enabled through imperialist politics, whereby two different modes of activity came to replace the political in practice. As a result, state, sovereignty, and politics came to be understood in primarily private, not public, terms. Just as modern sovereignty, therefore, is not really political, neither is its violence. The violence introduced into modern politics through the social is an endless and necessary violence: self-oriented, destructive, and all-consuming. It differs from the violence that corresponds to Arendt’s “work” activities: part public, part private; creative, not destructive; and end oriented, not cyclical. And this social violence contrasts wholly with action, which is intrinsically nonviolent, discursive, and spontaneous. Process-thinking results in an understanding of politics as violence. When pressed into politics, in practice this results not only in the destruction of the political space but the attempted destruction of human freedom itself. Thus, such ideas of politics are fundamentally unpolitical and wholly unacceptable. Arendt’s rejection of violence in her work is connected to the social condition of the modern world and modern politics, where violence always threatens to consume rather than create, to rule without power rather than enforce power. It seems that little can be done about the modern political situation, in which violence is inherently both present and politically unjustifiable. The social is depicted as an expanding, all-consuming principle, and furthermore, the political principles of the American Revolution which might serve as a guide would seem not to apply in the post-traditional world. After the modern break with tradition, authority, and religion—the foundational principles of political society, themselves rooted in faith in foundations—it appears Western political society is largely adrift from anything resembling politics. In such a situation, violence cannot be political, because we have largely lost touch with the political altogether, or increasingly are doing so. And yet, the idea that emerges through Arendt’s work—whether on Jewishness and Zionism, the ancient world, or, most clearly, in her work on revolution—is that there is some political space that can be somehow discovered, rediscovered, or created. That these foundational elements of politics have something to do with Arendt’s notion of speech and action as politics is quite clear, as is the necessity of creating the possibility of free speech and

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action through and for politics. It is in her writing on contemporary America that Arendt appears most optimistic and where she sees politics in its true form still clinging on in places. Her critique of the modern world is extensive, and the social sometimes seems to be an unavoidable future. Yet there are moments of hope that break through in her work, and in these writings, we can see what a true politics could be in the contemporary world and what exactly the relationship between power and violence might be in a nonideal but still political world.

CHAPTER 6

A Politics of Nonviolence?

Focusing on Arendt’s work on violence, in all its complexity, throws her understanding of politics into relief and offers a different image of politics than is often attributed to her. This chapter and the next will pursue this idea, looking first at how the reading of violence in Arendtian politics offered in the previous chapters can be seen in Arendt’s response to the politics of her own time, and second, how such a reading might contribute to existing commentaries on Arendtian politics and Arendtian-inspired political theory today. In both cases, returning to the question of the role that violence plays in politics helps to open up Arendt’s definition of politics in new ways and, at the very least, this extends the debate about the nature of the political in a different direction than the standard readings of Arendt’s work. This chapter will deal with Arendt’s writings on the contemporary politics of her adopted homeland, looking more extensively at her thoughts on the Cold War and nuclear stalemate, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement in the United States. The question of what role violence ought to play in politics is intimately related to each of these cases, and Arendt takes the question seriously—she does not evade or ignore it. Furthermore, it can be seen, as the previous chapters have suggested, that just as the historical case studies of Greece/Rome or the US/French Revolutions show, as well as the example in Arendt’s own time of the Jewish army and Zionist politics, in certain cases violence is both positively political and often necessary; what matters most in making the distinction between a political and anti-political violence in modernity is the way actions relate to what Arendt terms the social. Arendt’s correspondence and her essays show that she took a lively interest in the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States. It is in America that she places her greatest hopes for the future. “This republic,” she wrote in 1970, “despite the great turmoil of change and of failure through which it is

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going at present, may still be in possession of its traditional instruments for facing the future with some measure of confidence.”1 The “treasures” bequeathed to modern America by its revolutionary past—the institutional framework of government which balanced power with power, the Constitutional guarantees of freedom, and the independent character of the American people—were the buttresses with which it could (perhaps) withstand the immense pressures of the modern world. At the same time and, in fact, because she saw America as uniquely capable of maintaining its political space, she was severely critical of its flaws. The United States had strayed far from its origins, she believed; its “treasures” had, at least in part, been lost. Crisis seemed to be heaped upon crisis: from the country’s failed and lengthy interventions in Southeast Asia to internal dissent and protest from civil rights groups and student movements, and a series of governments which seemed ever more inept, corrupt, and unwilling to uphold the constitutional foundations of the nation. This took place against a background of continual low-level (and sometimes high-level) threat from the Soviets and the ever-present possibility of nuclear war. Arendt’s writings on international politics, as that related to US foreign policy, and her commentary on America’s troubled domestic affairs reveal what she believes American politics could be, and what it must not be if it is to retain its power and authenticity—the genuinely political power of a republican polity. In matters of war in the modern world, Arendt is best known for her commentary on the threat of nuclear war and how this redefines the logic of conflict. In terms of American politics, she is known as a proponent of civil disobedience as a justifiable, public act of resistance, usually interpreted as an intrinsically nonviolent form of conflict. Her thinking on the role of violence crosses both of these spheres in ways that are not wholly recognized in their complexity—that is, her criticism of violence in contemporary American politics is not premised on a rejection of violence but the ways in which it has been realized in modern America. We have already seen how, for Arendt, war could be justified and even political in some cases. “Under normal conditions,” she asserted, that is, “those that have prevailed in Europe since Roman antiquity, war was indeed the continuation of politics by other means.” It could be avoided, she went on, if one opponent decided to accept the other’s demands. Such an acceptance “might well be at the cost of freedom, but not of life.”2 By her own time, however, the situation had changed, in part because of the development of total warfare and, as the previous chapter touched on, the most perfect technological realization

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of that idea in the instrument of the nuclear bomb. The predominance of force “at the expense of all other political factors” she dates to the First World War, “with its huge mechanized battles on the western front.”3 In the postwar world, both “domestic politics . . . and foreign policy . . . saw their real substance in the use of brute force and actions that employed such force.”4 The invention of atomic weapons, although wholly new in scientific terms, was “nothing more than a culminating point, achieved, so to speak, by one short jump or short circuit, towards which events had in any case been moving at an ever accelerating pace.”5 Yet the development of nuclear weapons did represent a decisive political shift in more than one respect, even if it was preceded by a long history of increasingly totalizing forms of warfare. The threat of nuclear war put the question of how to deal with force at the forefront of the political agenda: it became, Arendt claimed, “the foremost political issue of our time.”6 Yet, she also notes that there is a substantive change in how war can be seen to relate to politics that has resulted from the invention of the atomic bomb. While the use of violence to annihilate life is hardly new, “the people who have always believed that a categorical condemnation of violence amounts to a condemnation of politics in general have ceased to be correct only in the last few years, or, more precisely, since the invention of the hydrogen bomb.”7 Prior to the hydrogen bomb, in other words, politics and violence were indeed intrinsically linked. True pacifists, those who condemned any form of violence, were indeed condemning something that was an integral part of how politics was practiced. Yet now, Arendt suggests, the bomb has transformed something in the logic of the relationship between politics and war. Previously, the capacity to destroy and produce was part of the cycle of history, something to be expected in politics. The destructive power of the bomb was, in contrast, “supernatural.” It was the extraordinary weapon that the extraordinary politics of extreme and total violence had demanded. But in turn, its appearance further transformed politics. In the margins of her copy of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, Arendt wrote: “We invented it [the bomb] because we dealt with the devil. We kept it—and in order to use it we must invent a devil.”8 The devil being dealt with was not Hitler alone but the political culture of violence that emerged in the modern world and which found its realization in Hitler’s murderous regime. We know, writes Arendt, that in an age of unlimited war, “whose aim is the total political or even physical destruction of the enemy,” any and all weapons will be used. “The

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atomic bomb dropped on Japan suddenly demonstrated to the entire world that threats of total destruction were not just empty words but the means for carry ing them out were indeed in hand.”9 What is at stake in a modern war is the “sheer existence of a people.” The outcome of this is that “war has ceased to be the ultima ratio of negotiations, whereby the goals of a war were determined at the point where negotiations broke off, so that all ensuing military actions really were nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.” Today, rather, “when war no longer presumes the coexistence of hostile parties as a given and no longer seeks simply to put an end to the conflict between them by force—that war first truly ceases to be a means of politics and, as a war of annihilation, begins to overstep the bounds set by politics and to annihilate politics itself.”10 Once introduced into the world, the logic of total war, and the means by which it achieve its ends, becomes all-encompassing, Arendt argues. A truly total war, a war of annihilation, originated with totalitarian regimes, she writes, but its invention “inevitably forced their own principle of action onto the nontotalitarian world. Once a principle of such vast scope enters the world, it is of course practically impossible to limit it, for instance, to a conflict between totalitarian and nontotalitarian nations.”11 Thus, the possibility of Hitler winning the war was the direct incentive for the Americans to build the bomb—but that technology was ultimately used in the very different context of the war against Japan. With nuclear weapons, it seems, the progression of violence in the modern world has reached an unprecedented level of advancement and has resulted in a qualitative transformation of the relationship between violence and politics in international affairs.

The End of War? There is, however, another kind of commentary on modern war in Arendt’s writing on Vietnam. While she is vehemently opposed to the war, she expresses a clear conviction that this is not a war that will follow the logic of total war to its devastating end point. Totality may indeed infuse the character of modern warfare and how humans tend to think about war in modernity, but not necessarily to the point where all other (conventional) warfare is therefore impossible. Arendt wrote in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1966 discussing the Vietnam situation: “I don’t think things will come to an all-out war with atomic weapons.”12 And she reaffirms, later in the same year, the

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same sentiment. “I really don’t expect World War III, but sometimes I get a bit ner vous despite myself.”13 Despite Arendt’s evident concerns regarding the influence of total war on modern politics and modern international relations, conventional warfare has not been entirely superseded. Vietnam is, nonetheless, unjustifiable, but not because of the possibility of nuclear escalation. “This is a civil war situation,” she argues, not a matter of American national or international security. We simply need to “stop bombing and start negotiating,” she writes.14 She bemoans the “untold misery that [America’s] ‘solutions’—pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and antipersonnel bullets—held in store for a ‘friend’ who needed to be ‘saved’ and for an ‘enemy’ who had neither the will nor the power to be one before we attacked him.”15 Yet, she says, despite a “fearful number of war crimes” in Vietnam, there is no will in the United States to “wholesale destruction” on the level of Hitler or Stalin.16 It is, explicitly, not a total war though it is still a cruel and unnecessary one. However, the problems that she most frequently raises in relation to Vietnam are more to do with the state of US politics and the danger of the war in Southeast Asia for the future of the American republic. While she takes it to be almost self-evident that the Vietnam War is morally indefensible, what interests and concerns Arendt about the war has more to do with how it reflects the nature of contemporary American government. Its progression reveals a certain kind of creeping corruption in American politics—that is, a corruption of its constitutional principles, namely the increasing power and independence of the office of the president. “In the early years of the Eisenhower administration,” she writes, “the executive still believed it needed congressional authority to start a war. Eisenhower was still old-fashioned enough to believe in the Constitution.”17 Evidently that is no longer the case, she asserts, noting that with Kennedy and Johnson, congressional authority was never sought for military action in Vietnam. Given the importance of the US Constitution for Arendt, this is not an insignificant trend. However, there are bigger problems in the world of American politics which are revealed by their actions in the war: the failure of any kind of political understanding or judgment. There was no tangible goal in this war, she writes, “neither power nor profit. Nor even influence in the world. . . . The goal was now the image itself.”18 Because of this, political policy was vague, short-term, and muddled, and when America at last realized it was in an inevitable slide toward defeat, the goal finally became to “save face.”19 What Arendt termed “image-making as global policy”—a battle to

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win over the minds of the people—was “something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in human history.” And while it might be understandable in the case of a “third-rate nation . . . [or] one of the old colonial powers,” Arendt finds it simply inexplicable that the dominant global power should be undertaking such a course of action.20 It was not even a consistently imperialist policy, she argues (against some other political commentators of the times), simply “an unbelievable example of using excessive means to achieve minor aims in a region of marginal interest.”21 The folly of the Vietnam War is highly revealing of the US government’s refusal to look at facts. It illuminates, she argues, its “inability or unwillingness to consult experience and to learn from reality.”22 This generation, she argues, “grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising”; its intellectuals were taught that “half of politics is ‘imagemaking’ and the other half is making people believe in the imagery.” When a sober assessment of reality has been replaced by a belief that political outcomes can be produced regardless of the facts, actual policy pursuits are doomed to fail. When the situation becomes too serious for “theory,” Arendt writes, it is no surprise that they should “almost automatically fall back on the older adage of carrot and stick,” adding that, “to them, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people with whom carrot-and-stick methods do not work either.”23 Politics as image making is portrayed here as mere façade for a politics that ultimately seeks to create outcomes through violence. Arendt’s familiar complaint—that in modernity, we think violence can solve all our problems— emerges here again with a new veneer of image making projected onto it. It is not that American politicians are seeking to pursue violence relentlessly in order to force political reality to conform to their understanding, as totalitarian regimes do, but rather that when violence does not work as expected, they are left in a position of helplessness. Such a position, it must also be noted, despite Arendt’s clear assertion that American politics is not totalitarian nor anything close, does tend to promote the intensification of violence. American elites resort to violence and image making because they do not understand the nature of power, Arendt unequivocally states. “The reason such excessively costly means, costly in human lives and material resources, were permitted to be used for such politically irrelevant ends must be sought not merely in the unfortunate superabundance in this country, but in its inability to understand that even great power is limited power.”24 The American self-image, and indeed, its image in the world, as “the mightiest power

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of Earth” hid the “myth of omnipotence.”25 American politicians, and the American elite more generally, did not understand the nature of power and its role in the effective limits of violence. This was particularly visible in the war in Vietnam. American policy makers and politicians simply could not understand how a “tiny backward nation” possessed the capacity to persist in their resistance against the Americans for year after year, seemingly against all odds.26 As Arendt wrote in “On Violence,” when power is faced with absolute violence, violence will win. But faced with a powerful enemy, if one is not willing to use total violence, power is ultimately the stronger force. In Vietnam, she writes, “the enemy, poor, abused, and suffering, grew stronger while the ‘mightiest country’ grew weaker with each passing year.”27 This can be attributed, on the one hand, to the Americans’ failure to grasp the nature of Vietnam’s highly developed culture and history of fighting together against foreign invaders, and their refusal to account for facts on the ground as they emerged, but equally, to the power exerted by the Vietnamese people against the barrage of bullets and bombs they faced, and which, as is often the nature of power, grew stronger in the face of adversity. Vietnam revealed that American politics was on a dangerous path. But there are limits, Arendt believes, that tend to divert American politics from the pursuit of a more overtly imperialist international strategy. Although, Arendt writes, she had previously believed that the country had “embarked on an imperialist policy . . . [and] utterly forgotten its old anticolonial sentiments,” certain events had made her more hopeful. “If undeclared small wars . . . are among the necessary means to attain imperial ends, the United States will be less able to employ them successfully than almost any other great power,” she argues. “In order for this country to carry adventurous and aggressive policies to success there would have to be decisive change in the American people’s ‘national character,’ ” a character belonging to the Americans since their foundation and whose presence was reaffirmed in the strong and well-organized opposition to the war that had arisen.28 Arendt’s analysis of the Vietnam War therefore exhibits essentially the same criticisms of modern politics and essential understanding of power, violence, and their relative relations to one another in politics as we see elsewhere in her writings. Yet there is one final aspect to her considerations on the war that is worth highlighting: her brief comments on how the war might be concluded. These comments are of par ticu lar interest because they run contrary to the much stronger claim she makes that nuclear bombs have essentially changed the character of modern warfare in politics. The Vietnam

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War is not a war which must of necessity become a nuclear war, nor, as we have seen, does she even believe it likely to. The logic of war is, thus, as it ever has been, even in the case of a war involving (on one side, at any rate) a nuclear power. Writing to Jaspers in September 1966, she writes: “The way to resolve an armed conflict is always the same: cease fire—armistice—peace negotiations—and, hopefully, peace treaty.”29 Just as violence can never solve or create politics in and of itself, neither does violence necessarily have to be totalizing or pose an existential threat. Violence now, as ever, simply sets the stage on which peace negotiations and the enactment of politics can take place. Violence can be the continuation of politics. The problem with the Vietnam War, in Arendt’s analysis, is that the violence of the Vietnam War was not the continuation of politics, because no coherently political decision had ever been made to go to war, no political goal or aim had been set out beside image making, and thus it represented a form of violence for the sake of violence, rather than politics.

Protest in the United States Roughly coincident with the Vietnam conflict was an accelerating movement of protest in the United States demanding a range of political changes, most importantly civil rights for African Americans, free speech and an end to restrictive campus administration for students, and also opposition to the Vietnam War itself. Many of these protest movements bled into one another, sharing aims, ideals, and sometimes tactics. The civil rights activism characteristic of 1960s America had actually begun in the mid-1950s with southern anti-segregation protests, consisting of sit-ins in racially segregated public spaces such as restaurants and cafes; so-called freedom rides by which young black and white protesters opposed segregation on the public transportation ser vices; and boycotts of segregated public services, most famously, of course, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks’s refusal to make way for a white passenger to sit. This movement, which almost exclusively adopted a tactic of principled nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, was headed by Martin Luther King Jr., a natural leader and spokesman. It grew more influential throughout the 1950s and early to mid-1960s, also inspiring broader political protest on university campuses, where resistance to America’s involvement in Vietnam grew as America became more deeply enmeshed in Southeast Asia through the 1960s.

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Nonviolent protests incorporating noncompliance with existing rules or laws—sit-ins, boycotts, and refusal to enlist, for example—were the norm until the mid-1960s. From the middle of the decade, however, protests became increasingly violent as frustrations grew, and diverse ideologies preaching political violence—both religious and secular—gained currency through the likes of Malcolm X and his religiously fueled black nationalism; the militant Black Panther movement, which demanded a separate nation for black Americans; and those such as James Forman, author of “The Black Manifesto,” who sought to attain political power for black Americans through violent means. It is widely known that Arendt broadly supported the nonviolent protest movement, the student campus protests, and the anti-Vietnam agenda, although she was often critical of its efficacy and impact. She was so enamored with the notion of this protest movement that she claimed civil disobedience could even be considered an essential part of American political culture and that furthermore, civil disobedience ought to be incorporated in some way into the institutional structure of the republic. As much as Arendt favored this side of the protest movement, she equally opposed and feared the militant activism that gained dominance in the later years of the 1960s and into the 1970s, particularly militant black activism. Her opposition is controversial, with some arguing that this reveals an undercurrent of racism in Arendt’s thought, others, that it shows at least a damning failure to take account of race inequality. Arendt’s thinking on civil rights, intersecting with her thinking on race in America, today forms some of the most problematic and hotly debated work in her canon. It is not the intention of this author to substantially intervene in this extensive debate (although this chapter will later touch on some readings of Arendt on these questions). Rather, the claim will be made here that interrogating the idea of violence in race politics in 1960s America offers us another perspective on Arendt’s ideas that shows what is arguably a more nuanced aspect of her thinking on these matters. On the question of civil disobedience, there is a consistent interpretation of her understanding of the phenomenon in American life.30 Arendt’s support of civil disobedience, it is frequently argued, favors an essentially and necessarily nonviolent type of political action, which respects and operates within the boundaries of constitutional politics and with the intention of influencing legislation within the constitutional body; furthermore, this form of activity is unusually well suited to modern America and its particular institutional framework. These are typical qualities of civil disobedience. Yet

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there is a more unusual aspect of Arendt’s analysis. She argues that these extralegal actions should be not only tolerated but embraced and that some space in the political structure of the state ought to be found to encompass this beneficial form of participatory action. This stands against the weight of opinion, certainly in the 1960s, that civil disobedience necessarily exists outside formal institutions. This idea is illustrated by the common claim that civil disobedients must respect the authority of the law even as they resist or reject certain aspects of it, and thus they ought to accept the consequences of their actions and whatever punishment is meted out to them under existing law. Arendt wholly rejects this argument. This means that Arendt diverges significantly from most typical models of civil disobedience. If civil disobedients are, or should be, under no par ticular obligation to accept the authority of the law as it applies to their protesting activities, Arendtian civil disobedience does not seem to necessarily respect legal or constitutional boundaries. In fact, it would appear that in her depiction, the civil disobedient is—at least potentially—rather closer to being a revolutionary figure than is usually thought. If civil disobedients are under no obligation to accept their punishment and the overarching authority of the law and the legislative and judicial institutions of the government, what exactly does tie them to the constitutional framework? Nonviolent and constitutionally limited civil disobedience is merely one kind of resistance, albeit one which is ideally suited to the character of the American people and their institutions. Yet the limits of civil disobedience are indistinct, and civil disobedience can in fact be considered a potentially revolutionary act, for Arendt. It further follows that since revolution is “not even conceivable” for Arendt outside the domain of violence, the potential relationship between violence and civil disobedience is closer than has previously been stated, or rather, there may be a justifiable role for violence in contemporary political protest under some circumstances. The limits of civil disobedience in Arendt’s thought are therefore somewhat at odds with the consensus view on her work—that civil disobedience is constitutionally and legally limited—and opens up her concept of political action to a much wider range of possibilities. Whatever Arendt understands by civil disobedience, it plainly represents a powerful means by which the political sphere can be restored to a more legitimately political form, and in which power itself can appear in the free and plural actions of political protesters. This takes on particular importance for American politics in Arendt’s work, but the principles she elucidates in

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her work on civil disobedience reflect what she believes to be the possibilities for politics itself in the modern world.

Arendt’s “Civil Disobedience” Arendt wrote her essay “Civil Disobedience” in 1970, following a decade of unprecedented popular protest in America that was paralleled across the Western world. In this essay Arendt defends civil disobedience as a legitimate political act that is fundamentally in accord with the spirit of American constitutionalism. Furthermore, she proposes that civil disobedience as an active force for change should be explicitly incorporated into US political institutions in some way, for the good of America’s political life now and in the future. Disobedience to the law of the kind seen in America in the 1960s, and in politics more broadly, arises, Arendt explains, “when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function and grievances will not be heard or acted upon,” or when the government “has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave doubt.”31 She cites specific concerns in American politics that fall under one or both of these banners, such as the failure to officially declare war on Vietnam; the illegal invasion of its neighbor Cambodia; the influence of secret agencies on public affairs; threats to the freedoms of speech, assembly, and a free press guaranteed by the First Amendment; and attempts to deprive the US Senate of its constitutional powers.32 In short, these accumulated actions undermined the constitutional order of the United States, she believed, and the recourse of the people to its proper legal channels. The civil disobedience seen in America was a form of genuinely political and thus legitimate group action, taking place outside (inadequate) legal channels but undertaken in order to restore the proper, constitutional order. Arendt’s defense of civil disobedience definitively rejects attempts to explain or justify civil disobedience on the grounds of individual conscience or morality, and she is therefore highly critical of those who make the claim for civil disobedience on the basis of personal principle. It is, rather, a political action, and Arendt’s justification of civil disobedience seeks to explicate its legitimacy rather than its normative value. Neither the justice of the ends sought by disobedients nor the intentions of the individuals taking part captured the essence of civil disobedience, she wrote, and the nature of civil disobedience is misconstrued by analyzing it in these terms. “Whenever the

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jurists attempt to justify the civil disobedient on moral and legal grounds,” she writes, “they construe his case in the image of either the conscientious objector or the man who tests the constitutionality of a statute.” Yet, she makes the very valid point that “the situation of the civil disobedient bears no analogy to either for the simple reason that he never exists as a single individual; he can function and survive only as a member of a group” (emphasis added).33 Furthermore, she argues, although the civil disobedient “is usually dissenting from a majority, [he] acts in the name of and for the sake of a group; he defies the law and the established authorities on the ground of basic dissent, and not because he as an individual wishes to make an exception for himself and to get away with it.”34 This puts civil disobedience beyond the realm of mere criminality, Arendt writes, because unlike the criminal, who seeks to avoid his deeds becoming public, the civil disobedient is openly defiant, relying on publicity to attain his ends.35 This publicity must be “the primary condition for all attempts that argue for the compatibility of civil disobedience with law and the American institutions of government,” Arendt claims.36 While she notes that common sense tells us civil disobedience is often inspired by a sense of justice within the individual, her point is that in the process of its enactment, civil disobedience becomes something else that cannot be analyzed merely in terms of the individual or in terms of justice itself, but which is characterized by its public nature. Civil disobedience is therefore characterized by publicity in three interconnected ways. In practical terms, civil disobedience is only effectively carried out by groups. It must therefore be pluralistic, that is, it must engage multiple actors around a cause. Additionally, those causes themselves must be publicly oriented, that is, causes supported not for reasons of personal interest but for what the disobedient believes to be the public good. Finally, publicity understood as visibility is a precondition for civil disobedience as distinguished from criminality. Civil disobedience must in Arendt’s terms be enacted by a public for public ends, and it must be visible to the public to whom it relates. It is therefore an active form of power: the coming together of people in a public space in order to enact political change. Power can appear in different guises. It can appear, for example, in the directly participatory politics of Athenian public spaces, but Arendt also identifies power in any political space which is premised on a social contract in the form of promising. Through promising, acts of power can be maintained over time rather than in the fleeting, heroic politics of the Greek world. Promising helps to entrench and stabilize power in politics. As  J.  M. Bernstein

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writes, for Arendt, “being a citizen is the promise to all other citizens to uphold the founding promise through which we have all become politically united. . . . To make a constitutional promise is to become a citizen for oneself and for others; one’s political responsibilities and entitlements flow from one’s identity as a citizen—one’s identity as, essentially, a promisor.”37 But it is also power that lies beneath political dissent, when the people come to oppose either the original contract after a period of time, or when the previously accepted political authority begins to act outside the scope of the constitution. The power involved in founding a constitution is no different, conceptually, from the power involved in opposing political action, or indeed in seeking to create a new constitution. Power is essentially public because it is an act of discourse, the sharing of multiple opinions in the public realm. And it is this that legitimates civil disobedience against the law. Civil disobedience need not even represent most or a majority in order to be legitimate: the publicity of the action in and of itself legitimates it. Yet, while this sets Arendt at odds with most ideas of democratic legitimacy, Jennifer Ring argues that this demonstrates a “profound antielitism” in Arendt’s politics.38 “Her concept of political action,” Ring writes, is “broad enough to include the likes of the pariah—the maverick, the outsider, the real individual—as well as ordinary members of a political community, who should be respected for becoming involved in the life of the community, rather than regarded as lawbreakers.”39 Finally, because politics and authority are legitimized through power, opposition to the law cannot be justified in moral terms because morality is not plural but subjective. “The rules of conscience hinge on interest in the self,” Arendt points out. “They say: Beware of doing something that you will not be able to live with. . . . The political and legal trouble with such justification is twofold. First, it cannot be generalized; in order to keep its validity, it must remain subjective.”40 Because conscience, the individual sense of justice, is wholly subjective, it cannot be the basis on which to oppose the power structures of a political community.

Civil Disobedience as an Agent of Change Civil disobedience, if “public” in the sense that Arendt sets it out, is therefore a legitimate form of political action. It is also a necessary form of political action. As the world changes, political institutions and laws must also

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evolve. As time passes, political change will always threaten to degrade the institutions and laws of the polity. Yet the law cannot change itself to meet the needs or counter the threats to the political body. “The law can indeed stabilize and legalize change once it has occurred, but the change itself is always the result of extra-legal action,” Arendt writes.41 The civil disobedience that could provide the means of change was also, luckily, embedded in the American spirit. “Consent,” she stated, “not in the very old sense of mere acquiescence . . . but in the sense of active support and continued participation in all matters of public interest, is in the spirit of the American law.”42 Consent structured America’s postrevolutionary political framework: the horizontal, Lockean social contract that bound citizens together by mutual promise instead of being subjected to a sovereign. Popular power was written into the US Constitution. But it is only through dissent that true consent is revealed, Arendt argues, or rather, the potential for dissent is required for tacit consent to be considered legitimate. Dissent is thus “the hallmark of free government,” Arendt asserts. “One who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent. Consent as it is implied in the right to dissent—the spirit of American law and the quintessence of American government—spells out and articulates the tacit consent given in exchange for the community’s tacit welcome of new arrivals, of the inner immigration through which it constantly renews itself.”43 Arendt argues, for this reason, that civil disobedience is “primarily American.” No other country or language, she writes, even has a name for it. The American republic is uniquely well placed to incorporate civil disobedience into its institutional framework, “not, perhaps, in accordance with its statutes, but in accordance with the spirit of its laws.”44 Because the revolutionary founders embedded power through consent and, therefore, dissent into the new constitution, civil disobedience is consistent with the spirit of the republic, and therefore potentially manageable and valuable. It is the final stage in a long historical process. “If action is essentially beginning,” writes Bernstein, “and beginning is best exemplified by revolutionary founding, and founding finally is completed in the re-founding that is civil disobedience, then civil disobedience is the fulfilment of Arendt’s political doctrine.”45 He adds to this the important point that “civil disobedience always concerns the constitutional order itself, referring to either its augmentation or its restoration.” Civil disobedience, structurally identical to revolution, is the “analogue of revolutionary founding that occurs within the ordinary world of representative, constitutional democracies.”46

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As such, civil disobedience should not be just tolerated but celebrated. While Arendt accepts that the nature of law makes it impossible to institute within law its own opposition, “it is an altogether different question whether it would be possible to find a recognized niche for civil disobedience in our institutions of government.”47 In modern America, writes Arendt, sovereignty has seeped in, undermining power. She refers to the “political question doctrine,” the Supreme Court’s claim that it did not have the authority to review certain extraordinary acts of the legislative or executive branches of the federal government (with particular reference to the decisions made with regards to the Vietnam War), and worries that this doctrine is the “loophole through which the sovereignty principle and the reason of state doctrine are permitted to filter back, as it were, into a system of government which in principle denies them.”48 Civil disobedience, by contrast, if established within America’s political institutions, “might be the best possible remedy for this ultimate failure of judicial review,” and Arendt proposes some specific actions toward this end.49 “The first step would be to obtain the same recognition for the civil-disobedient minorities that is accorded the numerous specialinterest groups . . . and to deal with civil-disobedient groups in the same way as with pressure groups, which, through their representatives—that is, registered lobbyists—are permitted to influence and ‘assist’ Congress by means of persuasion, qualified opinion, and the numbers of their constituents. These minorities of opinion would thus be able to establish themselves as a power that is not only ‘seen from afar’ during demonstrations and other dramatizations of their viewpoint but is always present and to be reckoned with in the daily business of government.”50 As Verity Smith points out, a “fear of undivided sovereignty” runs through Arendt’s work, shaping her idea of constitutionalism. “For Arendt, undivided sovereignty brings about the erasure or collapse of the public space necessary for plurality and human diversity. This fear commits her to a constitutional framework for politics as well as to a constant contestation of the framework— not as a form of disruption, but, rather, as a kind of conservation of the framework.”51 Arendt celebrates civil disobedience not merely as a “remedy to potential failures” but as a “politically enacted mechanism of amendment, and an ongoing process of constitutional interpretation.”52 Andreas Kalyvas echoes this when he writes of how Arendt’s view of civil disobedience enables her to “mediate between extraordinary and normal politics in a variety of ways.”53 Civil disobedience is “extrainstitutional but not anticonstitutional,” he writes, “outside the confines and mediations of the instituted political system.”54

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Arendt portrays civil disobedience as a recent form of an older pattern of voluntary association in America, and as such “quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.”55 Since the Mayflower, she claims, “voluntary associations have been the specifically American remedy for the failure of institutions, the unreliability of men, and the uncertain nature of the future.”56 The present “emergency” in the United States, she claimed, “has changed voluntary association into civil disobedience and transformed dissent into resistance.”57 For Arendt, this emergency has been prevalent throughout much of the Western world in the twentieth century, as traditional politics has broken down into chaos, totalitarianism, or war. Yet the emergency has only recently reached America, she believes, which, furthermore, might be distinguished from the rest of the world through its unique political tradition. Arendt’s claims in “On Violence” about the nonpolitical nature of violence, as well as her reliance on the American constitutional principle for her justification of civil disobedience in her essay on the subject, have led most to take the position that her idea of civil disobedience as a clearly political activity takes it therefore as necessarily nonviolent action. Tal Correm writes of how, for Arendt, violence is a perilous, “irreversible and unpredictable” course of action leading irrevocably to more violence rather than a better world.58 Joan Cocks writes, similarly, that Arendt wants to emphasize that it “always is possible and almost always desirable to forswear the use of ‘violence.’”59 Kalyvas explicitly excludes revolution from civil disobedience, claiming that in Arendt’s work, “civil disobedience is not a revolutionary constituent act and does not aspire to play this role.”60 Civil disobedience “leans on” the constitutional order, he writes; “legality provides the conditions of possibility for illegality.”61 The specific acts of illegality are undertaken to affirm the constitutional order “on a higher normative level [in ways] that are not directly or explicitly prescribed in the original constitutional text but implied by its normative nature, revolutionary origins, and historical development.”62 Comparing Arendt’s idea of civil disobedience with the nonviolence movement in America led by Martin Luther King Jr., on the one hand, and arguments for violent resistance propounded by more militant groups or protest leaders of the later 1960s—exemplified for Arendt by James Forman, writer of the “Black Manifesto”—on the other, reveals Arendtian civil disobedience to be a less dogmatically pacific notion. She emphatically rejects certain forms of violent resistance. She was withering in her critique of the Black Power movement and fearful of its potential impact on American society and politics. “Black racism, so blatantly evident in James Forman’s

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‘Manifesto,’” she writes, “could, of course, provoke a really violent white backlash, whose greatest danger would be the transformation of white prejudices into a full-fledged racist ideology for which ‘law and order’ would indeed become a mere façade.”63 By contrast, as Richard King notes, “comments in [Arendt’s] letters and essays during the 1960s indicate a general approval of Martin Luther King and of the civil rights movement’s dismantling of political and legal discrimination.”64 Yet Arendt was also critical of the premises of King’s argument for civil disobedience, which claimed a personal right and duty to pursue justice according to one’s conscience. Her defense of civil disobedience stands in contrast to both positions in ways that are revealing of the extent and possibilities for civil disobedience.

Theories of Violence and Nonviolence in the 1960s The leadership role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the black civil rights movement was unparalleled. Although civil rights protests and boycotts predated King’s involvement, his influence as a charismatic proponent of nonviolence was pivotal to the movement from the mid-1950s to his assassination in 1968. From the enormously successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, to the Birmingham action of 1963, to the less successful attempted Chicago protests of 1966, King was the voice, and certainly the spiritual leader, of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States.65 His own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), spawned the youth-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most influential civil rights organizations of the 1960s. Through his words as well as his political activities, King popu larized the forms of action—economic, social, and political—that would shape the face of the civil rights movement for a decade. His influence spread beyond the South and beyond racial boundaries. From 1960, the SNCC “had become a magnet for white student radicals.”66 The modus operandi of King became that of student protesters across America, when in 1964, the Berkeley campus protests became the prototype for campus revolts, using nonviolent but highly disruptive means such as picket lines and sit-ins (or teach-ins).67 The nonviolent mode of civil disobedience that characterized protest in the 1950s and early 1960s was heavily influenced by King, himself deeply impressed with the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi. Like Gandhi’s, King’s thought is spiritually inspired. His justification for illegal action is firmly moral, rooted

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in religion and Christian tradition specifically. Thus, King does not reject law per se but advocates breaking certain laws, because “there are two types of laws: just and unjust. . . . One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”68 This personal moral responsibility firmly trumps any legal duties of responsibility that might exist, unless the two are aligned in a just law. Furthermore, King writes, he does not advocate evading the law as “that would lead to anarchy.”69 Rather, “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”70 The political intent behind King’s approach to civil disobedience was to create “tension” through nonviolent but often illegal protest action, that is, to raise the prominence of issues in such a way that they demand resolution. It seeks to “create a crisis,” he wrote in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” so that “a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. . . . I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”71 However, regardless of the justice of one’s cause, nonviolent means alone must be utilized, King believes, for practical reasons as well as moral ones. Violence only begets further violence, he claimed, it solves no problems while it “creates new and more complicated ones.”72 The first principle in the civil disobedience movement is “the idea that means must be as pure as the end. The movement is based on the philosophy that ends and means must cohere . . . the end is pre-existent in the means.”73 The force inherent within King’s conception of civil disobedience is a Gandhi-inspired idea of selfcontrol and spiritual force. It is not cowardice, he writes, the method “does resist.”74 While nonviolent resisters do not use physical aggression, they are “strongly active spiritually.”75 They aim to awaken “a sense of moral shame in the opponent” with the intention of provoking “redemption and reconciliation.”76 The power that is invoked through nonviolent resistance thus operates in two equally important stages. “It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had,” King claims.77 Through this realization of strength and the enactment of resistance

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that it enables, the opponent’s conscience finally is stirred, so that “reconciliation becomes a reality.”78 The result, King writes, is that there “is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men.”79 Accordingly, in international as well as internal political affairs, King saw no purpose in the continued use of violence for political purposes. When “guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence,” he writes.80 Therefore, “the potential destructiveness of modern weapons of war totally rules out the possibility of war ever serving again as a negative good.”81 Yet as the 1960s rolled on, and little progress seemed to be made on the issues the protesters opposed, frustrations grew. After years of activism, their aims had not been achieved and they felt politically disempowered. Even as public opinion turned full force against the war in Vietnam, the war continued to escalate. “The building frustration bred feelings of desperation in many circles,” Tom Wells writes. “The frustration was greatest amongst younger protesters, many of whom lacked understanding of how much hard work was required to bring about political change.”82 This, combined with the changing response of successive US administrations toward the protesters, accounts in part for the rise of more violent ideologies of resistance, of which the Black Panthers were emblematic.83 “The violence-filled period from 1967–1968 saw the steady evolution of the Johnson Administration’s attitude from one dominated by a ‘transitional’ view and prevention-oriented responses to one increasingly reliant upon strong military and police forces to suppress rioters,” writes historian James Button.84 The influential arguments justifying violence ranged from the revolutionary black nationalist and religiously inspired writings of Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965, to Frantz Fanon’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s secular writings promoting the necessity of postcolonial revolutionary violence. The Black Power movement—proposing, variously, forms of black separatism or black leadership in the United States to be attained by force—was a major strain of violent activism and of particular concern to Arendt. Forman’s “Black Manifesto,” one important text of the Black Power movement, is criticized several times in “On Violence.” Previously a leading member of the SNCC, Forman became disillusioned with nonviolent protest. He briefly took a leadership role in the Black Panther Party before founding his own organization, the Unemployment and

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Poverty Action Committee. His manifesto calls for black Americans to unite to liberate themselves from racism and capitalism through taking revolutionary control of the US government. “Racism in the U.S. is so pervasive in the mentality of whites that only an armed, well-disciplined, black-controlled government can insure the stamping out of racism in this country,” his manifesto states.85 We must fight, writes Forman, using “whatever means necessary, including the use of force and power of the gun to bring down the colonizer . . . black people in this country must understand that we are the Vanguard Force. We shall liberate all the people in the U.S. and we will be instrumental in the liberation of colored people the world around.”86 As the most oppressed, black Americans must make the revolution, he argues, and as the vanguard “we must assume leadership, total control and we must exercise the humanity which is inherent in us.”87 Forman opposes racism, capitalism, and imperialism in favor of a socialist society in the United States. While the means of production are in the hands of “white racists” there can be no possibility of this, he writes, and black leadership is the only way in which black people can protect themselves against racism.88 He proposes a political revolution, seizing power from the government through “guerrilla warfare” and “armed confrontation,” as well as an economic revolution overthrowing capitalism, first in America but also globally, by attacking the “power centers” of the “white Western world.”89 In his manifesto, Forman calls on black Americans to participate in activism including boycotts, seizure of church property, the promotion of black liberation, and sit-ins. The latter are “not . . . a continuation of the sit-in movement of the early sixties but . . . active confrontation. . . . The principles of self-defense should be applied if attacked.”90 Alongside this, he demands reparations from churches and synagogues for their role in slavery, to be used for the establishment of various organizations aimed at promoting black education, black interests in the media, workers groups, cooperatives, and so forth.

Arendt, King, and Forman: Justifications of Civil Disobedience Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience clearly has affinities with that of King. Both share an idea of political power as an essentially nonelitist, participatory, and nonhierarchical activity that arises out of a way of acting together that is much more powerful than mere violence. Both King and Arendt

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were deeply concerned with the growth of individualism in modernity as a force that estranged individuals from the public sphere of participation. They share an emphasis on the importance of political means above the unpredictable and often unattainable ends of politics, and this further emphasizes the importance of nonviolent action in politics for both thinkers. Both also portray politics as an activity that requires enormous courage in standing up to and against the violence that inevitably permeates the political world, especially so in the contemporary age. Yet despite these overlapping conceptions of political power, the two substantially diverge on their understanding both of politics and civil disobedience. The central difference relates to the idea of justice in the public sphere. When King argues that civil disobedience operates by tapping into the shame of the enemy, in order that they might come to realize for themselves the injustice of their acts, this stands in sharp opposition to Arendt’s relatively impartial conceptualization of justice. Rather, both the operative force of politics and its legitimizing force is the possibility of genuine equality that the political sphere offers its participants: the equal opportunity of citizens to seek to convince or persuade their fellow citizens of some course of action. Persuasion, for Arendt, does not enable citizens to find “the truth” but to create their own reality between themselves. For King, a religious concept of objectively real justice lies at the heart of his justification for political action and civil disobedience. For King, justice is the natural property that legitimates political action as a realization of natural or God-given law, while for Arendt it is precisely the artificial nature of the political community that legitimizes it, in the genuine possibility for freedom it enables and the creation of a space of equals. Hence, those taking part in activities of civil disobedience, for Arendt, must create their cause and the justification for that within their public arena rather than find it in some higher justification. Each individual must, King believes, look within their conscience to understand what is the right cause to follow, the higher law that justifies breaking human laws. Ultimately, even evildoers might discover through conscience what the right path is, once they begin to feel shame about the wrongs they have committed. For Arendt, it is explicitly not in the individual that the justification for civil disobedience can be found but in the group’s acting together. Indeed, Arendt quotes from a report on civil disobedience in 1960s America: “If the decision to break the law really turned on individual conscience, it is hard to see in law how Dr. King is better than Governor Ross

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Barnett, of Mississippi, who also believed deeply in his cause, and was willing to go to jail.”91 Individual conscience cannot, Arendt argues, offer a way to differentiate criminality from civil disobedience—even to distinguish the “principled, committed” actions of a racist bigot from the actions of a civil rights leader preaching equality for all through nonviolent means. In Arendt’s terms, King’s justification of civil disobedience simply is not a political argument at all. A political argument for civil disobedience, in Arendt’s framework, cannot be justified by anything that exists outside the political sphere. Applying justice as the higher standard by which to justify acts of civil disobedience transforms civil disobedience into a moral but not a political action. This might be desirable—sometimes—but it is not equivalent to a truly political act. Appealing to conscience also makes an act of civil disobedience an essentially individual act rather than a public or group activity: it revokes the principle of publicity which is so central to Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience. Yet King’s protests had been successful to a certain extent, Arendt accepted. In the nonviolent civil right movement of the early 1960s, “boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations were successful in eliminating discriminatory laws and ordinances in the South,” she writes, also praising the “disinterested and usually highly moral claim” of student protesters.92 These kinds of protest, though, “proved utter failures” on encountering the social conditions of large urban centers, she notes, with “the stark needs of the black ghettos on one side, the overriding interests of white lower-income groups in respect to housing and education on the other.”93 There is a limited application to King’s civil disobedience. In contrast, Arendt was unreservedly appalled by the militant protest movements that emerged at the middle of the decade. Forman’s manifesto for her exemplified a kind of violent anti-politics that was illegitimate and potentially catastrophic. To determine political conflict as a conflict of racial or biological difference, as she argued Forman did, is to root political conflict in interests. Interest-based politics, based on natural and therefore insuperable differences, tends toward a cycle of violence because no consensus can emerge from groups that distinguish themselves in terms of their differences. “Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence by definition,” she claimed, “ because it objects to natural organic facts—a white or black skin—which no persuasion or power could change; all one can do, when the chips are down, is to exterminate their bearers.”94 All that protest could do here, she notes,

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where interest was the overriding concern and where interest was starkly divided between black and white citizens, “was to bring these conditions into the open, into the street, where the basic irreconcilability of interests was dangerously opposed.”95 Yet, as she notes, in relation to the student protests, “the academic establishment . . . feels more comfortable when confronted with these interests plus violence than when it is a matter of nonviolent ‘participatory democracy.’ ”96 In other words, the establishment understands the language of interest and violence rather better than that of opinion and participation, something which for Arendt is representative of political and institutional authority as a whole. Arendt thus rejects the Black Power movement not primarily because it is violent and therefore unpolitical, but because it is unpolitical and therefore violent—that is, it misunderstands politics, seeing it in terms of interests rather than opinion and necessity instead of freedom. The distinction is important because it shows that for Arendt the chief dividing line between the violent protesters and the nonviolent protesters was not violence itself but what led to that violence: an alternative worldview that understood politics to be based on the “social” interests that defined interest groups, rather than the opinions of those who took part in (freely aligned) political groupings, debates, and movements. It is not that violence is unconnected to this distinction, for the former tends much more heavily and even inevitably toward violence than the latter, but that the cause of this violence is a corrupted view of politics, rather than violence itself causing the corruption of politics and political understanding. Arendt ultimately rejects King’s justification of civil disobedience because it is too reliant on other, higher worlds, instead of being rooted in this world and in a particular political sphere. Because King believes civil disobedience gains its legitimacy through individual conscience and not through publicity, it is at the very least potentially subversive of politics. On the other hand, she rejects Forman’s rationale for violent civil disobedience not specifically because it is violent (problematic though that may be) but because it is premised on racial difference: “natural” interests which cannot be political because essentially divisive and hierarchical. In contrast to both of these very different ideas of civil disobedience, the fundamental importance of publicity is reinforced. But so too is the fact that Arendt does not distinguish between these two forms of civil disobedience or justifications for civil disobedience on the basis of whether they are violent or nonviolent. The legitimacy of

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civil disobedience in contemporary America is not essentially determined by the use of violence.

The Limits of Civil Disobedience Arendt’s thinking on civil disobedience was rooted in the American context of the 1950s and 1960s and therefore tends to focus on the positive alignment between civil disobedience and constitutionalism. Yet, if we press the idea of civil disobedience to its limits in Arendt’s work, a more expansive notion can be found, one in which neither constitutionalism nor nonviolence are essential elements of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, rather, can be understood as a variety of political revolutionary activity. That is, there is no hard and fast line between civil disobedience and revolution—neither constitutionalism nor nonviolence. We can see this even within the most suitable environment for positive, nonviolent civil disobedience, the United States, but even more clearly in civil disobedience that occurs in other kinds of political communities that Arendt writes about. Within the contemporary American context, Arendt notes that legitimate civil disobedience might be either restorative or protective of the Constitution. It “can be tuned to necessary and desirable change or to necessary and desirable preservation or restoration of the status quo—the preservation of rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, or the restoration of the proper balance of power in the government.”97 Accordingly, her idea of civil disobedience has usually been tied to an acceptance of existing law and to the US Constitution in particular. Her explanation of civil disobedience is explicitly a defense of civil disobedience as an act that can be constitutional. Publicity, she asserts, “is the primary condition for all attempts that argue for the compatibility of civil disobedience with law and the American institutions of government” (emphasis added).98 However, the extremely wide and permissive concept of legitimate civil disobedience—either the restoration of a former status quo, or the pursuit of changes deemed necessary or permissible in order to maintain certain overriding principles—undermines its explicit constitutionality or the need to comply with the existing constitution. The essential point for Arendt is that civil disobedience is primarily justified by its relationship with and support by public opinion. The crisis might be predicated or caused by a systemic political breakdown, but that doesn’t mean civil disobedience has to work to

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restore the old system. Civil disobedients may well choose a different form of political action, a change from the old politics in order to maintain politics for the future (although they often do not do this). “Of all the means that civil disobedients may use in the course of persuasion and of the dramatization of issues, the only one that can justify their being called ‘rebels’ is the means of violence,” writes Arendt. It generally follows from this, she writes, that a “generally accepted necessary characteristic of civil disobedience is nonviolence, and it follows that ‘civil disobedience is not revolution.’” The civil disobedient accepts “the frame of established authority and the general legitimacy of the system of laws,” while the revolutionary rejects them. And yet, she writes, this distinction, “so plausible at first glance, turns out to be more difficult to sustain than the distinction between civil disobedient and criminal.” Arendt wants, surprisingly, to debunk the necessary identification of the (legitimate) civil disobedient with the person who accepts the broad frame of law. No, she writes, “the civil disobedient shares with the revolutionary the wish to ‘change the world,’ and the changes he wishes to accomplish can be drastic indeed.” Consider Gandhi, she points out, “who is always quoted as the great example, in this context, of nonviolence.” Did he, she asks rhetorically, “accept the ‘frame of established authority,’ which was British rule of India? Did he respect the ‘general legitimacy of the system of laws’ in the colony?”99 Arendt thus definitively rejects the initially plausible claim that civil disobedience is essentially different from rebellion or revolution because it is restricted to acts that support the “general legitimacy of the system of laws.”100 The example of Gandhi—the archetypal nonviolent civil disobedient in the eyes of many—is especially instructive as to Arendt’s meaning. Clearly, she wants to claim Gandhi (as he is commonly recognized) as a civil disobedient—and yet she writes, quite reasonably, that Gandhi was in fact a revolutionary in any reasonable sense of the term, in wishing to overturn the existing form of government. He evidently and explicitly wished to radically change the social and political structure of India, abolishing British rule for Indian self-rule, and Western civilization for what he believed to be a better, and more authentically Indian, way of life and structure of politics. She positively rejects the division between the “civil disobedient” who respects the law and the “revolutionary” who doesn’t, because both wish to change the world through public action (which may or may not be violent), and neither, in her view, has to necessarily respect the existing political framework. This redraws Arendt’s previous depiction of civil disobedience

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as restoration or protection in its widest possible sense—as protecting or restoring not just existing (or recently existing) laws, nor even the constitution, but what is understood by the public to be the rightful position and form of politics itself. Arendt is making the point that while she considers acts of civil disobedience to be quite distinct from criminal acts (through their public nature), and thereby politically legitimate because they embody this quality of publicity that is central to her notion of genuine political power, there is no categorical distinction between civil disobedients and revolutionaries. Thus, civil disobedience, for Arendt, can indeed be or become wholly revolutionary when the disobedient seeks wholesale change—not just restoration or protection, in a more limited sense, but the restoration of political power that underlies political communities everywhere and endows them with legitimacy. There is no limit, therefore, to the ends that civil disobedience movements and actors might seek, nor do they have to respect the existing system. There seem to be, in fact, no political limits to civil disobedience. Even in America, Arendt identified certain threats that could conceivably provoke revolution. America, while not as badly affected by the maladies of the modern world as Europe, was not immune to them either. Two particular causes threatened America’s internal peace, Arendt wrote. “The current danger of rebellion in the United States arises not from dissent and resistance to particular law, executive orders, and national policies, not even from denunciations of ‘the system,’ ” she wrote. “What we are confronted with is a constitutional crisis of the very first order, and this crisis has been effected by two very different factors whose unfortunate coincidence has resulted in the par ticu lar poignancy as well as general confusion of the situation.”101 Those two factors were the challenges to the Constitution by the administration, thus undermining the people’s faith in constitutional process itself; and the “more radical unwillingness of certain sections of the population to recognize the consensus universalis,” that is, the fact that America is a single political community.102 The “sections of the population’” she refers to are the radical and militant wings of the black civil rights movement. While the US government was overreaching its constitutional authority, extending its sovereignty over the people and thus alienating and provoking dissent, parts of the black population— who had, after all, she notes, never been part of the original consensus universalis of the constitutional agreement, and who still faced exclusion and

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discrimination—began to no longer seek integration but the separation of the black American population from the white population, to withdraw their consent in the most extreme way possible. Thus, radical change was needed, and sought, through both civil and violent disobedience. However, Arendt believed that the US Constitution was structured in such a way that it might be particularly able to benefit from civil disobedience without being undermined. It is “widely held that change can be effected by law,” Arendt notes. Yet, she claims, “law can indeed stabilize and legalize change once it has occurred, but the change itself is always the result of extralegal action . . . [e.g.] the Supreme Court has the right to choose among the cases brought before it, and this choice is inevitably influenced by public opinion.”103 America—like every modern state—needs civil disobedience in order to provoke the changes to its legal system that are necessary for it to thrive. Law itself can never be enough. It was civil disobedience, she argues, that brought awareness of the enormous crime and fundamental problem of racism in American politics into the light. Not law but civil disobedience illuminated the “American dilemma,” she argues, which “forced upon the nation the recognition of the enormity of the crime, not just of slavery, but of chattel slavery.”104 Yet while America had drawn in part on the European intellectual and political tradition throughout its history and continued to be influenced by the European political arena, it also had roots in a very different tradition of revolution and popular political power. This tradition meant that resistance was sewn into the very fabric of the US Constitution in the principle of consent that underpins its model of government, and the revolutionary spirit that lay behind the nation and its constitution. Arendt even goes so far as to claim that civil disobedience “is primarily American in origin and substance . . . no other country, and no other language, has even a word for it, and . . . the American republic is the only government having at least a chance to cope with it—not, perhaps, in accordance with its statutes, but in accordance with the spirit of its laws.”105 Unlike the political models of the old world, whose roots lay in sovereign, hierarchical political authorities, and who struggle with the “fictitious origin of consent,” the spirit of American law is consent, that is, the revolutionary spirit that realized political power, creating something new through its actions.106 The principle that grounds American politics is thus fully in accordance with the attributes of civil disobedience—there is no fundamental conflict as there is in a truly sovereign state.

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While civil disobedience does not have to respect the laws in order to be legitimately political, or even be aligned with the principle or spirit of a political community it seeks to change, America is somewhat unique in that its constitution supports (in principle) the actions of civil disobedience (in the abstract). Civil disobedience is wholly unlimited in the ends it pursues, and the US Constitution is uniquely capable of embodying such change. Therein lies the potential, Arendt believes, of the American spirit of the constitution and the acts of civil disobedience that seek to change the law to form a positive alliance for change, creating something positive, rather than destructive, out of civil disobedience. Student protest represented, she argued, “a real danger to the status quo precisely because it strikes at the heart of genuine political life.”107 The students, she believed, had tasted the pleasure of political action; their protest represented a genuine form of political action. Yet, she would later write, they ultimately failed to produce the kind of revolution they sought because “they have no inkling of what power means, and if power were lying in the street and they knew it was lying there, they are certainly the last to be ready to stoop down and pick it up.” Their impact was limited because they failed to understand the true power of their acts; they, too, were blinded by the modern idea of sovereign politics and the ideas of power and violence that went along with that image. “The [true] revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up,” wrote Arendt. “Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to a revolution.”108 What was needed to “pave the way” to sweeping change “is a real analysis of the existing situation such as used to be made in earlier times . . . [but] the theoretical sterility and analytical dullness of this movement are just as striking and depressing as its joy in action is welcome.”109 Thus, despite not only the best of intentions but, to some degree, the exercise of political action, the students’ protests would prove to be impotent on a larger political level due to their failure to comprehend the ontological nature of power and its relationship with politics. Despite the emergence of a more promising realization of political action in the protests, the dire lack of political understanding in modern life held the students back and, later, facilitated the easy transformation of the early political movement into a dangerously antipolitical and interest-based movement. In America, then, Arendt believed, significant possibilities remained for protesters, through acts of civil disobedience, to pursue nonviolent but effective routes to restore the constitutional

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order. It was the tragedy of the protests that their failure of understanding prevented them doing from this.

The Role of Violence in Participatory Politics Of the early protest movements of the 1960s, Arendt wrote (later in that decade), “it is no secret that things have changed since then, that the adherents of nonviolence are on the defensive, and it would be futile to say that only the ‘extremists’ are yielding to a glorification of violence and have discovered— like Fanon’s Algerian peasants—that ‘only violence pays.’ ”110 It is the influence of Fanon and Sartre to which she in part attributes the contemporary and problematic surge toward a glorification of violence among American youth. “Sartre with his great felicity with words has given expression to the new faith,” she explains. “ ‘Violence,’ he now believes, on the strength of Fanon’s book, ‘like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.’” And yet, Arendt points out, “If this were true, revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills. The myth is more abstract, farther removed from reality, than Sorel’s myth of a general strike ever was. It is on a par with Fanon’s worst rhetorical excesses . . . to identify the national liberation movements with such outbursts is to prophesy their doom.”111 While the collective emotion provoked by the shared bearing and wielding of arms against an enemy might feel genuine, such sentiments are hugely misleading, she writes. “The hope is an illusion for the simple reason that no human relationship is more transitory than this kind of brotherhood, which can be actualized only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb.”112 There is nothing firm, nothing solid about the “brotherhood” that emerges from war, unlike the community of power that arises from the creation of an ongoing political discourse within a structured political space of law. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings argue that “Arendt and Fanon offer opposed arguments about the relation between politics and violence. It seems we have to choose between seeing violence as a ‘necessary’ aspect of politics and seeing violence as destructive of politics.”113 Yet, they continue, “on examination, the implications of both Fanon’s and Arendt’s analyses unsettle any clear-cut distinction between them. . . . Arendtian politics remains haunted by the violence it supposedly excludes.”114 Yet Arendtian politics does not categorically exclude violence. As Arendt explains in On

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Revolution, “violent reaction . . . however justifiable in its own terms, loses its raison d’être when it tries to develop a strategy of its own with specific goals; it becomes ‘irrational’ the moment it is ‘rationalized,’ that is the moment the re-action in the course of a contest turns into an action.”115 The violence of Fanon or Forman, conceptualized in just these terms—as not only a justifiable but legitimate political action leading to a rational end point of liberation and peaceful politics—is simply absurd, Arendt believes. The problem with their ideology is that it replaces power with violence, which, for Arendt, is one of the most problematic, albeit prevalent, misunderstandings of politics in the contemporary world. Yet, as this same passage illustrates, violence can indeed be quite reasonably involved in acts of revolution (of which civil disobedience is one form). Specifically, violence as a reaction against behavior that obscures or represses the legitimate power of the people is here depicted as politically justifiable and indeed valuable. “Revolutions and wars,” she writes, “are not even conceivable outside the domain of violence. . . . Violence is a kind of common denominator for both.”116 But, for Arendt, as we have seen, violence is only politically justifiable and reasonable when it is combined with an understanding of political power and the kind of nonviolent discursive action that underpins it instead of, as is so often the case, that action of power being replaced by violence. “Where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution,” she explains.117 And despite her cynicism about the modern world, she still believes that “the revolutionary spirit of the last centuries . . . is unequalled in all prior history.”118 By way of example, Arendt cites a Massachusetts bill passed to force a test of the legality of the Vietnam War. “Is it not obvious,” she writes, “that this legal action . . . was the result of the civil disobedience of draft resisters?” And, she argues (approvingly), “the whole body of labor legislation . . . was preceded by decades of frequently violent disobedience of what ultimately proved to be obsolete laws.”119 These acts of violence, mediated through the power of orga nized groups, interacted with the legislative framework in the cases Arendt cites in a public and distinctively political way. The people—even if a minority—are using their power, combined sometimes with violence, to change, augment, and abolish in parts the legal and political world of the United States. Such actions are not anti-political nor prepolitical but are part of an ongoing process of political action, actions which

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are, Arendt states, not in accordance with legal statute, “but in accordance with the spirit of the laws.”120 The tacit consent required by the American social contract requires this right to dissent, implicit in “the spirit of American law and the quintessence of American government.”121 In a situation of increasing political failure, such as that which America faced, justifiable violence for political ends—a right which in the American revolutionary example belonged to the state and in the Jewish army example belonged to a people— in modern America belongs to the only groups who act publicly: the protesters who oppose the sovereign authority. In entrenching its revolutionary spirit of consent (and dissent) within the constitution, the American founders gave their descendants the tools by which to harness the power of dissent as that materialized in the shape of certain forms of civil disobedience in the 1950s and 1960s. What the spirit of America could not encompass, and the internal contradiction that had always existed in the United States, was a politics in which race—as a form of objective interest in Arendt’s eyes—was so central. That form of civil unrest, because it represented an ideological politics both fundamentally at odds with the Constitution and the principles behind it, and because, lacking power, it turned to force and violence, was on the contrary extremely threatening to the republic, Arendt believed. This was true in the late twentieth century more than ever before. Yet this also implies that violent revolution may be the only possible solution for other nations or peoples across the world who do not benefit from a political system which comprehends the value and importance of power in Arendtian terms, or from the beneficial actions of civil disobedients for a consent-oriented constitutional framework. In such cases, violence, so long as it is not mistaken for or seen to replace political action, might indeed be the only real route by which to found a legitimately political system of government, just as the Americans had done two centuries before. Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience can be distinguished from those who justified it as a means of moving toward an ethically objective collective justice in the state, as well as from those who justified it as a means of representing the interests of certain groups against others. It can also be separated from those who understood civil disobedience as essentially nonviolent and thus nonrevolutionary, and those who believed violence was the key to a revolutionary new (quasi-utopian) world. For Arendt, civil disobedience and revolution were justified by the same thing—the nature of the acts as public action—and violence might be part of that legitimately political solution.

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However, violence could not be the only part of the answer, nor was it the most important element. The primary necessity in politics was the presence of power as the free action of people joined together as equals within a community, and their understanding of this. Thus, while resistance is preferentially nonviolent, civil disobedience as Arendt defines it does not necessarily exclude violence. However, in a world in which politics is still understood as sovereignty, that is, in which states define their authority through their monopoly on power, nonviolent civil disobedience has a special place as a means by which ordinary people can express their dissent and thus their power. It is an expression of the power that properly resides within the people, literally the only power that can stand up against the force of sovereignty, because it subverts the means that sovereignty operates through. For Arendt, America was the model in which the dissent on which true consent relies might be realized, and thus, the model for a post-traditional world in which power replaced violence as the essence of politics.

Arendt on Structural Inequality in the United States It is evident that, for Arendt, a political ideology or movement based on a recognition of existing racial and other structural, “natural” inequalities was at base unpolitical, and as such, would tend inevitably to fall back on the use of violence to achieve its ends. Race-based politics falls under the category of social politics, as does any ideology that attempts to reshape, reform, or base itself on so-called natural qualities of groups of people that belong properly to the world of the private sphere, especially biological or economic qualities. This means that, for the most part, structural inequalities relating to class and race are deemed to be outside politics for Arendt. By most normal criteria of politics this is a peculiar statement, but for Arendt, with her distinctly unusual and contentious definition of politics, political action based primarily on racial motivations can only ever be seen as a corruption of authentic politics. This is unquestionably a major limiting factor of Arendtian politics from a contemporary liberal perspective. In addition, in her published work as well as in her private correspondence, she also expressed problematic attitudes toward racial minorities, which at times seem to bias her understanding of contemporary American political events. In particular, Arendt’s views on African Americans have been much criticized, with most commentators identifying key failures in the portion of her work that addresses racial politics

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in America. These failures have wider implications, and some critics argue that they reveal problems that undermine her political theory. Many commentators have taken particular issue with the way that the division between the social and the political is strictly applied, for example, in Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.” Robert Bernasconi writes of how her use of the social/political distinction “is at the heart of her failure to address adequately the ‘racial issue.’ ”122 Her image of the political, based, Bernasconi argues, on the Greek polis, was constructed in response to the failings of politics in 1930s and 1940s Germany, and thus “when Arendt passed from the discussion of totalitarianism to that of the denial of civil rights in the United States, she did not recognize that a merely political solution would be inadequate so long as economic issues went unaddressed.”123 Arendt misunderstood the nature of the American issue, Bernasconi writes: “she provided an account of political community that lacked the resources necessary to address the divisions sustained.”124 He points to the flaws in her understanding of the American founding where she claimed that the revolution addressed “all men qua men.” The slaves were not considered men, Bernasconi points out, and “they had no right to enter the public realm.”125 Here, as in contemporary America, he argues, Arendt ignored the social and economic cost of upholding or constituting the political sphere to those who were excluded.126 Anne Norton, similarly, writes of how “the categories of ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’ enable Arendt to deflect critiques of an unjust racial order and the practices that preserve it.”127 The idea of “the social” moves the issue of desegregation into the realm of the private, Norton explains, depoliticizing it and making it a question of “private virtue.”128 Norton also takes aim at the category of “nature” that is so impor tant to how Arendt conceptualizes the social. Her failures, Norton concedes, are symptomatic of her time, to some extent. For Arendt, race is “natural,” and the body (and its race) did tend to be regarded as “prior to politics” or natural, writes Norton. Yet, she argues, the “dissemination of Freud, the work of Foucault and Althusser, feminism and race theory have made it easier for us to recognize that we inhabit bodies whose meaning is constituted long before we enter them, before, indeed, those particular bodies exist in the flesh . . . these inscriptions are the work of politics, not of nature.”129 Certainly, the ideas of these thinkers and schools of thought offer potent criticisms of Arendt’s approach to race. There are also issues in her portrayal of black history in the United States. For example, she strongly underplays the importance of the black civil rights movement in the wider protest movement of the 1960s, as Richard King

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explains. “An interview in 1972 saw her pay tribute to the pioneering role that the Civil Rights Movement played in initiating the events that led to the New Left in a broad sense,” he states. “At the same time, however, she seriously garbled the history of the Civil Rights movement.”130 She highlighted, King notes, citing Arendt, the centrality of “students from Harvard, who then attracted students from other famous universities. They went to the South, organized brilliantly.”131 Yet, he notes, “there was no mention of the students in historically black colleges in the South who had actually been responsible for the sit-ins and voter registration drives that constituted the backbone of the Southern movement.”132 Similarly, much of the blame for the transformation of protest culture in America to a more militantly violent one was laid at the doorstep of black communities. “Serious violence entered the scene only with the appearance of the Black Power movement on the campuses,” Arendt writes, “Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic qualification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, the representatives of the black community. . . . It was clear from the beginning . . . that violence with them was not a matter of theory and rhetoric.” In addition, she adds, “there stands a large minority of the Negro community behind the verbal or actual violence of the black students.”133 Kathryn Gines makes a forceful argument against Arendt on the issue of race. “It is clear that Arendt’s account of Black student protests, violence, and the Black Power movement misses the mark when it comes to the negro question, and it is part of a pattern in Arendt of underanalyzing anti-Black racism coupled with a biased critique of violence,” writes Gines.134 Arendt dismisses African histories, literature, and languages as unimportant, Gines goes on, and characterizes black students in American universities as both violent and not academically qualified to attend, denying them capacity for political action. “She presents Blacks as trapped in a dream world of escapism and suffering from irrational rage, while describing a ‘potentially’ violent backlash from the white community as perfectly rational,” Gines argues. “Arendt is far less condemning of the oppressors’ offensive violence than she is of the defensive violence of the oppressed.”135 Gines identifies several problems in Arendt’s treatment of black Americans. “She sees the Negro question as a Negro question rather than a white problem,” she notes. “Arendt’s analysis of the Jewish question has implications for her analysis of the Negro question, but Arendt does not readily connect the two.” Furthermore, Gines contends, “Arendt’s commitment to rigidly distinguishing what is properly political from the private and the social influences her analysis of the Negro

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question in a way that undermines her understanding of and judgments about it.” Specifically, she writes, “Arendt’s delineation of the Negro question as a social issue prevents her from recognizing that anti-Black racism (like Jew hatred) is a political phenomenon.”136 Michael Burroughs, writing on these problems in Arendt’s work, argues that her “ignorance of (or, again, indifference to) these elements of political events is due, in part, to white ignorance, a systematic epistemic error running throughout her work in the form of discriminatory ‘patterns of perceptual attentiveness’ and ‘belief-influencing premises’ that produce a false account of reality.”137 Providing the key impetus for most of these critiques is Arendt’s notorious 1959 article “Reflections on Little Rock.” This piece was so controversial, even when it was written, that it was very nearly rejected for publication, only fi nally appearing with an editorial note disclaiming the contents of the paper. It was prompted by the events that took place in 1957 in Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, when the National Guard was brought in to protect nine black students attending a previously all-white school, against the desires of the state authorities. In the essay, Arendt opposes the forced desegregation of American public schools on the basis that the schooling of children is rightfully a private concern, properly a decision of each child’s parents. In forcing parents to send their children to racially mixed schools, both would come to feel irritated and antagonized, Arendt writes, and “feel that they are deprived of some essential rights.”138 Arendt believes that these concerns are quite legitimate. “To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and so should not be exposed to them.”139 Because, she writes, “segregation is discrimination enforced by law, and desegregation can do no more than abolish the laws enforcing discrimination; it cannot abolish discrimination and enforce equality upon society, but it can, and indeed must, enforce equality within the body politic.”140 In the effort to desegregate schools by force, public and private have once again been confused. Arendt’s remarks here on the forced desegregation of southern schools, the illegitimacy of the federal state’s involvement, and her claims about the likely consequences of such action illustrate her concerns about the American civil rights movement more generally. These different spheres are portrayed

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as possessing essentially different principles of action, the principle of politics being equality while that of society is discrimination. When Arendt talks about society here, she is clearly discussing the social: “that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private, in which, since the beginning of the modern age, most men have spent the greater part of their lives.”141 But the social she is discussing is not one which wholly dominates human society in the way it does in totalitarian regimes. Politics, too, clearly plays an important role here in a more traditional (and constitutional) sense as an enforcer of equality, liberty, and so forth. The social is depicted as a sphere of privatized group identity, equivalent in essence to the class society that existed in Germany and Europe before and in the early twentieth century, before some states became totalitarian and thereby realized the absolute isolation of the individual. That is, it is a mode of group identity that is not based on political principles or a concern with the public sphere but emerges because of differences in wealth, class, or some other fixed interest. While the social has a tendency to dangerously consume other spheres of life, discrimination acts as a barrier to the universalizing nature of the social. Discrimination counters the conformism that the social tends toward, and social conformism in America, Arendt writes, “ because of the extraordinary heterogeneity of its population . . . tends to become an absolute and a substitute for national homogeneity.”142 This leads potentially to the ‘mass’ and certainly to the infringement of society on the rightful space of the political. “The question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and public sphere, where it is destructive.”143 The “hybrid realm” Arendt describes here is not fundamental to the human condition in the way labor, work, and action are, but it is explained as something that has become an unavoidable part of modern life—that we identify ourselves not simply as individuals or as members of a public, equal community, but also as members of different groups in society. Yet the factors influencing the development of this realm remain the same—the merging in public understanding of the private and the public—and thus the dominant nature of the private or of labor tends to overwhelm the much more fragile activities of action and power. Modern society is inherently unstable and prone to the deepening of the social principle, which leads to the isolation of the individual, the emergence of the masses, and the breakdown of politics itself. Arendt’s position unsurprisingly provoked fierce criticism from a wide audience, and unusually for her, she later partially retracted some of her

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claims, claiming she had not understood the complexities of the situation and the “ideal of sacrifice” in the decisions by the parents of the nine schoolchildren to send them into such circumstances.144 She revised her understanding of the parents’ actions from criticizing them for forcing children into an adult world of violence and anger, to seeing them as simply exposing their children to the inevitable realities of the life they would face as black citizens of southern states. Yet the principles of Arendt’s argument regarding the role of the political remained the same, and the broader criticism applied to the civil rights movement—the forced equalization of peoples in society, or the illegality of discrimination in the social sphere—remained central to her critique of that movement in general. Certainly, Arendt displays what is now, by any reasonable standard, an unacceptable cultural bias of Eurocentrism; furthermore, she often seems to exhibit a remarkable lack of concern for the problem of racial discrimination in America. That is not to say, however, that Arendt never attempts to answer such questions, and while Gines claims that Arendt believed America’s race problem to be quite separate from the (more impor tant) question of constitutional politics itself, this is not quite accurate. When Arendt cites Thomas Jefferson, who “shed tears” on the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution, this was not, Arendt argues, because of his empathy for the black slaves themselves but from fear for the future of a constitution into which had immediately been introduced its own contradiction. The Constitution was founded on a principle of equality, she writes, and slavery was the deepest contradiction that might be imagined, storing up political instability for the future and influencing—and threatening—American politics into her own day. There was in fact nothing quite as impor tant to the likelihood of the future success of the US Constitution as the resolution of this contradiction. On the other hand, it is true that the form Arendt’s political theory takes does seem to structurally exclude questions of race (as well as class and gender). This equates to a kind of race blindness in her idea of politics. As many have pointed out, by separating the social and the political, Arendt downplays the importance of divisions that originate outside the political but profoundly influence the political world, including the social divisions that influence the position of black Americans in American political life. Her politics relates to the formal equality that emerges within politics. Thus, Arendt often appears to be overly idealistic about how race should be separated from politics, without engaging with necessary questions of how or to what extent this can or should be the case in contemporary political practice. Arendt’s

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position is that a space for politics must be created and protected first and foremost, and that only by doing this can we hope to limit the problems of the social. The political space cannot be constructed on the basis of social identity, interests, or issues because these reinforce natural divisions and hierarchies and because, as we have seen, such activities when made “political” tend toward violence. This does not necessarily mean that the political must ignore social realities such as race inequality or oppression. However, in a world where politics is widely misunderstood as identical with the social, to further prioritize social issues will fail to have a beneficial political effect. Undertaking politics based on natural distinctions only exacerbates the problems of the social and the failures of politics in the modern world. But while Arendt’s political theory is often blind to racial issues, in important respects it is not blind to racism as such. And the prominence of racism in political ideology was what so repelled her about the work of James Forman. Forman’s racism toward white Americans bore the same problems as any other form of racism, she wrote. Racism places interests—fixed and unchangeable—above opinions, mutable and open to discussion. Race thinking of any kind is intrinsically unequal and moreover prevents the creation of truly political (artificial) equality, Arendt believes, because it is closed, a politics of necessity and of self-interest, rather than public, broad-reaching, and open to change. The color of one’s skin is fixed (“natural”), so defining politics according to this criterion results in a politics in which differences, definitively, cannot be overcome. It therefore invariably tends toward violence, something Arendt believes can be seen in the rise of the Black Power movement. And while race itself is a socially constructed quality, it is the social construction of race outside the political sphere, as a form of discrimination, that precisely cannot be permitted to permeate and disrupt the space of equal politics. James Bohman writes that “it points to the very high moral price that Arendt is willing to pay for plurality.”145 For many critics of Arendt, that price is too high. Yet for Arendt, the protection of the political sphere of plurality must trump all other interests, because without a genuinely political community, there can be no other guarantor of rights—including the right to racial equality and the right to protest against oppression. Yet, Bohman continues, “Arendt’s narrow version of political equality [in “Little Rock”] ignored the fact that segregation also produced a situation in which African Americans could not initiate political action and deliberation, except in the form of social disobedience.”146 This was a criticism that Arendt never adequately

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answered, either in relation to the problem of racism in contemporary America, or the problem of elitism or discrimination more broadly. However, focusing on violence in Arendt’s narrative of the black civil rights movement reveals greater nuance in her thinking about African American politics than the politics/society distinction suggests. Most commentators on the Little Rock piece primarily emphasize that Arendt considers schools to be within the realm of the social, and therefore that they should not be considered to be justifiably political spaces. They highlight that, as it stands, the political or public in America structurally excludes African Americans from full and equal participation. Arendt is criticized for not understanding the already political function of the segregated school (or other social sites of discrimination) as a buttress of the inequality that exists in American politics between black and white citizens—and the right of African American parents to therefore take the battle for political equality to the school gates. Arendt, as King has highlighted elsewhere, based her judgment in “Reflections” on the claims she discusses in an earlier essay, “The Crisis in Education.”147 Education is considered to be a private matter because it relates to the right of the parent to educate the child; schooling cannot be political, except in the most limited aspect, because it relates to a hierarchical relationship between parents or teachers in authority and the children they teach. The family, the “natural” grouping, always belongs to the private sphere rather than the political. It is the right of the family to choose where and how they educate their children, a right that the public sphere should not invade, she believes. In modernity, this private right becomes a social right to discriminate between schools and who one chooses to associate with inside the “private” space of the school. In Little Rock, Arendt believed that the violence of the mob that threatened and tried to attack the black schoolchildren who tried to attend the school indicated the necessity of maintaining some right to social discrimination—because if that was taken away, they would resort to violence, rather than to politics, to defend their natural “rights.” The principles of the social in modernity are played out here—the problematic conjunction or mixing of private and public, the ingress of “natural” relationships or modes of action into political action, the tendency to violence that emerges—arguably to absurdity. If one suspends disbelief, however, Little Rock and the violence that broke out there might be seen to support Arendt’s reading of the problematic way in which the collapse of the social into the political tends to result in violence. If we look at her writings on civil disobedience, it is also evident, in the way she opposes King’s nonviolent stance, that violence might be justified in

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the fight for black civil rights just as it can be in other political movements. The problem that Arendt highlights, with the black activists who advocated violence, was not therefore simply their use of violence but the way in which they carried out and sought to justify violent political acts. Nationalism, the argument for a sovereign black nation—these are features of a “social” politics that Arendt spent her career inveighing against. The violence that emerged from the right to such a politics was a violence of the social. It was not, she believed, a politics of legitimate power as she understood that term. It still remains the case that race, as such, is a problematic category for Arendt because she positions it within the sphere of natural difference—a claim that can certainly be overcome but that is comprehensible by the standards of her period. And other problematic racist undertones or emphases remain in her work, as already highlighted. But exploring the question of race in America in Arendt’s work from the perspective of understanding the place of violence in politics does allow us to explore the nuances that exist in her thought, even while we also identify lacunas in her thinking on race relations in the United States.

Violence in the Republic The United States that Arendt lived in and wrote about was self-evidently a sovereign state. Its citizens and political leaders held many of the same misconceptions about politics that Arendt sought to reject; its policy and institutions were accordingly flawed, sometimes greatly so. The principles of sovereignty, which had developed in Europe and enveloped the world, had permeated American political culture. It was not simply that the state possessed a monopoly on legitimate violence but, more worryingly, that the people neither knew nor cared what power was, that power had been superseded by propaganda or image making in political policy, and that when these tactics failed, violence was considered to be the inevitable political solution. Of course, that does not mean that power was wholly absent. The principle of consent on which America had been founded was still present in its people, its institutions, and its laws—to some extent, and to a far greater extent than in any other nation in the world, Arendt believed. The problem was that power wasn’t understood; people didn’t know how to act politically or how to recognize the power that they possessed. Her worries about modern America can be summarized in these terms: she was not (primarily) concerned about what violent action might mean for politics as much as what an absence of powerful

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action might mean for politics, because it was the latter aspect that would result in violence, chaos, and perhaps even the breakdown of the republic. So, in Arendt’s criticism of US foreign policy (the Vietnam War, the threat of nuclear war) and domestic politics (the various protest movements of the 1960s, and the actions of successive administrations on numerous counts), a critique of sovereign politics appears in the same terms she used to critique European politics. US policy in Vietnam bears the hallmarks of what she elsewhere identifies as process-thinking. It is excessively rational—that is, the preference for abstract rationalizations about how the enemy would respond led to a refusal to accept facts on the ground—and is therefore ideological rather than political. US policy in Vietnam is expansionary, not in terms of direct conquest but in the sense that the United States sought to press the global dominance of its preferred political system of democratic, capitalist liberalism through any and all means possible. And of course, the Vietnam War and America’s actions in the war showed that the government or policy makers involved believed (wrongly) that violence could solve anything. We can see some of these problems echoed in Arendt’s critique of the protest movement: that the student protesters didn’t understand power, that they didn’t recognize it; we see it in her rejection of the violence of the Black Power movement, which believed, she thought, that violence could reshape the entire world. Her criticism of the Black Power movement also shows us the other side of sovereign ideology: the belief that violence from below, which stems from the rage of the disaffected and excluded, could reshape and remake a better politics. Without power, politics—whether governed by the tyranny and rage of the people, or the despotism and iron grip of the machinery of the state—would be illegitimate and eventually fail. However, we can also see that a certain degree of violence—the coercive power of the state in war and as executor of justice internally—is pragmatically necessary even in her ideal state, and even when power is present. Most interestingly, when we look at her idea of civil disobedience—the clearest example of her call for greater participation through what is usually considered a nonviolent strategy—she is clearly distinct from followers of nonviolence and identifies modern violence in activities of civil disobedience as well. The distinguishing factor is not violence alone but the form of violence, and specifically the social or anti-political forms of violence that are so characteristic of modernity.

CHAPTER 7

A Space for the Political

There is one question that Arendt continuously wrestles with throughout her work and which appears in some way in all of her writings: How can we understand and enact a space for politics? Her phenomenological approach means that this attempt to delineate a space for politics is not merely conceptual but that she is concerned with how real physical spaces of action are constituted in the concrete and nonideal spaces that make up our political world. This is why, if we are to understand Arendt’s work in all its complexity, it is important to consider, in addition to her pronouncements on the nature of politics in its essence, how she depicts and describes the workings of politics in the contemporary world or in historical examples. Yet not all that we would label politics is recognized as such by Arendt. The question of what constitutes a space of politics or for politics is for her a question of how politics can be assessed as being legitimate or not. Legitimacy is a measure of the political; that which is not legitimate is nonpolitical, although it may be justified in political terms. We need a framework of understanding about what constitutes the political and therefore what constitutes political legitimacy, but we can only understand that through how political communities and political actors in the nonideal world have enacted and maintained political spaces. How then can we grasp the complex, shifting, dynamic reality of such spaces of politics? What is inside and what is outside, not just in ideal terms, but in practice? Arendt’s work attempts to answer the question of what constitutes the boundaries of the political. She also attempts to understand how we might, by identifying what constitutes the political, also identify and protect against that which endangers the space of the political or threatens to fracture its protective and constitutive boundary, and what might by contrast reinforce or support the political space. How, in short, can we identify the

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political and that which threatens it, in order to construct, maintain, or defend the space of politics? The nature of politics, Arendt knew, means that there can be no single or simple answer to this. Instead, her work shows us the tensions that permanently exist both within the political sphere and between the political and the nonpolitical spheres of life. These tensions are inherent to politics, and indeed, the nature of politics means that it is constantly in flux. But while there is no answer, there are answers, in the plural, to how we can negotiate these tensions, there are features of her work that help us to understand the dangers for politics and what can defend the political. The theme in her work that straddles the border of politics and the nonpolitical, of political threat and political defense, is that of violence. Through understanding how Arendt treats violence in all its complexity, we can come to a wide-ranging understanding of what she believes politics to be. Without serious reflection on violence, any understanding of Arendtian politics is prone to misrepresentation. These tensions strike at the heart of Arendt’s understanding of politics. We can see, for example, how Arendt’s political writings are continually moving between an insistence on the importance of keeping politics open and free in the fullest possible sense, as a space of natality and spontaneity, and an understanding that politics must in some way be closed off in order to provide stability and order, in order to create a space within which the fragile freedoms of political action can be protected against the forces of necessity and the conflicting desires of individuals. Spaces of action can and do spring up spontaneously, yet they will not persist into the future, Arendt is very clear, without definite and ordered attempts to constitute a permanent home for action. Another tension that is integral to Arendtian politics splits her central idea of “action” itself: her notion of political action, or public action, appears at times as essentially conflicted or agonic, while at other times she portrays the truly political form of action as power, or consensus in acting together. Related to both of these aspects is the question of whether politics could, or should, be considered in wholly nonteleological terms, or whether the ends— such as a stable polity and the creation and maintenance of the constitution— are considered political themselves. Arendtian politics certainly cannot be understood in terms of ends alone, but neither are the ends of politics wholly excluded from political action, at least to the extent that political forms must seek to plausibly perpetuate themselves or protect their existence into the future, especially against the threats imposed by certain forms of anti-politics.

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Her approach to politics itself shifts over time and between works, even within texts. Arendt is a vehement critic of modern politics, which has encompassed or enabled the rise of totalitarianism, the social sphere, and the rise of a political understanding that rests fundamentally upon violence. At the same time, she is concerned to work out viable political answers to these problems of modern politics and to determine how best to construct ideas of the political and political forms that can realize and protect freedom into the future. Here she is not just seeking a return to the polis, as some have asserted, but defining solutions for our own age: in terms of suitable constitutional arrangements and legal practices as well as how we might better understand the phenomenal realities of freedom and plurality today. Violence is essentially related to all of these tensions. Violence can undermine the space of the political, even cause its collapse, yet coercion, on some level, is necessary to protect the space of the political against internal and external threats. While the conflict within politics, either between agonal actors or between the power of a group and the action of an individual, is often understood in rhetorical terms as a conflict of ideas, we can also understand this conflict as riven with (potential) violence, because power can act in violent ways either against the political space or for it. The agon continually threatens to disturb consensus, but at the same time, power requires action to enliven it and imbue it with the legitimacy of free action. The question of whether politics is teleological or nonteleological is simply the paradox of means versus ends: must we think solely in terms of political practice or also in terms of what that practice needs to bring about, and therefore justify some element of violence for a legitimate end? And Arendt’s critique of modern politics, while undoubtedly a rejection of violence, also calls for the reconstituting of politics, through violence if necessary. “One of the most persistent themes of her thinking about action,” Margaret Canovan writes, “a theme that echoes in many variations throughout her work, is the question of how far action and violence can be detached from one another.”1 This is in part a response by Arendt, Canovan indicates, to the problematic Marxist notion of “making history, of taking one’s future in one’s hands and shaping it, [which] always entails violence.”2 What Canovan highlights here is that for Arendt, the modern world is where the confusion between the boundaries of the human condition occur, along with the subsequent devaluation of the political, and it is to her analysis of modernity that we must turn if we are to understand the nature of the problem and how Arendt believes we might solve it. Understanding Arendt’s treatment of violence and its role in politics

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can help us to negotiate the tension intrinsic to politics and how we might better make sense of and even utilize her idea of the political.

Interpretations of Arendtian Politics: The Agon, Action, and Power The previous chapter explored how violence shaped Arendt’s perspective on the politics of her own world and time. This chapter develops what my reading of power and violence in Arendtian politics means for political theory today by engaging with the work of some key contemporary political theorists who have been influenced by Arendt’s ideas: Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, and Seyla Benhabib. It draws out the wider implications of the approach to political violence suggested here with respect to impor tant themes dealt with by these authors, such as social justice, institutions of democratic conflict, and human rights. Again, I emphasize that the question of violence in politics must be seen as a way to come to an understanding of what politics is for Arendt, and that it has wider potential consequences for how we think about the nature of the political. It helps to engage critically with Arendtian-inspired theory—of which there is a great deal—and to develop such theory in new directions. This chapter is intended to highlight some implications of the interpretation of power and violence offered in the previous chapters. There is no question, however, that it exhausts these implications. The intention is simply to show how violence, and the reading of violence I have presented as a fair view of Arendt’s thinking, might shift our understanding of Arendtian politics in important ways. Contemporary interpretations of Arendt’s idea of the political have been dominated by analysis of the conflicts that go on inside the political space, and in particular, two key modes of conflict that seem to exist within this space and on which much analysis hinges. First, there is an inherent and positive conflict that exists in the political in the shape of agonism, the struggle between free actors that can only take place in its purest form, that is, entirely freed from necessity, in the political sphere. This is the space of politics as “agon,” its action conceptualized primarily as rhetorical struggle, a process whereby the actor, through free action and agonistic interaction, influences and is influenced by others. The agon is a space where the individual can appear and be recognized in their distinctiveness, a space where actions acquire meaning because they are public, rather than silent and private; it is a space of performance.

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The second key tension in the political is between this agonistic character of the political and the discursive, consensus-based qualities of political action, where the political is imagined as a space of consensus building and power rather than conflict. This is Arendtian politics in the guise of “acting in concert” rather than in terms of constitutive or agonic conflict; and as many have noted, these two ideas of politics seem to be at odds with one another. Accordingly, most of those who have written on Arendt tend to prefer one above the other to get out of this bind, prioritizing one as more essentially political than the other. Yet both are integral to her understanding of politics, and this challenges the integrity, or at least the sharpness of the definition of the divisions that Arendt sets up between the different forms of action in the vita activa, as writers such as Seyla Benhabib and John Sitton have already noted.3 Perhaps the most common claim among those who have written on such themes in Arendt is that the key, constitutive tension is essentially identified with the action of different individuals in their interactions with others, that is, in the agon itself. To simplify somewhat, this kind of claim is characterized by the identification of politics with “action” (in the pure sense), so that the sphere of action is thus a space structured by agonistic speech relations, the space itself shaped through a process of disputes and antagonism between a plurality of individuals acting into this space. It is premised on a Hellenistic view of Arendt’s work in which the heroic and often extraordinary actions of those who take part in politics form a true polity. Agon is an originally Greek term which describes a contest or a struggle. Initially used to refer to athletic or sporting contests of skill and strength, it also became a way to describe the rhetorical contests that were part of the democratic process. This was not just a synonym for sparring, as Debra Hawhee explains: “for outcome-driven competition, the Greeks used the term athlios, from the verb athleuin, meaning to contend for a prize. . . . The agon, by contrast, is not necessarily as focused on the outcome as it is on athlios. . . . Rather, the root meaning of agon is ‘gathering’ or ‘assembly.’ . . . Agon emphasizes the event of the gathering itself—the encounter rather than the division between the opposing sides.”4 Agon thus describes a space in which a par ticular type of encounter takes place, whereby engaged parties, while in conflict, also meet as equals, and where the encounter itself, rather than the outcome, holds value. Yet there are outcomes to agonic action, and what is particularly relevant here is that this kind of action provokes a response and subsequent change from both (or all) of the parties involved in the

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interaction—it is truly an inter-action, rather than a process whereby one party acts upon another. In Arendt’s terms, drawing on this initially Greek idea and term, politics as a space of agonism is a place where individuals can appear because it is a space where people compete against others to appear in their uniqueness and express their difference, and this appearance in fact constitutes the meaning of politics itself. Bhikhu Parekh argues that Arendt’s notion of politics, resting essentially on the agonism of the public sphere, is drawn overwhelmingly from her romanticized interpretation of Athenian politics. “She takes the Athenian political experience as the political experience par excellence,” he claims, “draws most of her examples from it and presents its structure as the structure of political experience itself.”5 The space of action is primarily a space of appearance, he writes, in which identities are realized through the process of political dispute. Politics emerges for Arendt, Parekh states, because men “are unique . . . and need public spaces of appearance.”6 Agonal action enables distinct identities; this is the primary function of politics. Furthermore, Parekh writes, this means that Arendtian politics is basically aesthetic rather than practical, a point on which he is critical. “Arendt subsumes politics under beauty,” he claims. “For her, it is primarily concerned to make the world beautiful.”7 If this is the case, Arendtian politics does indeed seem to fail to engage with either the practical or ethical problems of politics. Like Parekh, George Kateb is deeply concerned with what he also considers to be Arendt’s excessively Greek notion of politics as agon. He reads the actions of the agon, however, primarily in existential rather than aesthetic terms: the action of the political sphere is how individuals may realize their fullest form of existence.8 That this is where human reality may be realized to the highest degree is what gives politics and action its status for Arendt, Kateb argues. Kateb’s critique focuses on the practical implications of such extreme agonism within actual political communities. “My fear is that judging is too frail a support for the hope of keeping an only slightly altered Greek conception of political action, while reducing the dangers of its countenancing immorality,” he writes.9 The only way to rescue Arendt’s political model, he argues, is by explicitly rejecting “Arendt’s claim that the innermost meaning of action is untouched by consequence.”10 Like Parekh, Kateb is concerned that this idea of politics is disengaged from much that we hold to be of importance in the political world. Other writers on Arendt emphasize the plural quality of the agonic political sphere rather than the realization of individual distinction or meaning.

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While it is commonly recognized that the two cannot be wholly disentangled, various interpretations do prioritize particular elements over others. Thus, Dana Villa writes of the essential plurality of the political and indeed, Arendt’s attempt to decenter the individual in political thought. “The peculiar freedom of action cannot be captured by philosophies of action that place autonomous agency at their center,” he writes. “Arendt decenters the subject in the political field in a manner parallel to Nietzsche’s decentering of the moral subject. The result is a theory of action in which virtuosity, agonism, and theatricality dominate the more Aristotelian model of deliberating citizens, which Habermas sees as the center of Arendt’s theory.”11 He characterizes her notion of action as the “non-teleological renewal of the Aristotelian idea of praxis,” arguing that Arendt adopted the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between speech and politics while also attributing to freedom a priority that is missing in Aristotle.12 Arendtian action is political debate, and this is “end-constitutive: its goal does not stand apart from the process, dominating it at every point, but is rather formed in the course of the ‘performance itself.’ ”13 The performance of action requires plurality in order to take place, and it is through these performances— comprising both difference and mutual recognition, agonism and the sharing of perspectives—that the political sphere emerges as an intersubjective world of reality: Arendt’s “enlarged mentality” of multiple perspectives. Like Parekh, Villa adopts an aesthetic reading of Arendt’s principle of action, claiming that this enables us to make sense of both the Greek claim to heroic action—“the shining glory of great deeds”—as well as the more pluralistic idea that positions dialogue and deliberation at the center of Arendt’s political.14 He asks: “If free action by definition transcends the categories of motives and goals, what possible meaning can it have apart from the aesthetic enjoyment, the feeling of power, which such self-conscious mastery, such display of one’s own virtuosity, produces? Where ‘the deed is every thing,’ it is abundantly clear that what matters is the style of action and not its origin or goal.”15 Villa succeeds, in his reading of her work, in bringing together two aspects of Arendt’s “action” that seem to be at odds. Agonism stresses conflict and difference above consensus even while, as Villa highlights, it incorporates performance—that is, plurality is required in order to show oneself to others. Yet Villa, too, is concerned with the nonteleological quality of Arendt’s action as political activity, and his aesthetic reading seems to leave us far from a vision of politics that most people would accept as adequately comprehensive.

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An alternative perspective prioritizes power as the political activity par excellence: a consensus-driven idea of political action as communication oriented toward agreement. Jürgen Habermas’s widely read but contentious interpretation of Arendt’s “communicative model of power,” discussed in Chapter 1, is one example. To recap, he argues that Arendt separates her notion of power from force, instead defining power as something that acts toward the forming of a common, agreed will. She measures “the strength of a consensus brought about in unconstrained communication . . . against the claim to a rational validity that is immanent in speech.”16 This, as many have noted, accords rather more closely with Habermas’s own theories of communicative consensus in asserting that a “rational” conclusion can be reached, or emerges, through communication between people in the political sphere. For Arendt, reaching reason is certainly not what occurs in the political space. One can attain freedom through action, or come to shared notions of meaning, but these are wholly context specific and disconnected from any par ticular idea of reason as such. Yet Habermas, too, expresses concern with the exclusion of consequence from Arendt’s idea of truly political action, claiming specifically that this excludes adequate consideration of either structural violence or strategic elements of political action that utilize force.17 Hanna Pitkin adopts a more pluralistic, power-oriented approach to understanding Arendt. For Arendt, she says, “my fellow citizens are less an audience before whom I try to present a memorable image of self, than fellow actors in collective self-determination, determining along with me not our image but who we shall be, for what we shall stand.”18 But she, too, argues that the absence of substantive content empties Arendt’s politics of any possible meaning. “Public life . . . never occurs in the abstract, without content,” she insists, “it always affects the lives of real people.”19 What can power do, she asks, “unless there are real interests at stake in them, unless the consequences of what we do there really matter to us, and unless we are very much aware of those interests and consequences?”20 As a result, Arendt’s political actors, she writes, look either like little boys, craving reassurance, or in a rather different image, like a community of tyrants, a handful of men excluding all others from this privileged sphere of action. For Pitkin it is the absence of a clear notion of justice that is the central problem of Arendt’s political framework. But the failure to assert what politics is about or even what it might be about is also highly problematic, she argues. “What is it that they talk about together,” Pitkin ponders, “in that endless palaver in the agora?”21

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This literature highlights two points: that there is a consistent critique of “political action” as something that is somehow separated from consequences, ends, or nondiscursive activity; and the idea of politics as something that is either fundamentally about, and given meaning by, its nature as either “action” in the agon and the appearance of the person that is realized in the space or, alternatively, the communicative consensus or collective self-determination of “power.” If we are to make sense of Arendt’s work as a whole, or to try and develop a coherent model from this, it is clear that the fundamental question is if and how we might reconcile the different conceptual and (in Arendt’s eyes) phenomenal boundaries that appear in her portrayal and analysis of the political. This has been recognized by some already. Benhabib writes that, for Arendt, while all politics involves an agonistic dimension, “agonal politics also entails an associative dimension based on the power of persuasion and consensus. In this sense, the sharp differentiation between the two models needs to be softened.”22 She argues that “what is important is not so much what public discourse is about as the way in which this discourse takes place: force and violence destroy the specificity of public discourse, by introducing the ‘dumb’ language of physical superiority and constraint and by silencing the voice of persuasion and conviction. Only power is generated by public discourse and is sustained by it. By the standpoint of this procedural model, neither the distinction between the social and the political nor the distinction between work, labor or action are that relevant.”23 John Sitton, in his discussion of Arendt’s council politics—a portrayal of real-world politics as it should be for Arendt—also explains that the space of action cannot be so clearly bounded. “Politics cannot be reduced to goals of political action,” he explains, “although the latter are not excluded from politics, as Arendt’s critics frequently charge.” Arendt, he asserts, “repeatedly allows for an instrumental dimension of political action, as shown . . . in the phrases ‘joint action and deliberation’ and politics as activities of ‘expressing, discussing, deciding.’ ”24 And Jeffrey  C. Isaac, in opposition to Villa’s aestheticization of Arendtian action, argues that she was not primarily concerned with “the tradition” or an “aestheticist struggle against Platonism” but rather “with thinking what we are doing—with coming to terms with the perplexing and shattering political experiences of the twentieth century, understanding their rootedness in long-standing ways of thinking and being, and reconstructing a political vision that might help secure human dignity and freedom in the aftermath of totalitarianism and world

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war.”25 Action is therefore “neither wholly discursive nor wholly performative, nor is it a synthesis of the two. It is consequential. It produces results.”26 Isaac argues, going further still than Sitton, and directly countering Benhabib’s claim that the procedure of politics must nevertheless always be nonviolent, that Arendt’s notion of action is in fact very far from essentially pacific political procedure. Political action “can employ nonviolence successfully, or it can provoke the violence of the police; it can advance the cause of civil rights, or it can fail to do so; it can produce an effective, persuasive movement or an authoritarian revolutionary sect. All depends on how it is done.”27 Isaac highlights that in some respects, we need to break down the boundaries between these different ideas of action and different spaces of the vita activa, an idea which is at the very heart of the project the present work is engaged in.

A Broader Understanding of the Political This work has argued that this challenge to the integrity of the boundaries within the political also applies to the boundaries between the public and private, the political and nonpolitical, action and work. This can be shown very clearly if we examine the role that the supposedly essentially conflicting notions of violence and power play in Arendt’s portrayal of real politics. These are forms of activity that can often be seen to work together in ways that Arendt identifies and accepts as legitimately political. This observation does not resolve the tensions of the political but does make the political more expansive than it has previously been understood to be for Arendt. The nature of action, while essentially nonteleological, does not preclude politics from being teleological in some ways, because the political is broader than just action—that is, work, too, can be a public activity, even if is not a purely or wholly political activity. The political, while essentially public, need not always meet the high criteria Arendt sets for public action, because elements of private action, through work, can interact with and play a part in the political, as long as this does not dominate political activity. What is essential is rather an overarching orientation toward the public interest, and toward publicity, within the political sphere—this is what legitimates political action. Thus, even elements of violence, although not all forms of violence, can be political. The models of action outlined above show a tension between interpretations focusing on agonal or heroic action—action as a means whereby individuals

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can appear to their fellow citizens and thus achieve the highest level of existential real ity through their very differentiation—and those focusing on consensus-driven, dialogical models of power, where the people act cooperatively, or “in concert.” Both power and action are evidently a part of what Arendt considers to be genuinely political action, and yet, this study has argued, political action is about more than this for Arendt. Both models are idealistic in their different ways, they valorize heroic action within the political sphere or a politics of consensus, but they do not deal with much of what we consider to be important in politics: both emphasize action within the political sphere and for itself, rather than political threats, influences, or problems that intrude upon such action from the outside. Indeed, these models seem to exclude even the possibility of engaging in legitimate politics that orients itself toward particular ends or objectives. What about, for example, not just external threats of violence but conflict and division within the political community? These things happen and cannot simply be ignored. And Arendt is criticized by many for this emphasis on political action as something that occurs only within a particular, radically limited space of action, and which cannot be end oriented. Yet Arendt’s work can be read differently, and while action as she sets it out in The Human Condition has these characteristics, politics is more than just action in this very specific and abstract sense, and can be seen to be teleological in some ways. The means to bridge the gap between action and labor is of course her third and underexamined category, work, which reveals the inadequacy of understanding the political as action alone. Work is essential to nonideal politics because it constitutes and reconstitutes the constantly changing boundaries of the particular political community; it provides the stabilizing force, the “world” in which people can actually act. Work is not wholly or intrinsically a public activity but it can be for the public. It can be (but need not be) violent, and if work-violence is for the public, then that violence too can be political, or at the very least, for Arendt it can be politically justified. Thus, work can entrench the existing constitution by enforcing its limits against threats; it can create new constitutions that become political because power emerges; it can also destroy or change existing constitutional arrangements if it needs to do so in order to create a new, positive political arrangement. If work is determined and carried out through power, it is unquestionably political. Looking beyond action and power to work, and framing these three parts and their relationships as constitutive elements of the political in any real-world sense, can resolve many of the problems identified in Arendt’s politics.

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Action generates freedom in that it is the realization of the human potential for natality as well as individuality, distinction, and thus plurality, perhaps the key structuring feature of Arendt’s understanding of politics. Yet action can be dangerous, too, and dangerous not just for the individual but to the body politic. Action by its nature is uncontrollable; natality is unpredictable. Power is the realization or the completion of freedom through the political body, and it thus attributes legitimacy to political action (a legitimacy that action itself can never obtain without power). With its essentially participatory character, it is the enactment of political equality and thus the other side of plurality. And yet, power can conflict; there is nothing about the engagement of people in politics that means they will or must agree, and indeed, without conflict, the continuous discourse and exchange of perspectives that creates the very web of meaning that people live within would not exist. Work relates to politics in a different way; it relates to the creation of the political world itself, and thus it enables and sustains both action and power. Work can be destructive or liberatory, but to be political or for the political it must also be constructive. It may be a public activity if it is for politics and not purely for the individual or against the political. Yet work cannot be a political activity in its own right: it requires power to drive it forward and endow it with legitimacy. Through the activities of work, politics can indeed be concerned with its ends or future good, whatever that is deemed to be, without undermining the roots of its legitimacy and meaningfulness in natality and plurality. Arendtian politics, that “endless palaver in the agora,” thus looks rather less self-indulgent and elitist once these barriers between politics as action and power and politics as an end-oriented activity are broken down. Politics is no longer simply self-serving, elitist, and irrelevant because the political sphere is constantly being reconstituted by this action, including action that can emerge from beyond or within the political sphere, by groups willing to fight for change and indeed even for entrance to the political sphere, a fight which can go beyond discussion and consensus building to acts of civil disobedience and even, ultimately, revolution and the violence that revolution entails. While this does not resolve the issues of economic injustice that are so often excluded from Arendtian politics by Arendt herself, it does offer at least an approach to understanding her work that is more encompassing than most interpretations allow. Furthermore, it can be said to be at the very least plausible and arguable, if not universally or even widely agreed, that guaranteeing and negotiating the rights of citizenship and the nature of the constitution take priority over questions of inequality in the social sphere and

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thus must be foremost in how we conceptualize the meaning and practice of politics. If private interests do inevitably conflict at some point, if political debate and activity premised primarily on interests and interest groups inevitably results in division and the impossibility of consensus, excluding those discussions from the political sphere is at least a reasoned approach, even if it does seem that we give up as impossible many questions of injustice that we consider enormously important. Instead of looking at politics in the ideal or the abstract world Arendt constructs, notably in The Human Condition, this study has looked at politics in practice insofar as we can see what that looks like through Arendt’s eyes. It asks, using the idea of the political that Arendt constructs, how we can therefore create or understand real spaces of politics, and how those spaces change over time in relation to the actions of their citizens and outsiders, but also how such spaces gain permanence. By looking through her eyes, we can see more clearly the dynamic tension that constitutes political communities: between initiation or action, doing or power, and the limits that constrain and thus also constitute our political worlds.

The Politics of the Agon This reading of Arendt offers a new perspective on her work but also enables us to think in different ways about contemporary political theories that have been influenced or inspired by her idea of the political. In particular, theories that use ideas of the agon—agonal democracy, agonistics, or agonic politics— which seek to understand and characterize politics in terms of productive conflicts, have been much influenced by Arendt. Indeed, Arendt’s work, together with Nietzsche’s, is a preeminent influence on this area of political thought. Reading Arendt’s notion of the political in a more expansive manner gives us a very different view of what the agon is or what shape it might take, and so enables us to reconstruct agonal politics in new ways. She offers us ways to think about politics spatially, and the view from within, in terms of conflict and power, appearance and recognition. These acts create distance between citizens, but they also form and shape the relationships that tie citizens together. She also clearly outlines what politics is not, and what can damage or break the fragile space of politics: the ideas that I have set out here as “process-thinking” and which lie at the heart of her critique of sovereignty. These are the hard edges of her idea of the political, the boundaries which

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politics must not transgress if we are to avoid the very worst fate of the most extreme violence and repression of freedom that politics can hold for us. However, she also suggests ways to think about questions that lie between the two extremes of the ideal politics and totalitarian anti-politics, which relate to the shifting boundaries of “the political” in the world. The Greeks, of course, possessed politics, but so did the Romans, although their politics took a very different form, and so did the early Americans, though their politics again looked very different from both the Greek and Roman models. Particular questions and concerns change, people and peoples change, and contexts and threats change; Arendt’s theorization of politics enables us to be sensitive to this, as she herself was. Even in the deeply flawed sovereign representative democracies of the modern era, and despite our confusion about the relationship between violence and politics and the process-thinking that shapes so much of modern understanding and political action, politics still persists in some respects. The political is not a state of either/or; it is not either present or absent. All people, possessing the possibility of being political creatures, live with and act out a constant tension between the political and other activities of human life. Looking at violence as being a legitimate part of this process, as this work has suggested, enables us to extend this framework of agonism to work-violence, while still maintaining a defined distinction between the political and labor-violence or the violence of the social. Both Arendt and Nietzsche draw on the image of the Greek agon in their political writings, the sparring for honor that took place in both athletic contests and rhetorical or political debates. What mattered about this contest was not the result but the activity in itself. Agonic action was thus not teleological, at least not primarily. Indeed, Arendt explains, the Greeks had a wholly different word for outcome-driven competition. The root of agon is gathering or assembly, and as such, the event of the encounter itself, rather than its outcome, is emphasized. Drawing on these ideas of the agon, in her work Arendt highlights the importance of action (rather than either will or indeed outcomes); she highlights the importance of the gathering that takes place within the agon; and she emphasizes the nature of the conflict that invariably takes place in the agon and is intrinsic to the agon. This conflict, however, is usually understood in terms of discursive conflict by those who have drawn on (and some of those who reject) Arendtian agonic theories of politics. Indeed, the Greek agon is quite different from the activities of war or violence that took place outside the polis.

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Agonistic understandings of politics thus stand in contrast to teleological ideas of politics: politics, as a primarily agonistic activity, is distinctive and valuable in and of itself and not for some other purpose or good. There is something about this contest, or rather, this gathering of sparring contestants, that realizes something valuable about human nature or human life. Usually, this is identified as either freedom or difference or both: agonic activity as the realization of the potential for freedom that lies in all individuals, and as the per formance or appearance of the distinctiveness of each individual actor in this contest, which shines out through the agonic contest. It prioritizes action above outcome, and this places it in distinction to most varieties of “realist” politics: the dilemma of weighing means and ends in politics is firmly resolved, one might say in favor of the means. More accurately, the traditionally understood means of politics are not even means without some telos to orient the very meaning of the word. The means/ends polarity dissolves in this image of politics as action; it is repositioned firmly outside the genuine political. Agonistic politics understands politics as a contest of words, a primarily discursive activity, but it is not the only branch of political theory that does so. Deliberative discourse theories such as Habermas defends emphasize the consensus that ultimately results from discursive conflict as the value of the activity. For Habermas and those who follow him, debate and the exchange of opinions in the public sphere enables participants to come to a final consensus on questions, which is furthermore a legitimate consensus because it is reached through processes of rational debate. Rationality produces legitimate choices and value for the group; it reveals the general interest of the group. It thus stands counter to agonism in two respects: it is a teleological account of political action (it derives its value from its end), and it is based on consensus rather than conflict. That is, the value of this kind of interaction is not the conflict itself but the consensus that finally, at least in the ideal situation, emerges from that conflict and indeed ends it. Agonism, in contrast, does not seek to validate politics through consensus but to highlight the intrinsic value of the conflict and the necessity of keeping a space for conflict open, or the inevitability of conflict for realizing some qualities of human nature or living together. Within agonistic theories of politics, there are multiple branches and purposes to which the agonistic element is turned, although these overlap heavily with one another. William Connolly, for example, offers an explicitly linguistic or discourse-oriented analysis of agonism which explores the

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way in which our language or the concepts we use are shaped dynamically, through an ongoing conflict or “games.”28 James Tully’s work also explores these processes of conceptual innovation, while seeking to understand how these operate within real-world political processes and discourses—a project of “public philosophy” in his terms.29 Theorists such as Mouffe, Honig, and Benhabib (while also emphasizing discourse) explore the ways in which agonism can be used to understand political action or particular elements of politics, often seeking to understand democracy through the lens of agonism. In the rest of this chapter, following my emphasis on the impossibility of understanding Arendt’s political theory without embedding it in real-world political possibilities and challenges, I will focus on what the reinterpretation of the Arendtian political suggested by the analysis of violence offered in this work can offer to theories of agonism, which seek to understand the reality of political action in the context of the nonideal political world. This chapter will largely focus on the work of Mouffe, Benhabib, and Honig, whose ideas intersect with or support certain aspects of the claims made here about the positive, constitutive nature of conflict, division, and differences within politics, while seeking to show how this reading of Arendt’s view of politics can develop the political themes they work with.

Agonism in Political Theory: Bonnie Honig and a Politics of Difference “Most political theorists are hostile to the disruptions of politics,” Bonnie Honig writes. They “converge in the assumption that success lies in the elimination from a regime of dissonance, resistance, conflict, or struggle.”30 Against the likes of Michael Sandel, John Rawls, and Immanuel Kant, Honig looks instead to Nietzsche and Arendt, who provide “a perspective from which agonal conflict is celebrated.”31 The former assume that their favored institutions “fit” a peoples’ identity, while the latter accept that no such fit is possible, Honig writes: “every politics has its remainders.”32 Theorists like Nietzsche and Arendt recognize these “remainders,” she argues, and because of them, seek to “secure the perpetuity of political contest.”33 Arendt theorizes an endlessly ongoing politics that is never over and is disruptive and agonistic, Honig argues, “a democratic politics of augmentation that perpetually reauthors a regime’s constituting structures for the sake of the remainders that sedimentation (of identities and constitutions) would other wise

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engender.”34 By contrast, she argues, when we look to Rawls and Sandel, we find that they “other” aspects of political dissonance that do not fit their models, not only ignoring but in fact creating these remainders through the very structures they propose. Arendt “does not try to soothe the undecidable other’s disruptions of language, law, morality, and subjectivity because the other keeps the contest of identity and difference going.”35 She “affirms the reality of perpetual contest, even within an ordered setting.”36 Honig, however, is critical of Arendt in several respects. She sees herself as going beyond Arendt, for example, in arguing that regimes require support that comes from outside the political space, and we need not see these supports as pre- or apolitical, against Arendt’s belief that “foundings can and indeed ought to simply dispense with foundational anchors,” in Honig’s words.37 In a later work, however, Honig highlights the very aspect that this study has emphasized as being so impor tant for Arendt’s understanding of politics: the category of work. Arendt “can be read as a kind of object-relations theorist,” writes Honig, “given that she granted to object permanence the important capacity to stabilize a world fit for human inhabitation. The argument develops out of The Human Condition in which the Work section of the book—the relatively neglected part of the book that details, among other things, the functions and powers of things—is key. . . . Arendt emerges as a thinker keenly committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.”38 This thingness is surely, as this work has argued, a form of political anchor that at least becomes foundational after the act of founding. Honig takes issue, as well, with the extent to which Arendt “assigns unsettling practices, like politics, to a rather narrow set of sites and objects, insisting that politics stay there lest it disturb the reassuring identities and roles, the predictabilities, of everyday life.”39 If we chose, as many do, to highlight the nonnegotiability of the public-private division, Honig argues that Arendt could be considered akin, in some ways, to Rawls, Kant, and Sandel. Honig does not make such an interpretation but emphasizes the possibilities for doing so and its problematic nature. She examines the distinction between public and private in Arendt’s account of action, criticizing the status quo understanding of this account, and instead seeks to reinterpret her seemingly “rather constricted” view of politics in a way that is more open to questions of social justice. “Arendt insists that her public-private distinction is nonnegotiable, but its politicization and attenuation are called for by her own account of politics and action,” Honig writes. “Indeed, any reading of Arendt

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that takes seriously the agonistic, virtuosic, and performative impulses of her politics must, for the sake of that politics, resist the a priori determination of a public-private distinction that is beyond contestation and amendment.”40 Action, she continues, is boundless, so “why should it respect a public-private distinction that seeks, like a law of laws, to regulate and contain it without ever allowing itself to be engaged or contested by it?”41 Arendt’s private-public distinction is expressed through multiple binaries, Honig writes—power/violence, necessity/freedom, action/behavior—where each is “meant to secure that much more firmly the distinction that resists the ontologizing function Arendt assigns to it.”42 Honig explains that for Arendt, the drawing of distinctions is an extraordinary act with the power to create new realities. This explanation of what Arendt is doing accords well with the methodological claims made previously, in that Arendt is taking part in the activity of constituting political understanding through her actions: the claims for the reconceptualization of “ordinary” political terms she makes in her work. But Honig claims that “Arendt is caught in a cycle of anxious repetition. Binary distinctions are heaped, one on another, in a heroic effort to resist the erosion of a distinction that is tenuous enough to need all this.”43 As this book has argued, these divisions are indeed tenuous, although nonetheless important. And Arendt’s claims about politics and the social “tempt us to think that these distinctions are, above all else, drawn to protect the public from the private realm’s imperialism.”44 But it is equally important to Arendt, Honig argues, to protect the private sphere from the excesses of action and politics. Honig criticizes Arendt, as others have, for emptying the public realm of “almost all content” through her exclusion of private practices or concerns from the political sphere. Yet Honig argues that the self-defeating character of the distinction, and its ambiguity, are not reasons to give up the concept, but rather, a challenge. Honig asks, “What if we took Arendt’s own irresistibly lodged distinction to be a line drawn in the sand, an illicit constative, a constituting mark or text, calling out to be contested, augmented, and amended?” On this basis, she makes the argument that we ought not to understand the political space as simply an empty, stable space but to engage with politics in “private” spaces instead, using “action’s generative power to proliferate the sites and subject of politics, to include resistance to system. . . . It might find spaces of performativity and resistance in the rifts and fissures of private realm identities and institutions.”45 The analysis offered in this work suggests that Arendt’s argument is rather less problematic than Honig thinks. The relationship between power and

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violence in politics, exemplified by the various case studies from Arendt’s work in this book, shows that work, as both a form of activity and the objects of work, can be considered political. Arendt is not solely concerned with the intrinsic nature of a thing or an action but with the purpose or orientation of an action or object. The quasi-public, quasi-private nature of work draws the two spheres together; they overlap in the work space. There are limits to this: the expansionary, progress-oriented “social” cannot be considered political, nor can a purely self-interested and private act, but there is a world of inbetween. As Patchen Markell writes, “The Human Condition doesn’t celebrate a pure, rarefied, and frustratingly contentless domain of action; instead, it tries to reintegrate human activity understood instrumentally and human activity understood as meaningful performance, and it does this in part by denying what it is often taken to affirm—that work can adequately be grasped as the sovereign production of useful, physically durable objects.”46 Honig believes that the boundaries Arendt discusses, particularly that between the private and public sphere, are irrevocably fixed, and she critiques Arendt on this count. But the reading offered in this work shows the ambiguity of borders in Arendt’s work and the need to read the boundary setting that Arendt engages in within the proper historical context. Understanding acts of violence as potentially part of politics extends the political significantly in one direction, and because it reveals the political capacity that exists within work as Arendt defines it, it opens up the possibility for politics to be extended in other directions as well. It undermines the common criticism that Arendt’s political space is somehow without content. Honig asks how Arendt’s boundless concept of action can coexist with such boundaries as she (Honig) understands them. Yet boundaries can be understood in many different ways: they are just as importantly conceptualized as connections, as Arendt’s analysis of Roman lex highlights. They can be understood as not a limit to action but a protective barrier around the space action needs to operate, as Arendt’s understanding of Greek politics shows. Action may be boundless without being all-powerful; it still faces opposition. Constitutive violence can form internal connections between parts of the system or protect the external boundaries of the political in order to secure or perhaps extend it over time. As power/violence is the key binary in Arendt’s work, their opposition is just as important as their interdependence. Against the perceived fixity of Arendt’s political boundaries, Honig sees herself as “radicalizing” Arendt’s politics, augmenting her ideas by building on the transgressiveness and excessiveness of political action, “prizing and

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extending them, marshalling the democratizing force of their politicizations against the sedimentations of the public and the private realm.”47 (Arendt would indeed be skeptical about the possibilities of a radically democratizing project without an adequate constitutional delimiting of such a project.) Yet Honig also asserts that politics is about not just excess or extraordinary politics but the ordinary politics of the everyday, the administrative politics of Rawlsian philosophy. We need to accept both of these features of politics, she urges, and it is problematic to depoliticize either, as she argues Rawls does by accounting for difference through “external agitation” and Arendt does by assimilating administration to “nature.”48 Instead, Honig asserts the importance of the “dilemma,” the reality that there are choices that have no clear answers or solutions, remainders that will always exist, and the eternal presence of difference. “The social dimensions of the self’s formation as a citizen-subject require and generate an openness to its continual renegotiation of its boundaries and affiliations in relation to a variety of (often incommensurable) groups, networks, discourses, and ideologies, both within its ‘home’ state and abroad,” she writes. And it is social democracies, she argues, “committed to the perpetuity of political contest and to the generation of new (domestic as well as international or extrastatist) social movements in addition to the more rather than less egalitarian distribution of scarce resources” that offer the greatest promise for an agonal politics of the kind she outlines.49 Social democracies enable “decentered subjects” to engage in the renegotiations of the public sphere, in turn “energiz[ing] their social democracies, while pressing upon them claims of justice, fairness, fidelity and ethicality on behalf of those differences to which social democratic regimes tend to become deaf in their eagerness to administer to represented identities that are established, secure, and familiar.”50 Honig’s agonal politics is an interplay of social and psychological facets, political but also, as she writes, “a practice of ethics.”51 It takes place within a specifically (social) democratic arena, where difference “posits alternative, and perhaps broader sites of potential empowerment.”52 Against certainty, “another conception of subjectivity emerges, a coalitional (and psychoanalytical) conception in which the fragments, differences, and identities that constitute subjectivity do not simply coexist within a single if plural self but actually cross-cut and inhabit each other, cooperating with and waging war against each other in a perpetual motion of mutuality, engagement, struggle, and debt.”53 But of course, Honig and Arendt are writing in different contexts, and with different presuppositions. Honig is clearly not as concerned as Arendt

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with a supposed breakdown of politics and the ensuing emphasis on establishing a space for politics. Rather, Honig’s priority is to open up politics in order to oppose entrenched inequalities and injustice. The distinctions that Arendt makes between different spheres of activity and whether they are part of a properly political realm is based on her critique of the way impor tant distinctions have largely been lost in modernity. It does not necessarily mean that the different aspects of the world are always and absolutely separate from one another. For example, Honig criticizes Arendt’s approach and offers her own understanding of the political agon by highlighting that individuals are members of multiple groups in society, and that this must be recognized in any polity. But the reading of Arendtian politics that has been offered here, sharpened by looking at it through the question of violence, reveals that Arendt has no issue with the existence of multiple political movements which we might recognize (although incorrectly, for Arendt) as social movements. Her work on civil disobedience exemplifies the legitimacy of the activities of multiple nonstate groups in ways that might even encompass some violent actions in order to bring about political ends. Arendt simply asserts that the actions of these groups, violent or peaceful, should be for political ends, not based on exclusively private interests or in the pursuit of private ends. Hence her critique of the Black Power or black separatist movements in America, in contrast to her defense of civil disobedience in a wide array of forms. Politics is not as strictly delimited in Arendt as Honig believes and is much more open to what we would recognize as social movements—although “the social” itself remains at odds with, and a threat to, the political.

Agonism in Political Theory: Chantal Mouffe and a Politics of Antagonism In Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, which draws together themes from her work, Chantal Mouffe engages in a project of redefining the political in terms of antagonism combined with an Arendtian inspired notion of agonism. Drawing on both Arendt and Carl Schmitt for her concept of a distinct and separate political sphere, she writes that “to think politically recognizes the ontological dimension of radical negativity.”54 She therefore, unlike Honig, accepts the stratification of politics from other forms of activity and its prioritization over other forms of activity, while at the same time identifying conflict—as opposition or “radical negativity”—as intrinsic to

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politics in some sense. In addition, she writes, “society is permeated by contingency and any order is of an hegemonic nature, i.e. it is always the expression of power relations.”55 Thus the Arendtian idea of power and the connections of power which form a political society are adopted to construct Mouffe’s own idea of the internal structure of the political sphere. “Every order,” she writes, “is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices.”56 She draws substantially on Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction in her thought, that is, the ever-present reality of (the possibility of) existential hostility in human relations. Every human relationship is always a we/them, she writes, and our politics and societies are not essentially composed by anything but the relationships we have. Every we/them possibility holds the potential of turning into a friend/enemy distinction, she argues, and consequently, “the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.”57 Within this, she claims, “ ‘passions’ are the driving force in the political field.”58 While this appears to be a distinctly more emotive concept than Arendt’s “action,” it is in fact not too far from action as that appears as “public happiness” in On Revolution, particularly since Mouffe is careful to distinguish the political sphere from the ethical. Both authors appeal to some instinctive drive to engage in politics. And just as action, for Arendt, is both of the essence of politics and also destabilizing, so do the passions appear in Mouffe’s theorization of the political. She is critical of Arendt’s notion of politics, claiming that it is a politics of “agonism without antagonism” and that Arendt ends up “envisaging the public space as a space where consensus can be reached.”59 Yet it is not Arendt (still a key influence on Mouffe’s work) who is the preeminent target of Mouffe’s criticism, but rather the “political liberals”: most frequently Rawls, but also Habermas, Sandel, Michael Walzer, and those contemporary theorists influenced by these thinkers who place liberal individualism at the heart of their philosophies of politics. She takes aim at the “incapacity of liberal thought to grasp [the political’s] nature” and argues that it is the “the irreducible character of antagonism that explains the impotence of most political theorists.”60 The individualist, universalist, rationalist ideals of the political liberals are illusory, she argues. Consensus in politics, or the possibility of reliably finding a universal consensus, is an illusion. Moreover, when we drive antagonism from our political practices, the void is filled

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with other struggles, she argues, such as that over identity, for example. Thus, she writes, “democracy is in peril not only when there is insufficient consensus and allegiance to the values it embodies, but also when its agonistic dynamic is hindered by an apparent excess of consensus, which masks a disquieting apathy. It is also endangered by the growing marginalization of entire groups whose status as an ‘underclass’ practically puts them outside the political community.”61 Political liberalism is not only wrong, it is actively dangerous, because it fails to engage with the reality of conflict. “The evasion of the political could . . . jeopardize the hard-won conquests of the democratic revolution,” she writes. With the demise of Marxism, we must face the fact that the resolution of antagonism is impossible.62 However, Mouffe calls for not a full-fledged rejection of liberalism but rather a rethinking of what liberal democracy can be when reimagined in radical ways which incorporate an acceptance of antagonism. At the time she wrote her work on liberalism and democracy, in 1993, the Western world was reshaping its self-understanding after the collapse of the Soviet Union. How, she asks, can pluralistic democracy be understood without its other? First of all, a plausible and legitimate liberalism must accept antagonisms. They cannot be eliminated; thus it is by far preferable to provide them with a political outlet within a pluralistic democratic system rather than to hide them, repress difference, or wait for it to flare up later on. “Liberal democracy requires consensus on the rules of the game,” writes Mouffe, “but it also calls for the constitution of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions and the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. This ‘agonistic pluralism’ is constitutive of modern democracy and, rather than seeing it as a threat, we should realize that it represents the very condition of existence of such democracy.”63 Mouffe also calls for what she describes as “liberal socialism.” Socialism as an ideal which stands in opposition to the liberal democratic regime may be dead, she writes, but “this does not mean that we should also abandon the objectives of socialism conceived as one dimension in the struggle for a deepening of democracy. Understood as a process of democratization of the economy, socialism is a necessary component of the project of radical and plural democracy. Consequently, I believe there is an urgent need to advocate a ‘liberal socialism.’ ”64 Mouffe goes on to articulate her ideal of how the conflict implicit in politics ought to be ordered within democratic politics, which in her opinion, may extend beyond the usual articulation of democracy as it has developed

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in the West. She rejects representative democracy as the only (or privileged) form of democracy. “There are many social relations where representative forms of democracy would be completely inadequate, and forms of democracy should therefore be plural.” Sometimes representative democracy is the best solution, sometimes direct democracy, she argues, and “we should also try to imagine new forms of democracy.”65 Rather, “a well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions,” she argues. “If this is missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by confrontation between non-negotiated moral values or essentialist forms of identification.”66 She proposes a reconceptualization of the task of democratic politics, not as attempting to exclude conflict, but by recognizing the political in its antagonistic dimension. The question of democracy, she writes, is not how to find a rational conclusion to our problems, nor how to negotiate compromise among competing interests. It is the question not of how to eliminate the passions but of how “to ‘sublimate’ those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.”67 Arendt’s work on violence supports a position similar to Mouffe’s here, when she claims that democracy (or genuine politics) requires a confrontation of different positions. There is, for Arendt, no such thing as the democratic or legitimately political group or the democratic or genuinely political position—this is at the heart of her rejection of sovereignty. Politics that claims to enact “the will of the people” via majoritarian representative democracy is under attack by both Mouffe and Arendt, who therefore seek out alternatives. So, for example, Arendt’s writing on the Jewish army offers a new proposition for a form of nonnational democracy; her writing on civil disobedience defends the political legitimacy and importance of small minority groups: there are multiple groups that can become powerful or exert power in specific ways that affect the majority outside law. And these examples, importantly, encompass conflict but also potentially (necessarily, in the case of the Jewish army) violence. For Mouffe, a reimagined liberalism (or liberal democratic regime) need not be incommensurable with her plural system of antagonism, although it is firmly opposed to current liberal political theory. “The idea of a perfect consensus, a harmonious central will, must . . . be abandoned,” she urges, “and the permanence of conflicts and antagonisms accepted. Once the very possibility of achieving homogeneity is discarded, the necessity of liberal institutions becomes evident. . . . [They] provide the guarantee that individual

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freedom will be protected against the tyranny of the majority or the domination of the totalitarian party/state.”68 Like Arendt, Mouffe is not so concerned with the prevention of violence per se as with the avoidance of tyranny, whether that be the tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of a government or political regime. She sees it as the task of political theory to accept conflict in order to think it though. “Instead of shying away from the component of violence and hostility inherent in social relations, the task is to think how to create the conditions under which those aggressive forces can be defused and diverted and a pluralist democratic order made possible.”69 Mouffe takes Arendt’s emphasis on the importance of being part of a political community in order to guarantee rights a step further. Mouffe goes beyond citizenship to assess the kind of institutions that guarantee liberal rights. Arendt, as Danielle Allen has pointed out, is rarely concerned with everyday law as opposed to constitutional law.70 But that does not mean that Mouffe’s claims are at odds with Arendt’s—rather, they could be seen to extend her ideas into the space of everyday law and institutional politics. Both Arendt and Mouffe prefer an idea of democratic confrontation against a monolithic idea of democracy as the will of the people, and reading Arendt on violence—although violence does not have to result—shows that she takes this seriously. Both stand against a Rawlsian liberal model of an essentially nonviolent democratic modern politics operating below a sovereign monopolist of violence in the nation state. Arendt’s idea of politics and the institutions and laws that politics operates through is revealed to be a highly conflicted, agonistic, and even antagonistic system. Even within a legitimate political system—such as the United States in the twentieth century—Arendt believed space could and must be found for radical change through civil disobedience by participatory but nonmajoritarian political movements.

Agonism in Political Theory: Seyla Benhabib and Deliberative Legitimacy Benhabib, while influenced by Arendt, sees herself as diverging in impor tant ways from Arendt’s notion of politics. She is more concerned than Arendt is with constructing a model of normative theory—she argues that Arendt’s phenomenological essentialism cannot form a grounding for ethical inquiry— yet she draws on agonism in the way that she employs the idea of deliberation, arguing that there is an essential and central role for deliberation in

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legitimate democratic action. Her deliberative model of democracy is proceduralist, that is, it proceeds from a recognition of the conflict of values and of interests that exists in any community and the legitimacy of value pluralism. “Proceduralist models of democracy allow the articulation of conflicts of interest under conditions of social cooperation mutually acceptable to all,” Benhabib argues.71 It is simply a fiction to believe that modern mass societies can organize themselves as an assembly, she writes. Instead, in modern democratic societies, multiple associations form an “anonymous ‘public conversation.’ ”72 Her model of deliberative democracy “privileges such a public sphere of mutually interlocking and overlapping networks and associations of deliberation, contestation, and argumentation.”73 These overlapping but contesting institutions and networks form, for Benhabib, “the political” in its modern sense. She emphasizes that this model is not a “counterfactual thought experiment” but represents the reality of the contemporary political sphere. Such a theory “elucidates the already implicit principles and logic of existing democratic principles and logic of existing democratic practices,” and she notes, among these existing practices and principles: “deliberative bodies in democracies, the rationale of parliamentary opposition . . . a free and independent media and sphere of public opinion, and the rationale for employing majority rule as a decision procedure.”74 However, this model of democratic politics is not without its challenges, even in conceptual terms, as Benhabib explains, taking the idea of human rights as part of modern democratic practice. The paradox of democratic legitimacy, she writes, “is that the republican sovereign ought to undertake to bind its will through a series of precommitments to a set of formal and substantive norms usually referred to as ‘ human rights.’ ”75 These protect the private autonomy of individuals “while also creating conditions of participation for them as public agents.”76 This paradox cannot be entirely resolved, she argues, but may be mitigated through the “renegotiation and reiteration of the dual commitments to human rights and sovereign self-determination.”77 The demos, as popular sovereign, “must assert control over a specific territorial domain [but] it can also engage in reflexive acts of self-constitution whereby the boundaries of the demos can be readjusted and democratic sovereignty itself can be dissembled or reaggregated.”78 She thus draws on what she describes as “democratic iterations” to explain this paradox of how individual participation can be combined with substantive guarantees of rights, without either being superseded by the other.79 “Democratic iterations involve complex processes of public argument, deliberation, and exchange through

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which universalist rights claims are contested and contextualized, invoked and revoked, posited and positioned throughout legal and political institutions, as well as in the associations of civil society.”80 In the modern, globalized world, these iterations take place both within the nation-state and in “transnational public spheres of communication and action.”81 It is a process of continual adjustment, describing how “the unity and diversity of human rights is enacted and re-enacted in strong and weak public spheres, not only in legislature and courts, but often more effectively by social movements, civil society actors, and transnational organizations working across borders.”82 Benhabib describes her approach as being based on communicative freedom, in the sense that freedom of expression and association are not simply normative rights but “are the crucial conditions for the recognition of individuals as beings who live in a political order of whose legitimacy they have been convinced with good reason.”83 In this manner, the “rights of expression and association that are exercised in democratic iterations undergird the communicative exercise of freedom itself.”84 It is only when the people themselves are viewed not simply as subjects, she claims, but as authors of the law, that the idea of human rights can credibly be described as emerging from free and democratic processes of opinion formation.85 She thus takes a position very similar to Arendt’s in understanding politics as a set of continuously evolving discourses engaging both institutional agency and popular sovereignty, in which the preconditions of discourse are the preconditions of politics. But she takes this project considerably beyond Arendt, first, in ascribing to rights a normative as well as political character, and second, in her focus on the transnational or quasi-cosmopolitan character of the contemporary world. Yet while Benhabib writes that the motivation for these discourses “arises when the certitudes of our life-worlds breaks down through conflict, dissent, and disagreement,” the discourse-ethics model she proposes brings people together “in experiences of establishing commonality across diversity, conflict, divide, and struggle.”86 But in this model, although descriptive in that discursive processes do exist and shape democratic politics, the end result of “commonality across diversity” is by her own admission aspirational, “a goal to strive for . . . [not] a description of the way the world is.”87 In a globalized world, Benhabib believes, “the boundaries of the political have shifted beyond the republic housed in the nation-state,” and “only multiple strategies or forms of struggle can reassert the ruptured link between popular consent and the public exercise of power.”88 Yet she still sees the state as the unique agent of military intervention, and therefore as

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the actor primarily responsible for the actualization of human rights norms, including, for example, through “military intervention to stop massive human rights violations,” although, she adds, “only the prevention of genocide, slavery, and ethnic cleansing can justify such acts.”89 Given that Arendt wants to oppose the centrality of sovereignty in modern politics and wholly rejects the idea that the state should hold a unique monopoly on legitimate violence, how might the state be able to uphold human rights? The question becomes even more pressing when, as this book has claimed, violence can be justified in political terms. The idea of human rights requires a guarantor in order to be meaningful, as Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is not possible to construct a normative model from the reading of Arendt offered here, because Arendt’s concern is always oriented around the question of whether an act is political, and thus legitimate or justified in political terms, rather than whether an act is right or wrong. Yet Arendt’s system certainly permits the incorporation of human rights in a limited sense as political rights; furthermore, by delimiting the sphere of the political so that the private sphere is broadly excluded, Arendt’s political framework also offers protection to the rights properly belonging to the private sphere by excluding them from the intrusion of the public, as occurs, Arendt argues, through the dominance of the modern “social” system.

Agonal Democracy: A New Perspective on Politics Theories of agonal democracy or agonal politics, or theories which draw upon the agon, offer ways to critique, understand, and develop politics in ways which diverge from the dominant liberal (and especially Rawlsian) idea that politics is about building consensus, rational agreement, and implementing a comprehensive notion of sociopolitical justice. Agonal ideas of politics offer new terminologies to discuss the political that enable us to recognize overlooked or rejected realities: the “dilemmas,” “remainders,” and antagonisms that permeate our world. We ignore these realities to our conceptual detriment (in terms of understanding) and to the actual political and social detriment of those who are or hold ideas that are considered remainders and who are therefore considered irrelevant. The language of conflict, whether agonism or antagonism, reflects certain realities of our political life that cannot be understood by ideal theories which seek the resolution of all substantive political problems through rational consensus or comprehensive theories of

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justice. Even if politics is about building consensus and agreement, or we want to understand it in this way, conflict is the other, and essential, side of the coin. An understanding of politics that ignores the process by which we come to political conclusions, consensus, or even arrive at particular actions collectively is not a satisfactory understanding of political reality. Agonism goes some way to rectifying that imbalance. Theories of agonal politics enable us to think in ways that decenter the state and society (as a unitary entity or organization) and do not privilege one particular site of power but recognize a plurality of values and of groups, as well as the essentially plural situation of individuals in society. This latter point is perhaps the most important idea that consistently appears in the work of most agonal theorists of politics: that politics should be understood as a participatory engagement between people and (perhaps) peoples. This promotes an idea of politics that is not only anti-elitist and egalitarian (sometimes radically)—as indeed most liberal contemporary theories of politics are, of course—but which is also, much more contentiously, opposed to the attainment of definitive and conclusive consensus as the closing down of political engagement. The process of participation and the seeking of consensus, while still recognizing division and difference, are prioritized. Agonal political theory is therefore an alternative to, but not necessarily a wholesale rejection of, liberalism, at least the Rawlsian liberal theories that continue to dominate contemporary political thought. It is thus a powerful critical tool in contemporary political theory, but also a mode of thought that can provide positive ideas and ideals for political theory and practice. The three thinkers whose work has been discussed here overlap in these ways while also drawing on different elements or interpretations of agonal politics and pressing these aspects in different directions. Mouffe heavily emphasizes the importance of existential political conflict and antagonism (not just agonism) within politics itself, arguing that we must recognize the existence and importance of the friend/enemy distinction if we are to manage the antagonisms that arise in a reasonable, effective, and inclusive manner that does not simply ignore conflict and division. Her take on agonal democracy is, like Arendt’s, distinctly political rather than normative, in contrast to the work of Benhabib and Honig, both of whom are interested in pressing agonism in the direction of political ethics. For Honig, much of the power of agonism as a descriptor of politics comes from its recognition of psychological qualities and the kinds of relationships between people that reflexively create self. She wants to extend and apply agonal principles into the private

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realm, the everyday or administrative politics that Arendt believed were unpolitical. Benhabib, thinking in terms of a distinctly cosmopolitan framework, in contrast to Mouffe’s and Honig’s work, questions how we can guarantee fixed liberal ideas of human rights while still ensuring that citizens have access to meaningful participation and the capacity to make changes to their political world. Agonism, through a constant iterative process, rather than through radical or revolutionary change, is the means by which we can understand the coexistence of democratic participation and the guarantee of rights. All of these thinkers, it is worth pointing out, engage much more seriously than Arendt ever did with the idea of social justice and not just political legitimacy. While Honig and Benhabib explore the normative dimensions of agonism and its extension into the private, the interpretation of Arendt’s work presented here pushes in a different direction, one that is much closer to Mouffe’s work. She explicitly recognizes the necessity of violence and conflict in politics, and that politics is about how we deal with these problems and not simply avoid them. “Politics, as the attempt to domesticate the political, to keep at bay the forces of destruction and to establish order, always has to do with conflict and antagonisms. It requires an understanding that every consensus is, by necessity, based on acts of exclusion and that there can never be a fully inclusive ‘rational’ consensus. . . . it is precisely this dimension of undecidability and coercion that ‘political liberalism’ is at pains to liberate. It offers us a picture of a well-ordered society as one from which antagonism, violence, power and repression have disappeared. But, in fact, this is only because they have been made invisible through a clever stratagem.”90 I would argue that Arendt, despite her noted antipathy to violence, also emphasizes that politics is a constant process of conflict and antagonisms. However, I believe that we can press this type of inquiry further, asking, in par ticular, how we can understand violence in politics not just as a process (which it is) but as a process leading to certain political outcomes, and a process which is for political outcomes. Each of these thinkers—Mouffe, Benhabib, and Honig—offers a slightly different perspective on agonic ideas, while the principles that tie their thought together as agonism offer us a perspective which stands apart from, and in some respects against, predominant liberal schools. Agonal political theory emphasizes, to its credit, the importance of understanding politics as process, but ends cannot be ignored, and Arendt offers us some possible solutions to how we might conceptualize a political theory that can grapple with both the process and the outcomes.

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Agonal political thought tends to emphasize the conflict that occurs within the political sphere, and particularly the conflict that takes place in recognizably democratic terms, that is, through discourse within a political community. Even Mouffe, who places great importance on antagonism and the friend-enemy distinction, is chiefly concerned with recognizing antagonism as an ever-present possibility that might break apart the political community if not effectively managed and given voice. The task is primarily to find ways that aggression can be defused, rather than to identify when, if, and why some acts of violence might be necessary and even beneficial for the political community. What does agonal politics tell us about processes that are not discursive but are participatory (violent or quasi-violent civil disobedience, for example)? What about processes that are public but not majorityled or agreed upon? What about political processes that are (as Arendt writes), not legitimate in and of themselves but justifiable by their outcomes? In other words, violence and conflict, in very real terms, can be part of the process of politics as well as the means to particular political outcomes. What about political practices that go beyond talking, or indeed originate outside the democratic, discursive processes of negotiation? There is still a tendency to draw back from these modes of politics in favor of discursive politics, but are these forms of politics not also part of the practice of political formation, and do they not also bear meaningfulness in themselves—at least conceivably? We should not, of course, underestimate the centrality of discourse in political reality: discussion, compromise, and agreement are necessary to any political world worthy of the name. Without discourse (and without making discourse central to understanding politics), any kind of genuinely participatory democracy would be impossible. The qualities of appearance and recognition of our place in the world that emerge through interactions in political space would be absent, as would the creation of individuality and difference within an arena of equality (rather than simply the differentiation of hierarchical authority, rule, or status). Also, political understanding, which operates actively through grasping, developing, and creating new concepts and norms, would suffer. All of these things are of the utmost importance to any decent politics. Yet we are repeatedly presented with the reality of violent conflict in the world that acts outside the bounds of discourse. We are, at times, faced with the necessity of protecting our political communities against internal and external threats through the use of military force, civilian police, and the coercive apparatus that supports and enables systems of justice. It is necessary to respond to this appropriately or in such a way that,

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even if not ideal, is not essentially destructive or neglectful of our own political community: that is, to understand how we can use violence so that it does not place the public sphere itself under threat; does not abolish or threaten freedom, plurality, and difference; and does not too far restrict the possibility of power in participatory acts. Discourse might be central to making decisions about violence, but in enacting coercion or violence we step outside the realm of discourse into another form of power, where our actions are all the more dangerous and it is even more important to understand when they are legitimate or justified and when they are not. Many agonal theorists have tended to work on the more normative implications of conflict in politics, moving away from Arendt’s phenomenological approach and the primacy of understanding, acknowledging, or recognizing the political before ethical questions can be answered. This has a tendency to drown out phenomenological questions about what the political is and how it can be protected and maintained—an equally important aspect of political thought and practice. For example, Benhabib relocates the legitimate source of power and human rights norms in the iterative, discursive struggle between multiple bodies of people and peoples, yet it is unclear how the possession of violence by traditional sovereign bodies interacts with this process in the framework she sets up (if it does at all). Benhabib is pragmatic in recognizing the position of the sovereign state as that which has the monopoly on military force (in most circumstances), and she draws on, for example, the application of international military intervention for the purposes of preventing massive human rights abuses. Yet it is still unclear what justifies the repression of action in any situation, whether national, international, or subnational. The question remains as to how violence ought to be ideally positioned in terms of the political-normative practices of democratic iterations. Arendt’s thought on this relationship, as outlined here, offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between violence and politics, one which is capable of understanding violence not just as a sovereign act but as something which permeates political practice in a multitude of ways, and of identifying where such violence is justifiable or not in public terms—a potentially normative claim drawn from a political idea founded on discourse. Even Mouffe, who deals much more directly with the question of the role of violence in politics, does not go far enough in some directions (even while she criticizes Arendt for not having recognized antagonism adequately). Interpreting Arendt in the way this study has suggested extends her work on violence in politics beyond consensus, and extends the range of situations

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which Arendt’s theory might apply to. Mouffe suggests that “when institutional channels do not exist for antagonisms to be expressed in an antagonistic way, they are likely to explode into violence.”91 While she reasons that pluralistic difference should be accepted as political normality (“antagonism”) and incorporated into political institutions because this results in the avoidance of political violence, Arendt’s reasoning is more complex. The avoidance of destabilizing violence is evidently a priority in Arendt’s work. But the different forms of violence that are identified with different forms of human activity offer a guide as to which kind of violence is politically acceptable and which is not, in those situations where violence—rooted in any political body, that is, one with public power—does emerge, and furthermore, how to identify and avoid this by properly delimiting the range of the legitimately political and those actions which justifiably result from the political. This has been recognized by some other writers. Jane Mansbridge writes of how, in recent years, “theorists of deliberative democracy have stressed the democratic potential for reasoned persuasion to the almost complete exclusion of the independently justifiable arguments for power as coercion in democratic life. Yet democracies must have their coercive as well as their deliberative moments.”92 They need coercion to reinforce their nature as democracies, she writes. On issues where there is disagreement, deliberation may not lead to consensus. “At this point, when conflict remains after good deliberation, a democracy has two choices—to remain at the status quo or to act, by coercing some to go along with others.”93 In politics, there are both coercive and agonal or discursive qualities; but how are we to understand these as—if not compatible—then at least not wholly paradoxical? Arendt’s work can help us to see this opposition in terms of a positive constitutive tension in politics. This work has sought to break down the fixity of some of the barriers that Arendt proposes in politics, and even more, those that others have read into her work. In doing so, it extends the question that Benhabib, Mouffe, and Honig all ask—how we can understand and accept the reality of conflict in politics—into a different direction. Thus, for example, where Honig asks how we can develop Arendt’s thought to understand the role of private spaces in relation to the production of the political, there is a contrasting question, explored in this study, of what we can understand to actually be part of the public sphere—both questions driven by the same desire to transcend the seemingly problematic distinctions that pepper Arendt’s work. Honig’s fascinating reading of Arendt presses politics further into everyday life and offers one way out of the paradox of

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Arendt’s supposedly content-free political realm. The argument offered in this thesis uses similar claims to argue for the extension of politics in a different direction. The private-public distinction is indeed not as absolute, in practice, as Arendt sometimes suggests. The ambiguity, or blurred nature, of this line does not mean a distinction does not exist, it simply means it is invariably open to contestation where the public and the private meet. And in some cases, this ambiguity means that violence enters the political in a quite justifiable way. But this cannot be stretched beyond all limits; the ambiguity of concepts as they appear in practice does not result in their all being the same, nor does it equate to the unity of the public and private, nor the unity of violence and politics—and so the justification of violence in these different situations is not identical. The conceptual distinction remains, but it remains contested, as political (and ultimately all) concepts, as interpretations of reality, must be. If one breaks down the absolute nature of the private-public distinction, treating it instead as Honig’s “constituting mark . . . calling out to be augmented,” the realm of the political expands in multiple directions, further into everyday life than a straightforward reading of Arendt’s work might suggest. And as it does, the potential use of Arendtian theory, or its relevance in political practice, expands accordingly. However, just as there are problems with understanding politics purely in terms of discourse and (ultimate) consensus from conflict, there are even more obvious problems with understanding politics purely in realist terms. This tends to diminish the participatory and discursive features of politics by framing politics as being ultimately, in the decisive action, about coercion. We can see this as the exceptional view of politics, or politics defined by its extremes, in contrast to the normalizing view of politics—the everyday negotiations and discussions that characterize political action most of the time. But this is too simplistic. The two are always connected, and must be. We cannot separate the decision from the discussion and participation that legitimates it, we cannot and should not separate violence from power, and we cannot separate the actions that occur within the political community from the practices that make the community itself. It must be recognized that a purely decisionist and coercive political realism was precisely what Arendt rejected, even as she accepted violent action to be political in some cases. For violence to be politically justified, there are two particular features that allow us to distinguish political and nonpolitical violence. First of all, the kind of violence she rejected in politics was that of process-thinking, in which violence in politics is considered and enacted

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as an endless cycle of (inevitably worsening) violence. Violence for the sake of violence—violence that possesses a characteristic of necessity, with no conceivable end—is not politically justifiable. Second, there is one clear quality which violence must display, as must any truly political action, and that is publicity, publicness, or power, understood in the sense set out in the previous chapter as necessarily connected to plurality. Acts of political violence that are carried out through such public power are justifiable. So, Arendt rejected representative democracy because she believed that its plurality and indeed freedom is subsumed under unitary or sovereign rule, which, due to its singular character, cannot act through power. But surely, one might argue, this is simply reading too much into the work of a thinker who repeatedly argued against violence in politics and sought to separate violence from politics. Yet the examples discussed in this work—the Jewish army, the political nature of Roman violence, extreme though it was, and the violence of the American revolutionary war—do show Arendt to be a thinker who was at ease with the use of (some kinds of) violence in politics, and who understood that violence to be political. Remember that this is a theorist who was perfectly willing to support what would be recognized as terrorism in the case of Sholem Schwarzbard, the Jewish anarchist mentioned toward the start of this book, who murdered the official he considered responsible for the death of his family in the Ukrainian pogroms of the Russian Civil War. Yet that Schwarzbard immediately handed himself over to the police, making his individual act of violence a public and political act through the court case that ensued (and ultimately acquitted him), corresponds to the framework offered in this study of Arendt’s work. Violence can sometimes be used to silence or to repress freedom, which is anti-political, but it can also be used in order to enable silenced people and peoples to speak and to be heard, even to force an entry to a political space which they otherwise have no access to, or to force a transformation to the political space in order to acquire a voice.

An Arendtian Approach to Negotiating the Tensions of Violence in Politics Arendt’s work therefore enables us to use agonal ideas of politics to understand how to approach questions around violence in politics. How does it help us to negotiate the tensions that exist between the consensual and discursive and the violent and coercive aspects of politics? The tensions that this work has

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outlined, which pull two ways across the boundaries of politics in Arendtian political thought, offer some approaches that can assist here, offering ways of differentiating political action from nonpolitical action while still maintaining a productive (and realistic) tension between the different forces at work. Arendt, in On Revolution most clearly but across her work more broadly, depicts politics as an activity that is always pulled between being a free, unstructured, open space—the spontaneity of natality, the pure freedom that is expressed in the equal space of the political as action—and being closed off and ordered by the constitutional limits that maintain the political space over time and protect it from the threats it faces. Including aspects of work activity in political, public action enables us to understand how state coercion can be justifiable within Arendt’s theory of politics, as it clearly is, for example in the upholding of law; this is not necessarily power but action backed by power. Work provides a necessary, stabilizing balance to the necessity of action and its chaotic nature without wholly restricting it, protecting the political space as a specific, not unlimited, space to act. If power should come up against the state’s (legitimate) authority, this too is legitimate action, even, in the extreme case, if violence is required to defend a group or indeed the whole political space. Power can appear in many different guises: it can be active, it can also be tacit. If a small minority acts into the political for some particular change and that change is rejected, in a political community where the people have the capacity to participate, we might say that the power of the people is tacit in the state and not the active minority. Of course, if politics is exclusive, nonparticipatory, and represses power itself, then this may not be the case. If that minority presses for change and the majority supports them, their power becomes enacted, and in a properly constituted state, their power will guide the shape of politics. In this formation of the public, the action-power-work dynamic incorporates ends as well as means. Thinking in terms not just of the present, but also of the future, necessitates consideration of ends. Means and ends are mutually necessary in a depiction of the political that considers legacy and stability as well as action and freedom, and work is the way to realize political ends in a way which is nonthreatening to the political sphere, even if it does entail some degree of violence. What about the tension that exists within the (strict) Arendtian political sphere: between the conflict of the agon and the persuasion, conversation, and consensus that marks power? A normal tension between people as individuals and groups of people is inevitable and productive—it does not need to be resolved. But what happens when action butts up against power, over

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some issue that is irresolvable? In this case, when individual action presses against the power of the group, the group clearly has a legitimate right to defend their rights, interests, and claims against that individual, including through the use of coercion. The individual cannot possess this, except through persuasion and the initiation of power that might emerge. In a more difficult case, what happens when agonism becomes antagonism? Or when two groups, acting in concert against each other, act against one another within a political community in a context where persuasion is no longer a viable solution to the issue at hand? If the issue is such that the two groups cannot live with the difference (and these are the rarest of cases), there is no way, in Arendt’s view, to ascertain who is right—normatively or politically. Either the two groups are no longer one political community, or they insist that they must be and some compromise must be sought. Ultimately, violent action can only ever be concluded politically by peace being agreed upon, not decided through violence. But violence can shape the context for peace, and this is justifiable in Arendt’s politics even if it is, of course, undesirable. While these tensions tie coercive and noncoercive elements of violence together, there are clear divisions in Arendt’s work: the most important is the distinction between her critique of anti-political violence and her positive theorizing of how politics can be enacted and protected for freedom. On the basis of her fear of totalitarianism as anti-politics, she definitely excludes “the social” from politics because it prioritizes the private over the public and replaces the public with the private. It is therefore necessary conflictual. Either as individualism or as sovereignty, “the social” represses plurality and results in an inevitable and cyclical violence because power is not present to break the cycle. Arendt excludes from her work ideas of politics that define politics as violence, that see politics as structurally identical to or based on violence. Her relationship is the reverse: politics is power, but violence can be based on power. She thus rejects the “making” of politics in the absence of the legitimizing force of power to authorize its activity, for example, under modern sovereignty. In contrast, she is clear about what does constitute politics: action, which initiates; power, which extends and legitimates and enacts action; and work, especially in law and constitutionality, which entrenches action and power while pushing against its excesses. This distinction also explains why Arendt so firmly insists that action and power must be protected. The danger of the social in the modern world, and the dominance of the social, makes real politics rare and dangerous, and manipulation of masses, well used to being ruled, a normal part of our understanding and

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practices of politics. Only, in theory, by redefining what is genuinely political might we push back against the conceptual dominance of social politics. Violence utilized for power via work, rather than violence used for control, offers an approach to thinking about where and if political coercion is justifiable. The activity of work, its productiveness and worldliness, provides a way in which the activities of pure politics itself and the seeming impotence of a purely discursive power/action can be understood in a more pragmatic way that engages with questions of ends. The extended public sphere of the action-power-work space offers us a way to think through whether state coercion or indeed political resistance—even revolution—is legitimate through violent action. The limits of work and the clear distinction between work violence and labor violence, social violence, or the violence of process-thinking offer ways to distinguish violence in its anti-political form, and the threat of totalitarianism, from a politics of positive construction which nevertheless necessitates at least some violence in constructing or maintaining the world in which politics exists. Finally, perhaps most productively, it offers a way to understand the relationship between the nonteleological core of politics and the necessity of thinking about and for the future, a connection which might indeed offer a way to think through how interests themselves might be incorporated into political action without destroying the sphere of politics. This idea takes us beyond the scope of Arendt’s work, but it might be extremely productive when we are thinking about what we can do with Arendtian politics, and the much-raised critique that her political framework excludes much that is of concern in the contemporary world and that we would indeed consider intrinsic to politics. Is it necessary to agree with all of Arendt’s claims about the nature of modernity, the contentious idea of the social, her criticism of sovereignty and rule, and her idea of process-thinking in order for her thinking to be of any relevance to contemporary political theory? Must we share her fears, born in the shadow of totalitarianism, and the diagnosis of modern society she made as a result? Not entirely, I would argue, but to a degree. Some rejection of rule necessarily follows if we accept the idea of power as the essence of politics, of power as acting in concert, or of politics as a necessarily participatory activity. In some ways, this is the essence of democratic thinking, and thus the core of Arendt’s argument is not contentious at all. Other aspects, such as her sharp delineation of private and public, may be more problematic. Yet even if one does not accept the historical narrative or description of modern politics that she offers (as outlined in this work), a version of her argument

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remains viable: that some forms of violence close down politics, and other forms can open up politics. If we agree that politics is about maintaining conflict, or the space and practices of the agon, and that no closure is necessary or even possible because keeping the future open is a precondition of freedom, then thinking about violence in terms of understanding what practices will keep the political space open and which will delimit it, versus which will irreparably damage it, seems both legitimate and necessary. We can also think about her critique of sovereignty beyond the simplistic claim that sovereign states must be abolished if politics is to exist, and more in terms of total dominance of sovereignty as the organizing idea in modern politics. We can, of course, see that many aspects of politics are nonsovereign. Why should we then think about politics as being either rule over or being ruled, sovereignty or chaos, with nothing between? Sometimes we do see these extremes, in totalitarianism, on the one hand, and the actions of the Homeric heroes or the Athenian demos (at their best), on the other. But most of the time, the tensions of politics offer choices to think through, not definitive good and bad options to choose from. And Arendt’s work illustrates this particularly well because she gives us a political and not an ethical theory, that is, a theory which seeks to elucidate the limits of politics but also the freedoms we are permitted within those boundaries. We might also ask, finally, if Arendt is engaged primarily in boundary drawing, doesn’t this study undermine her very project? It does not, because the primary danger we face is the reality of the tenuous nature of these boundaries. We need to understand that we need some boundaries, but in fact, the boundaries are always, necessarily in flux. We have to understand how we can create and uphold the boundaries of the political in the most effective way but also in a way that is pragmatic, that meets the requirements of the moment and the society. Arendt doesn’t argue we must impose sharp dividing lines onto society but that we should understand what the basis is for our dividing lines or the shape of politics. Without some understanding of what the political is, we have no way of orienting ourselves. That doesn’t mean we should fix our “political” on one specific idea or shape or set of boundaries, but rather understand the possibilities we are presented with. Arendt’s conceptualization of politics is idiosyncratic in many ways: her conceptualization of labor, work, and action as the tripartite structure of human action; the barrier she insists upon erecting between the public and the private; and her controversial idea of the social, for example. But her fundamental claims, and their roots in discourse as the means of making politics, are

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supported and adopted by numerous other philosophers and political theorists. The necessity of protecting politics from other forces requires the creation of conceptual boundaries or “spheres” of action, which are then institutionalized in our lives. The irrevocable presence of violence, or force, in the world, is a major reason for the necessity of protecting the fragile sphere of politics. The creation and maintenance of politics is the practice of carefully finding our way through the practices of discourse and consensus that emerge out of action—specifically, acting in the public context, and the practices of institution making and remaking that give these free, spontaneous acts some stability and permanence in the world. Arendt’s rejection of rule, Markell writes, “has led some readers to identify Arendt, whether approvingly or disapprovingly, with an anarchic tradition of political thought that sees freedom as intrinsically opposed to form and associated instead with revolutionary events, or with perpetual movement.” And, he continues, while there are others who “take her to be more ambivalent toward the phenomenon of rule . . . their readings remain structured by the presupposition of an opposition between rule and freedom, closure and openness.”94 Arendt’s theory offers a way of connecting these two worlds, and so offers a route through the ideal politics of action and freedom and the practical reality of dealing with the world as it stands, including the presence of violence. Arendt’s work supports an anti-sovereign politics, or at least a politics which is severely critical of modern sovereignty. For this reason, it can seem difficult to apply the principles of Arendtian politics to modern political systems, or that Arendt’s politics is simply of a different order than the politics of the modern world. I do not believe this to be the case. Politics does not need to be complete or ideal for some form of politics to exist, and indeed the nature of politics is that it can never be either of these things. This book has sought to show Arendt as a much less utopian thinker than she has often been portrayed, in part due to her supposed failure to engage in questions of violence beyond simply rejecting it as an anti-political phenomenon. Yet, for Arendt, violence and power invariably appear side by side and, in her work, she does offer ways of engaging—though critically—with the reality of violence in modern politics. In doing so, her analysis strikes to the heart of sovereign politics itself.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 2. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). 3. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), 145. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 147. 6. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 143. 7. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), xi. 8. Keith Breen, “Violence and Power: A Critique of Hannah Arendt on ‘the Political,’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 3 (2007): 343. 9. Ibid., 345. 10. Ibid., 343. 11. Ibid., 363. 12. Ibid., 349. 13. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon,” Contemporary Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 93. 14. Ibid., 107. 15. Ibid., 93. 16. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 16. 17. Annabel Herzog, “The Concept of Violence in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” Continental Philosophy Review 50, no. 2 (2017): 165–79, 166. 18. Ibid., 167; Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 240. 19. Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt’s Political Engagements,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 56. 20. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 126.

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Notes to Pages 7–25

21. Ibid., 137. 22. George Kateb, “Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 368. 23. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 19. 24. Hannah Arendt, “The Political Organization of the Jewish People,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 217. 25. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 178. 26. Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, December 23, 1960, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 415. 27. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 155. 28. Iris Marion Young, “Power, Violence and Legitimacy: A Reading of Hannah Arendt in an Age of Police Brutality and Humanitarian Intervention,” in Breaking the Cycles of Hatred, ed. Martha Minow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 271. 29. John McGowan, “Must Politics Be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 263. 30. Ibid., 263–64. 31. Ibid., 291. 32. Ibid., 266. 33. Ibid., 274. 34. Ibid., 288–89. 35. Ibid., 291. 36. Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 37. Ibid., 46. 38. Ibid., 10. 39. Ibid., 78. 40. Ibid., 75. 41. Patricia Owens, “Hannah Arendt, Violence, and the Inescapable Fact of Humanity,” in Hannah Arendt and International Relations, ed. Anthony F. Lang Jr. and John Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 45. 42. Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 333. 43. Mouffe is again an exception, drawing on Carl Schmitt’s famous friend/enemy distinction from The Concept of the Political to explore the boundaries of politics.

Chapter 1 1. Hannah Arendt, “Power Politics Triumphs,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 157. 2. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 105–6. 3. Ibid., 264–65. 4. Ibid., 269. 5. Ibid., 271.

Notes to Pages 26–31

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6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 234–35. 7. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 107. 8. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 162. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 119. 12. Arendt, “What Is Freedom,” 162–63. 13. Ibid., 163. 14. Arendt, “On Violence,” 137. 15. Ibid. 16. Hannah Arendt, “The End of Tradition,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 81. 17. This is attributable to the reliance of the Greeks on the institution of slavery, making the necessary worldly, particularly laboring activities of life mere “slavish” pursuits rather than noble activities. Arendt, “The End of Tradition,” 82. 18. Ibid. 19. Liisi Keedus, “Liberalism and the Question of ‘The Proud’: Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss as Readers of Hobbes,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73 no. 2 (2012): 323. 20. Ibid. 21. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Rahel Varnhagen, (Munich: Piper, 1981); and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1994). 22. Since Arendt had left Germany in 1933 for France, and after the invasion of France in 1941 successfully sought refuge in America along with her few close family members, she had escaped the worst. Yet she was still shocked and deeply affected by the Holocaust and the events of the war and the years that preceded it, and it should not be forgotten that she was a stateless refugee for close to twenty years (1933–51). 23. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 139. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Annelies Degryse, “The Sovereign and the Social: Arendt’s Understanding of Hobbes,” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 15 no. 2 (2008): 246. 27. Ibid., 247. 28. Ibid., 140. 29. Ibid., 141. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid. 32. Hannah Arendt, “Thomas Hobbes Lecture,” History of Political Theory Lectures, University of California, Courses, Subject File, 1949–75, 023994, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Notes to Pages 31–38

33. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 141. 34. Ibid., 146. The idea of capitalism and its historical development that Arendt uses here is evidently drawn from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. She would have been familiar with his work as he was a major figure in recent German academia when she was studying at Marburg and Heidelberg, even more so because her doctoral supervisor and friend Karl Jaspers was a close friend of Weber and his family in the 1910s. In 1950, while writing Origins, Arendt wrote in a letter to Jaspers that she was reading a great deal of Weber, and in a 1956 letter, she notes to Jaspers that she considers The Protestant Ethic to be a work of “incredible genius. . . . There is nothing in the literature after it that begins to approach it.” Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, June 25, 1950, and February 17, 1956, in Hannah Arendt/ Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 150; 282. 35. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 144. 36. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 120. 37. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 146. 38. Ibid., 144–45. 39. Ibid., 142. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 31. 41. Degryse, “The Sovereign and the Social.” 42. Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 22. 43. Ibid. 44. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 171. 45. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 156. 46. Ibid., 158. 47. Arendt, “Thomas Hobbes Lecture,” 023996. 48. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 161. 49. Arendt, “Thomas Hobbes Lecture,” 023996-7. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 023997. 52. Ibid. 53. Arendt comes back to this idea of “reckoning with consequences” many times in her work over twenty years; evidently this is a notion that has par ticu lar and sustained resonance with her. 54. Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 76. 55. Ibid., 76–77. 56. Ibid. 57. Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” 27. 58. Ibid., 18. 59. Arendt, On Revolution, 156. 60. Judith Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review 50 (1983): 69. 61. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 125. 62. Ibid., 137. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 39–53

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65. Ibid., 392. 66. Ibid., 461. 67. Ibid. 68. Arendt, On Revolution, 156. 69. Ibid.,168. 70. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2. 71. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 296. 72. Ibid., 392. 73. Ibid., 475. 74. John L. Stanley, “Is Totalitarianism a New Phenomenon? Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism,” in Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (1987): 178. 75. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix. 76. Ibid., 302. 77. Arendt, “On Violence,” 134. 78. Ibid., 171. 79. Ibid., 139. 80. Ibid., 143. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Arendt, The Human Condition, 189. 84. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 4. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 6. 87. Ibid. 88. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 125. 89. Ibid. 90. Hannah Arendt, “The Tradition of Political Thought,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 62; Arendt, “On Violence,” 151. 91. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 145. 92. Arendt, “On Violence,” 140. 93. Arendt, The Human Condition, 201. 94. Arendt, “On Violence,” 145. 95. Ibid., 175. 96. Arendt, The Human Condition, 161, 208. 97. Ibid., 160. 98. Arendt, “On Violence,” 179. 99. Arendt, On Revolution, 114. 100. Arendt, The Human Condition, 31. 101. Ibid., 167. 102. Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 18. 103. Ibid., 18. 104. Ibid., 33.

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Notes to Pages 53–66

105. Ibid., 35. 106. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 473. 107. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139–40. 108. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), 111. 109. Arendt, “On Violence,” 142. 110. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52. 111. Arendt, On Revolution, 223. 112. Arendt, The Human Condition, 95.

Chapter 2 1. Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 136. 2. Ibid., 152. 3. Ibid., 178. 4. Ibid., 165. 5. Hannah Arendt, “New Palestine Party,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 419. 6. Ibid., 417, 419. 7. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 138. 8. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Zionism,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 331. 9. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 167. 10. Hannah Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 58. 11. Ibid., 138–39. 12. Ibid., 159–60. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Ibid., 143. 15. Ibid., 178. 16. Ibid., 158. 17. Ibid., 137; Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 228–29. 18. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 143, 147. 19. Ibid., 149. 20. Ibid., 143, 149. 21. Ibid., 145. 22. Ibid., 143. 23. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 228–29. 24. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 137. 25. Ibid., 138. 26. Ibid., 138–39, 143. 27. Ibid., 145. 28. Ibid., 167. 29. For example, Judith Butler, “I Merely Belong to Them,” London Review of Books 29, no. 9 (May 2007), http://www.lrb.co.uk /v29/n09/judith–butler/i-merely-belong-to-them.

Notes to Pages 67–81

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30. George Kateb, “Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 348. 31. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 166. 32. Ibid., 154. 33. Margaret Canovan, “The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Arendt’s ‘Popu lism,’ ” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 405. 34. Ibid., 414. 35. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 137. 36. Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 83. 37. Hannah Arendt, “A Way Towards the Reconciliation of Peoples,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 261. 38. Hannah Arendt, “The Political Organization of the Jewish People,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 199. 39. Arendt, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 109. 40. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 120. 41. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). 42. Arendt, “Antisemitism,” 59. 43. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 144. 44. Arendt, “New Palestine Party,” 419. 45. Ibid., 54. 46. Including, for example, the cultural Zionism of Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am, and most importantly for Arendt, Bernard Lazare, as well as more religiously oriented forms of Zionism, which were of less interest to Arendt. 47. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 353. 48. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 145. 49. Ibid., 143. 50. Ibid., 141—42. Here Arendt is quoting Hillel, a Jewish sage of the first century A.D. 51. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 148. 52. Ibid., 150. 53. Ibid., 151. 54. Ibid., 153. 55. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 57. 56. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 323. 57. Hannah Arendt, “[The Origins of Totalitarianism] A Reply,” Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (1953): 81. 58. Kateb, “Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality.” 59. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen (Munich: Piper, 1981), 4. 60. See, e.g., William Selinger, “The Politics of Arendtian Historiography: European Federation and The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (2016); Gil Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015); and Caroline Ashcroft, “Jewishness and the Problem of

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Notes to Pages 81–87

Nationalism: A Genealogy of Arendt’s Early Political Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 2 (2017). 61. Hannah Arendt, “Letter to Mr Mirelman, December 24, 1956,” Correspondence— General—McQ-Mit miscellaneous, 0068, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 62. Hannah Arendt, “Letter to William Zukerman, November 1, 1953,” Correspondence— Publishers—Jewish Newsletter 1950—1961, 0009d, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 63. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 274. 64. Arendt, “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening,” 138. 65. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 19. 66. Arendt, “On Violence,” 179.

Chapter 3 1. These papers, while not a wholly cohesive body of work, are largely composed of an intended but never completed follow-up work to The Human Condition, predominantly focusing on the influence of Marx in modern politics and the nature of the break in tradition that emerged in part through his influence. 2. Noel O’Sullivan, “Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1975). 3. Ibid., 229. 4. Dana Villa, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 118–19, 51. 7. James Tully, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” Economy and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 162. 8. Ibid., 168. 9. Ibid. 10. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 118. 11. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 7. 12. Ibid., 11, 15. 13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 192. 14. Ibid., 193. 15. Ibid., 193–94. 16. Ibid., 194. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 194–95. 19. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 118.

Notes to Pages 88–97

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20. Hannah Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 5. 21. Ibid., 6. 22. Hannah Arendt, “The End of Tradition,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 85–86. 23. Dana Villa, “Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 193. 24. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115. 25. Ibid., 2. 26. Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011). 27. Published as a collection in 2005 under the title The Promise of Politics. 28. Roy T. Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 98. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 195. 30. Ibid. 31. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 180, 182. 32. Ibid., 182. 33. Dean Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought: The Practice of Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 130. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 182. 36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 197. 37. Ibid., 194. 38. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 127–28. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 197. 40. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 127–28. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 42. This is not to suggest that Arendt’s politics does not show itself, in some respects, as elitist, but simply that Greek individualism is not the exclusive inspiration or model for this elitism. 43. E.g., Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 270. 44. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 45. Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought,” 125. 46. Arendt, The Human Condition, 56. 47. Ibid., 59, 195; Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 178–81. 48. Arendt, The Human Condition, 195. 49. Hannah Arendt, “The Tradition of Political Thought,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 42. 50. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 210. 51. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), 94–95. 52. Arendt, On Revolution, 202–3.

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Notes to Pages 97–109

53. Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought,” 138. 54. Ibid. 55. Arendt, On Revolution, 210. 56. Ibid., 28. 57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 167. 58. Ibid., 173. 59. Ibid., 169. 60. Ibid., 168. 61. Ibid., 169–70. 62. Ibid., 64. 63. Arendt, On Revolution, 188. 64. Ibid. 65. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 189. 66. Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 67. Ibid., 10. 68. Arendt, On Revolution, 188. 69. Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 121. 70. Owens, Between War and Politics, 49. 71. Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 111. 72. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 5. 73. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 181. 74. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139–40. 75. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 179. 76. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 178. 77. Ibid.

Chapter 4 1. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 120. 2. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), 125. 3. Ibid. 4. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 120. 5. Hannah Arendt, “From Hegel to Marx,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 74. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119. 9. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 35. 10. Ibid., 125. 11. Ibid., 29. 12. Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 140.

Notes to Pages 111–120

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13. The separation of the social and the political will be explained in greater depth in the following chapter, as will the modern-day (and no less problematic) equivalent, in Arendt’s discussion of race inequality in her essay on Little Rock. 14. Arendt, On Revolution, 60. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 181. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 95–96. 19. Ibid., 233. 20. Ibid., 228. 21. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 139. 22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 300. 23. Arendt, On Revolution, 115. 24. Ibid., 100. 25. Ibid., 68. 26. Ibid. 27. See, e.g., Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 109; Robert Nisbet, “Hannah Arendt and the American Revolution,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 68. 28. Arendt, On Revolution, 68. 29. Ibid., 173. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 174. 32. Ibid., 127. 33. Ibid., 121. 34. Ibid., 127. 35. Ibid., 182. 36. Ibid. 37. Lisa Disch, “How Could Hannah Arendt Glorify the American Revolution and Revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the Historiography of the French and American Revolutions,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (2011): 354. 38. Arendt, The Human Condition, 191. 39. Arendt, On Revolution, 126. 40. Ibid., 197. 41. Ibid. 42. Disch, “How Could Hannah Arendt Glorify the American Revolution?,” 354. 43. Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, “Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt,” Constellations 16, no. 2 (2009): 147. 44. John Medearis, “Lost or Obscured? How V. I. Lenin, Joseph Schumpeter, and Hannah Arendt Misunderstood the Council Movement,” Polity 36, no. 3 (2004); John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy,” Polity 20, no. 1 (1987). 45. Simon Schama, Citizens (London: Penguin, 1989), 140–41. 46. Judith Shklar, “Rethinking the Past,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 81. 47. Ibid. 48. Arendt, On Revolution, 39.

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Notes to Pages 120–130

49. Ibid., 199. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Hannah Arendt, “Reply to J. M. Cameron’s review of Between Past and Future and Men in Dark Times,” Speeches and Writings File—Essays and Lectures, 1969, 0002, The Hannah Arendt Papers, The New School, New York. 53. J. M. Bernstein, “Promising and Civil Disobedience: Arendt’s Political Modernism,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 123. 54. Ibid., 125. 55. Arendt, On Revolution, 228. 56. Ibid., 198. 57. Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 140. 58. Arendt, On Revolution, 17. 59. Ibid., 18. 60. Ibid., 21. 61. Ibid., 19. 62. Ibid., 35. 63. Hannah Arendt, “Revolution—Spurious and Genuine,” Speeches and Writings File— Essays and Lectures, 1964, 0003, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Arendt, On Revolution, 170. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 201. 71. Arendt, “Revolution—Spurious and Genuine,” 0004. 72. Arendt, On Revolution, 202. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 51–52. 75. Ibid., 235. 76. Ibid., 255. 77. Ibid., 280. 78. Ibid., 219. 79. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 152. 80. Hannah Arendt, “The End of Tradition,” The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 86. 81. Ibid., 54. 82. Arendt, The Human Condition, 135. 83. Ibid., 95.

Notes to Pages 134–140

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Chapter 5 1. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 189. 2. Ibid., 181. 3. Annelies Degryse, “The Sovereign and the Social: Arendt’s Understanding of Hobbes,” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 15, no. 2 (2008). However, there is no evidence that Arendt read Macpherson or that his interpretation influenced Arendt’s work, and Degryse considers it to be unlikely. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 38. 5. For all of these reasons, Arendt’s opposition of the public to the private has become a focal point for much of the feminist critique of her work. 6. Arendt, The Human Condition, 38. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Ibid., 46. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 47, 48^#49. 12. Ibid., 39. 13. Ibid., 41. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 33. 17. Ibid., 248. 18. Ibid., 250. 19. Ibid., 251. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 68. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. Ibid., 67. 24. Ibid., 253. Arendt is here discussing postwar Germany, but the analysis could be applied to any modern, Western state. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 257. 27. Ibid., 264. 28. Galileo Galilei, cited in Arendt, The Human Condition, 260. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 265. 30. Ibid., 260. 31. Ibid., 264. 32. Ibid., 249–50. 33. Ibid., 280. 34. Ibid., 283. 35. Ibid., 293. 36. Ibid., 297. 37. Ibid., 314.

256

Notes to Pages 140–151

38. Ibid., 321. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 160. 41. Ibid., 42. 42. Ibid., 60. 43. The extent and anger of the extraordinary controversy surrounding Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial dwarfs almost any other par ticu lar criticism of her work; however, it would be fair to say that her analysis of the concept of the social has also invoked widespread critique, rejection, and sometimes even outrage at its implications. 44. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 16. 45. Eli Zaretsky, “Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 225. 46. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1984), 180. 47. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 15. 48. Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 205. 49. Arendt, The Human Condition, 5. 50. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 472. 51. Ibid., 438. 52. Ibid., 317. 53. Margaret Canovan, “The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Arendt’s ‘Popu lism,’ ” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 405. 54. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466. 55. Ibid., 467. 56. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 22. 57. Ibid., 26. 58. Ibid., 31. 59. Ibid., 33. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 116. 62. Ibid., 52. 63. Ibid., 48. 64. Ibid., 49. 65. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1969), 39. 66. Ibid., 39. 67. Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 261. 68. Ibid., 270. 69. Arendt, The Human Condition, 42. 70. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 151–163

257

71. Ibid., 40–43. 72. Ibid., 43. 73. Ibid., 45. 74. Hannah Arendt, “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005). 75. Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between Past and Future, ed. Jerome Kohn (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 262. 76. Ibid., 263. 77. Arendt, “The Ivory Tower,” 194. Although it is worth pointing out that this overdramatization of the threat of scientific planning was in no way unique to Arendt in the postwar period, particularly among liberal writers who wrote against the totalitarianisms either of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, e.g., thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, and Jacob Talmon. 78. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 159. 79. Britain achieved nuclear status in the early 1950s, with France following around a decade later, and China and Israel both close on its heels with nuclear capability by the early to mid-1960s. With the US and the USSR, these nations were the only states to possess nuclear weapons for the period in which Arendt was writing on these issues, and their stockpiles were in the tens (or hundreds for the UK) rather than the tens of thousands that both superpower nations had at hand. 80. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 150. 81. Vladimir Dedijer, “The Poor Man’s Power,” in Unless Peace Comes, ed. Nigel Calder (London: Allen Lane, 1965), 36. 82. Arendt, “On Violence,” 110–11. 83. Ibid., 111. 84. Ibid., 153. 85. Ibid., 154. 86. Ibid. 87. Arendt, The Human Condition, 69. 88. Ibid. 89. Hannah Arendt, “Revolution—Spurious and Genuine,” Speeches and Writings File— Essays and Lectures—, 1964, 0003, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 90. Arendt, The Human Condition, 40–43.

Chapter 6 1. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 102. 2. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 146. 3. Ibid., 147–48. 4. Ibid., 146. 5. Ibid., 154. 6. Ibid., 147–48. 7. Ibid., 154.

258

Notes to Pages 163–171

8. Hannah Arendt, marginalia in Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, Hannah Arendt Centre, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 96. 9. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 158–59. 10. Ibid., 159. 11. Ibid., 159–60. 12. Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, January 16, 1966, in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 621. 13. Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, February 19, 1966, in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 627. 14. Hannah Arendt, letter to Mary McCarthy, in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1996), 181–82. 15. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 19. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Ibid., 21. 18. Ibid., 17–18. 19. Ibid., 18. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Ibid., 27. 22. Ibid., 42. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. Ibid., 43. 28. Ibid., 45–46. 29. Hannah Arendt, “Letter to Jaspers, September 14, 1966,” Correspondence, Vietnam War—1965–June 1968, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 30. See, for instance, J. M. Bernstein, “Promising and Civil Disobedience: Arendt’s Political Modernism,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Verity Smith, “Dissent in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Patriotism,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Joan Cocks, “On Commonality, Nationalism, and Violence: Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, and Frantz Fanon,” in Women in German Yearbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Tal Correm, “Ethics Beyond Strug gle: Fanon, Gandhi, and Arendt on Violence, Politics, and Humanism,” Listening 50 (Winter 2015). 31. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 74. 32. Arendt was extremely concerned with the prevalence of McCarthyism in the years following the war, not least because her husband, Heinrich Blücher, had taken part in the Sparta-

Notes to Pages 171–178

259

cist rebellion in Germany in 1919 and thus was considered suspicious as a potential communist threat. 33. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 55. 34. Ibid., 76. 35. Ibid., 75. 36. Ibid. 37. Bernstein, “Promising and Civil Disobedience,” 123. 38. Jennifer Ring, “The Pariah as Hero: Hannah Arendt’s Political Actor,” Political Theory 19, no. 3 (August 1991): 449. 39. Ibid., 449–50. 40. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 64. 41. Ibid., 80. 42. Ibid., 85. 43. Ibid., 88. 44. Ibid., 83. 45. Bernstein, “Promising and Civil Disobedience,” 115–16. 46. Ibid., 127. 47. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 99. 48. Ibid., 100. 49. Ibid., 101. 50. Ibid.. 51. Smith, “Dissent in Dark Times,” 109. 52. Ibid., 105–12, 111–12. 53. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 288. 54. Ibid. 55. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 96. 56. Ibid., 101–2. 57. Ibid., 101. 58. Correm, “Ethics Beyond Struggle,” 27. 59. Cocks, “On Commonality, Nationalism, and Violence,” 44. 60. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 290. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 174. 64. Richard H. King, “American Dilemmas, European Experiences,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1997): 330. 65. The Chicago protests were halted in the face of likely rioting. 66. Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 58. 67. Ibid. 68. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” [1963], Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document _ images /undecided/630416-019.pdf. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid.

260

Notes to Pages 178–187

72. Martin Luther King Jr., “Nonviolence and Racial Justice” [1957], in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 7. 73. Martin Luther King Jr., “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 45. 74. King, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” 7. 75. Ibid., 7–8. 76. Ibid., 7. 77. Martin Luther King Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 60. 78. Ibid. 79. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Social Organization of Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 33. 80. King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 39. 81. Ibid., 60. 82. Tom Wells, “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the United States,” in The Vietnam War, ed. Peter Lowe (London: Macmillan, 1998), 131–32. 83. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, eds., Black Power in the Sixties (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 84. James Button, Black Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 161. 85. James Forman, “Afro-Americana (The Black Manifesto),” Africa Today 16, no.  4 (1969): 22. 86. Ibid., 21. 87. Ibid., 22. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 21, 22, 24. 90. Ibid., 24. 91. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 64. 92. Arendt, “On Violence,” 173, 121. 93. Ibid., 173. 94. Ibid., 172–73. 95. Ibid., 173. 96. Ibid., 121. 97. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 75. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 76–77. 100. Ibid., 77. 101. Ibid., 89. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 80. 104. Ibid., 81. 105. Ibid., 83. 106. Ibid., 84, 85.

Notes to Pages 188–196

261

107. Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, February 19, 1965, in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 583. 108. Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 206. 109. Ibid., 206–7. 110. Arendt, “On Violence,” 116. 111. Ibid., 122–23. 112. Ibid., 166. 113. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon,” Contemporary Political Theory 7, no 1 (2008): 93–94. 114. Ibid. 115. Arendt, “On Violence,” 162–63. 116. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 18 117. Ibid., 35. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 80. 120. Ibid., 83. 121. Ibid., 88. 122. Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 4. 123. Ibid., 10. 124. Ibid., 4. 125. Ibid., 14. 126. Ibid., 15. 127. Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 259. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 257. 130. Richard King, Arendt and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 274. 131. Arendt, cited in King, Arendt and America, 274. 132. King, Arendt and America, 274. 133. Arendt, “On Violence,” 201–2. 134. Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 135. Ibid., 122. 136. Ibid., 1–2. 137. Michael D. Burroughs, “Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’ and White Ignorance,” Critical Philosophy of Race 3, no. 1 (2015): 64. 138. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgement, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 197. 139. Ibid., 212. 140. Ibid., 204. 141. Ibid., 205. 142. Ibid., 206.

262

Notes to Pages 196–210

143. Ibid. 144. Arendt, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 109, 316. 145. James Bohman, “The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendt’s ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’ ” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: Massachu setts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 59. 146. Ibid., 76. 147. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006).

Chapter 7 1. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 138. 2. Ibid., 165. 3. Seyla Benhabib, “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space,” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 2 (1993); John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy,” Polity 20, no. 1 (1987). 4. Debra Hawhee, “Agonism and Arete,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 3 (2002): 185–86. 5. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 82. 6. Ibid., xi. 7. Ibid., x. 8. George Kateb, “Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1984), 38. 10. Ibid., 39. 11. Dana Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil, Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 275. 12. Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 44. Arendt believed that the relationship posited between speech and politics in Aristotle’s work was representative of the nature of Athenian politics as it was in practice, and that he drew on real-life politics in order to construct his ideal theory of politics. 13. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 27. 14. Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 280. 15. Ibid., 290. 16. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 6. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 346. 19. Ibid., 343. 20. Ibid., 346. 21. Ibid., 336. 22. Benhabib, “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space,” 103.

Notes to Pages 210–224

263

23. Ibid., 106. 24. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy,” 85–86. 25. Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Situating Arendt on Action and Politics,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 535. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 538. 28. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 29. James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vols. I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 30. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 3. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 10. 35. Ibid., 13. 36. Ibid., 15. 37. Ibid., 9. 38. Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 34–35. 39. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 202. 40. Ibid., 118–19. 41. Ibid., 119. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 119–20. 45. Ibid., 123. 46. Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 18–19. 47. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 205. 48. Ibid. 49. Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas and the Politics of Home,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 271. 50. Ibid., 273. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 271. 53. Ibid. 54. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), xi. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 2. 57. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 3. 58. Mouffe, Agonistics, 6. 59. Ibid., 10. 60. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 1–2. 61. Ibid., 6. 62. Ibid., 2.

264

Notes to Pages 224–241

63. Ibid., 4. 64. Ibid., 90. 65. Ibid., 104. 66. Mouffe, Agonistics, 7. 67. Ibid., 9. 68. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 105. 69. Ibid., 153. 70. Danielle Allen, “Law’s Necessary Forcefulness: Ralph Ellison vs. Hannah Arendt on the Battle of Little Rock,” Oklahoma City University Law Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 857–96. 71. Seyla Benhabib, “Towards a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 73. 72. Ibid., 74. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 84. 75. Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 143. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 144. 79. Ibid., 143. 80. Ibid., 16. 81. Ibid., 144. 82. Ibid., 15. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 15–16. 86. Ibid., 72, 70. 87. Ibid., 72, 70. 88. Ibid., 114. 89. Ibid., 91. 90. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 141. 91. Ibid., 122. 92. Jane Mansbridge, “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 46. 93. Ibid., 47. 94. Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006): 61.

BIBLIOGR APHY

Works by Arendt Unpublished Arendt, Hannah. “Letter to Jaspers, September 14, 1966.” Correspondence, Vietnam War— 1965–June 1968. The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. “Letter to Mr Mirelman, December 24, 1956.” Correspondence— General—McQ-Mit miscellaneous. The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. “Letter to William Zukerman, November  1, 1953.” Correspondence—Publishers— Jewish Newsletter 1950–1961. The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. “Reply to J. M. Cameron’s review of Between Past and Future and Men in Dark Times.” Speeches and Writings File—Essays and Lectures, 1969. The Hannah Arendt Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. “Revolution—Spurious and Genuine.” Speeches and Writings File—Essays and Lectures, 1964. The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. “Thomas Hobbes Lecture.” History of Political Theory Lectures, University of California, Courses, Subject File, 1949–75, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. Marginalia in Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Published Arendt, Hannah. “Antisemitism.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. “The Concept of History.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man.” In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin, 1993. ———. “The Crisis in Education.” In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin, 2006. ———. “The Crisis of Zionism.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin, 1994. ———. “The End of Tradition.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “From Hegel to Marx.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005.

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Bibliography

———. “Home to Roost.” In Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. ———. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. “The Image of Hell.” In Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “Introduction into Politics.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense.” In Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. “The Jewish War That Isn’t Happening.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. “Lying in Politics.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. ———. “New Palestine Party.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. “On Violence.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt, 1968. ———. “[The Origins of Totalitarianism] A Reply.” Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (1953). ———. “The Political Organization of the Jewish People.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. “Power Politics Triumphs.” In Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. Rahel Varnhagen. Munich: Piper, 1981. ———. “Reflections on Little Rock.” In Responsibility and Judgement, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. ———. “Socrates.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. ———. “Tradition and the Modern Age.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. “The Tradition of Political Thought.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “Understanding and Politics.” In Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. “A Way Towards the Reconciliation of Peoples.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. “We Refugees.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

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———. “What Is Authority?” In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin, 2006. ———. “What Is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin, 2006. ———. “Zionism Reconsidered.” In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Arendt, Hannah, and Karl Jaspers. Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Arendt, Hannah, and Mary McCarthy. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman. San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1996.

Other Works Cited Allen, Danielle. “Law’s Necessary Forcefulness: Ralph Ellison vs. Hannah Arendt on the Battle of Little Rock.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 857–96. Arato, Andrew, and Jean Cohen. “Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt.” Constellations 16, no. 2 (2009): 307–30. Ashcroft, Caroline. “Jewishness and the Problem of Nationalism: A Genealogy of Arendt’s Early Political Thought.” Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 2 (2017): 421–49. Barnouw, Dagmar. Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Benhabib, Seyla. Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. ———. “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space.” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 2 (1993): 97–114. ———. “Hannah Arendt’s Political Engagements.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, 55–62. ———. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. ———. “ Towards a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.” In Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 67–94. Bernasconi, Robert. “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions.” Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 3–24. Bernstein, J. M. “Promising and Civil Disobedience: Arendt’s Political Modernism.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Bohman, James. “The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendt’s ‘Reflections on Little Rock.’ ” In Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997, 53–80. Breen, Keith. “Violence and Power: A Critique of Hannah Arendt on ‘the Political.’ ” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 3 (2007), 343–72. Burroughs, Michael D. “Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’ and White Ignorance.” Critical Philosophy of Race 3, no. 1 (2015): 52–78. Butler, Judith. “I Merely Belong to Them.” London Review of Books 29, no. 9 (May 2007). http:// www.lrb.co.uk /v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them. Button, James. Black Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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INDEX

action, 3–4, 6, 21–22, 43, 52, 56, 90, 92, 94, 112, 159, 203, 210–12, 237; forms of, 45–46, 93; as distinct from power, 42, 44, 105, 130; and the social, 136, 145, 148, 151, 159; and worldliness, 20, 96, 129; and violence, 10, 13, 18, 38, 48, 154, 157–58, 204. See also the aesthetic, agonism, the American Revolution, ancient Greece, civil disobedience, contemplation, fabrication, freedom, the Jewish people, nonviolence, political space, revolution, power, science, work, worldliness the aesthetic: as political, 207; and its relationship to action, 210 agonism, 3, 8, 10, 15, 19, 20, 54, 84–87, 105, 203–4, 217; and action, 46–47, 86, 130, 211; the agon, 205, 207; in ancient Greece, 108; and antagonism, 226, 234; and freedom, 216; and plurality, 230; against the social, 137; and speech, 206, 216 American Revolution, 21, 40, 57, 106, 128–29, 157; and action, 116, 118, 120–22, 126; and power, 122, 156–57; Rome’s influence in, 100, 116, 120–21; and violence, 115 122. See also war, work ancient Greece, 2, 7–8, 22, 28, 103, 156; and the Greek understanding of action, 2, 10, 34, 44, 85–88, 90–93; and freedom, 107; and nomos, 101. See also agonism, speech, tradition, will anti-Semitism, 60, 68, 157 Aristotle, 87–88, 90, 208 art: as a creation of work, 52–53, 100, 128. See also the aesthetic augmentation, 125–26, 131, 174, 217; in the American Constitution, 122; as a type of making, 103, 105

Begin, Menachem, 61, 73 behaviorism, 142, 150–52 Benhabib, Seyla, 2, 7, 45–46, 86, 205–6, 210–11, 217, 226–29, 233 Bernasconi, Robert, 193 Bernstein, J. M., 121, 174 “The Black Manifesto,” 176 Black Panther Party, 179 Black Power, 47, 176, 180, 183, 187, 194, 198, 201 Blücher, Heinrich, 258 Blumenfeld, Kurt, 59, 63 Bodin, Jean, 28–29, 33 Canovan, Margaret, 40, 69, 88, 146, 204 capitalism, 32, 35, 138; anti- capitalism, 180 Christianity, 29, 138; Christian idea of freedom, 34–35 Cicero, 29, 79, 119 civil disobedience, 171; and action, 173, 188, 190; and the role of conscience, 177, 179, 182, 184; and constitutionalism, 186; as public act, 172; as revolutionary act, 170, 189; and sovereignty, 175; in the United States, 21, 187. See also constitutionalism, law common sense, 3, 55–56, 78–79, 90, 99, 139 constitutionalism, 4, 27, 115–16, 119–20, 191; and civil disobedience, 170–71, 176, 185; and power, 173; and racial equality, 197; in the United States, 123, 129; and violence, 124–25, 131. See also civil disobedience contemplation: in contrast to action, 2, 36–37, 44, 88, 129 courage as a political virtue, 8

272

Index

Degryse, Annelies, 30, 33, 135 democracy: deliberative democracy, 227; democratic iterations, 228; radical democracy, 221; representative democracy, 225. See also legitimacy Disch, Lisa, 118–19 Eichmann, Adolf, 41, 145, 147, 148 Enlightenment, 25; and the Jewish people, 61, 68–69, 70, 82 equality, 3, 6, 68, 181; anti-elitism, 173; inequality, 149, 200; in the United States, 116. See also constitutionalism fabrication: and its relationship to action, 51, 103; in Greek politics, 87, 90–91; in authentic politics, 4, 68, 94, 96–97, 103–5, 115, 121–26, 158, 238, 241; and process, 113; and power, 95; and totalitarianism, 39; and violence, 50–51, 53–55, 104–5, 114, 124–25. See also science, work Fanon, Frantz, 5, 179, 189–90 Forman, James, 176, 181, 190 founding, 56, 115; in Roman politics, 91, 96 Frazer, Elizabeth, 5–6, 189 freedom, 2–4, 29, 34–36, 39, 46, 49, 55, 57, 93, 108, 143, 203, 208; and action, 43, 121, 213; four concepts of freedom, 34–35. See also agonism, ancient Greece, Christianity, revolution, sovereignty, totalitarianism French Revolution, 21, 37, 58, 106, 116, 118–19, 122, 126–28, 133–34, 140–41, 154; and public happiness, 119; and sovereignty, 27–28; and violence, 109–15. See also labor, plurality, poverty, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sovereignty Galilei, Galileo, 138 Gandhi, Mohandas, 177, 185 Gines, Kathryn, 194, 197 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 45, 86, 144, 209, 216, 223 Hammer, Dean, 91, 95, 97 Hegel, G. F. W., 35, 108, 127 Heidegger, Martin, 85 Herzl, Theodor, 60, 72–74 Herzog, Annabel, 6

Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 20, 28–29, 31–32, 35–36, 49, 135, 142; as bourgeois phi losopher, 30–31, 33; theory of sovereignty, 32–38; as precursor to totalitarian politics, 32–33, 38, 135 on political violence, 33, 38. See also law, realism Honig, Bonnie, 2, 205, 217–22 The Human Condition, 7, 13, 33, 44, 49, 53–54, 83–85, 89–90, 135–36, 212, 214, 218, 220 Hutchings, Kimberly, 5, 6, 189 Ihud, 81 imperialism, 36, 38–39 Isaac, Jeffrey C., 7, 210–11 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 63, 73 Jaspers, Karl, 8, 164, 168 Jewish army, 7, 64–67, 71, 78; the Jewish Brigade, 64; and widespread participation, 60–62, 66–67; and violence, 61, 66–68, 72–77, 82–83. See also war Jewish people, 59, 72; and action, 75–76; the pariah/parvenu status of modern Jews, 80. See also anti-Semitism, the Enlightenment, nationalism, recognition Kateb, George, 78–79, 207 Keedus, Liisi, 29 Kierkegaard, Søren, 36 King Jr., Martin Luther, 168, 176–79, 180–84, 193 labor, 10, 17, 43–44, 49–51, 53, 99, 130; in the French Revolution, 111–114, 140–42; in Marxist theory, 36; and the violence of labor, 104–5, 143, 239–40 law, 4, 42, 49, 52, 93, 226, 237–38; and civil disobedience, 171–75, 178, 181, 184–89, 190–91, 195, and Thomas Hobbes, 30, 32; as Roman lex, 11, 34, 90, 101–3, 134; as Greek nomos, 11, 87, 90–92; and power, 120; as product of making, 51, 87, 98, 101–2; and totalitarian lawlessness, 39; in the United States, 120–21. See also ancient Greece Lazare, Bernard, 59–60 legitimacy, 62, 78, 171, 185–86, 202–4, 213; and democracy, 173, 226–29; as distinct

Index from justification, 9, 133; and political power, 158; and violence, 77 liberalism, 66, 70, 224–25, 230–31 Macpherson, C. B., 30, 135 Magnes, Judah, 73, 80–81 making. See fabrication, work Malcolm X, 179 Markell, Patchen, 53, 89, 220 Marx, Karl, 36, 127, 140; and making history, 204; and modern intellectual revolution, 108. See also labor mass society, 137, 146 McGowan, John, 8–10, 78 Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 19, 205, 217, 222–26, 234 natality, 49, 57, 78–79, 110, 203 nationalism: and Jewishness, 60, 66, 70, 73–75; in the United States, 169, 200. See also Zionism nature, 43, 137, 139, 151; laws of, 39, and the social, 112–14, 147, 193; and modern science, 139, 141; against the political, 114; and the violence of the natural, 50, 54, 104–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 214–15 nonviolence: and the authenticity of political action, 109; as a political tactic, 179, 186 Norton, Anne, 193 “On Violence,” 4–12, 38, 41, 48–49, 105, 167, 176 O’Sullivan, Noel, 85 Owens, Patricia, 8, 10–11, 13, 102–3 pacifism, 6 Parekh, Bhikhu, 5, 85, 95, 207 participation, 3, 40, 42, 86, 156, 174, 181, 201, 227, 230–31. See also Jewish army phenomenology, 5, 202 Pitkin, Hanna, 144, 209 Plato, 2, 28, 88, 90, 95, 108 plurality, 3, 17–18, 27, 43–44, 48, 50–51, 57, 74–76, 78–80, 108, 120, 133, 198, 208, 213, 233; and French Revolution, 111–12, 141; and the social, 136–37, 238; and sovereignty, 32, 40, 141–43, 145, 175, 236. See also agonism poetry: and tradition, 100 political space, 3, 6, 10, 12, 48, 54–58, 72, 89, 94–95, 110, 119, 130–31, 143, 155, 158–59,

273

199, 202–9, 218–19, 237; and action, 15, 53, 79, 132, 203, 205; in Roman politics, 91–92, 96–98, 101–2 poverty, 118, 135, 149; and the French Revolution, 111–12, 114–16 power, 3–4, 15, 56, 78–79, 93–95, 98, 111, 129, 209–10; forms of power, 47, 173, 237; as fundamental to the political, 42–43, 173, 212, 238; and violence, 12, 42, 49, 77, 82, 88, 131, 134, 167, 201. See also action, American Revolution, constitutionalism, fabrication, law, legitimacy, Roman Republic, sovereignty, speech, student protests process-thinking, 35, 108, 113, 127, 130, 138–41, 153, 158–59, 201, 214–15, 236, 239; and totalitarianism, 145. See also fabrication, science, sovereignty promising, 27, 46, 48, 118, 121, 122, 172 public happiness, 117. See also French Revolution public sphere, 43, 46, 48, 50, 87, 135–37, 199, 207, 216, 220–21, 227–28, 233–34, 239; the Jewish public sphere, 70; the public/ private distinction, 155, 196, 219, 235. See also civil disobedience race and racism, 145, 169, 180, 191–93, 198; in the United States, 195–96, 200. See also the social Rawls, John, 1, 218, 221, 223, 226, 229–30 realism, 1, 5, 15, 48, 55, 77, 216, 235; in Thomas Hobbes, 30 reason, 140, 142; rationality, 45–46, 50; rationalization, 68, 150, 153–54, 201. See also process-thinking, science recognition 46, 56, 79–82, 86, 142, 175, 208, 214, 232; Jewish identity, 66, 68–72, 75–77 “Reflections on Little Rock,” 135, 193, 195 Reformation, 138 reification, 99. See also worldliness republicanism, 47, 115, 162. See also constitutionalism revolution, 16, 56, 132, 214; and action, 114; and freedom, 109; and liberation from, 118; and publicity, 192; and violence, 109–10, 125, 189–91. See also American Revolution, civil disobedience, French Revolution, Karl Marx, revolutionary councils, science, violence, war

274

Index

revolutionary councils, 128, 156, 210; in the United States, 117, 119, 127 rights, 19–20, 25, 116–17, 205, 226–29, 231 Roman Republic, 8, 10, 84, 90, 106; and action, 98, 102, 104; and power, 42; and tradition, 107; and its influence in the United States, 121, 129; and worldliness, 104. See also the American Revolution, founding, political space, tradition, will Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: and the French Revolution, 37, and sovereignty, 27–28 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 179, 189 Schmitt, Carl, 30, 163, 222–23 science: against action, 139, 140; economic science, 150, 152; as a kind of fabrication, 140; the scientific revolution, 114, 138–39. See also nature, process-thinking, reason self-defense, 57 Shklar, Judith, 37, 120 Sitton, John, 119, 206, 210 SNCC, 177, 179 social contract, 125, 191; dissent and consent, 174, 192; in the United States, 117 the social, 17–18, 21, 111–12, 126, 144–47, 204, 210, 215, 219, 220, 222, 238–40; and the breakdown of public/private distinction, 137–42, 154–55; and race, 192–200; and violence, 132, 134–37, 141–44, 149–51, 153–54, 158–60, 200. See also action, agonism, nature, plurality, sovereignty, totalitarianism sovereignty, 1–2, 9, 17, 20, 23, 29, 57, 75, 77, 88, 105, 225, 227, 240–41; and expansionism, 38, 42, 154; and freedom, 35; in the French Revolution, 34, 127; and power, 26–28, 32, 34, 39–40; and process-thinking, 214, 239; and the social, 135, 141–46, 158, 238; and sovereign violence, 19, 26, 42–43, 135, 141–44, 154, 158–59, 238; in the United States, 119, 126, 175, 192, 200. See also civil disobedience, French Revolution, Thomas Hobbes, plurality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, totalitarianism, tyranny speech, 46, 48, 56, 83, 156, 159, 233; in ancient Greece, 87; and discursive conflict, 215; communicative consensus, 209; and power, 210; rhetorical struggle, 205; speech acts, 100. See also agonism statelessness, 25, 245

student protests in the United States; and power, 188 technology: and violence, 152–53, 162–64 totalitarianism, 20, 23–25, 32–33, 41, 57, 78, 89, 204; and the collapse of freedom, 40; and the social, 145–46, 149, 238–39; and sovereignty, 26, 38–42, 142, 146; and violence, 39, 47, 51, 57, 143, 204. See also fabrication, Hobbes, Thomas, law, process-thinking tradition, 16, 23–26, 37, 51, 57, 68, 80, 82, 100, 125, 210; in ancient Greece, 11, 88–89, 103, 108; in Rome, 11, 84, 96–103, 108, 119–22, 128–29, 156–57; the tradition of political thought, 1–2, 28–29, 32, 34, 36–37, 48, 88, 108, 117, 119, 210; in the United States, 104, 119–22, 125, 128–29, 176, 187. See also poetry, Roman Republic, worldliness Tsao, Roy, 90, 91, 103 Tully, James, 86, 217 tyranny, 23, 26–27, 32–33, 40–42, 51, 57, 145, 148–49, 226; and sovereignty, 36 United States, 162, 166; and civil rights movement, 47, 168, 177, 186, 189, 191, 194; constitutionalism, 121. See also civil disobedience, American Revolution, augmentation, civil disobedience, constitutionalism, equality, law, nationalism, revolutionary councils, Roman Republic, social contract, tradition, violence, war, work Varnhagen, Rahel, 79–80 Vietnam War, 150, 153, 168 Villa, Dana, 85, 208 violence, 1–7, 14–17, 41–43, 49, 55, 82, 123, 130–32, 155–58, 160, 204–5, 233–41; forms of, 9–10, 12–13, 50–52, 239; and instrumentality, 6, 15, 18, 48, 53–54, 57, 155, 203, 205; as political activity, 6, 8–13, 18–19, 57–58, 66, 77, 124, 126, 133–35, 157–58, 200, 211; in the United States, 166, 183, 199–201; unpolitical or antipolitical violence, 4–5, 18, 38, 47–48, 73, 114, 152–55. See also action, American Revolution, constitutionalism, fabrication, French Revolution, Thomas Hobbes,

Index Jewish army, labor, legitimacy, Martin Luther King Jr., nature, power, revolution, the social, sovereignty, totalitarianism, work war, 8, 10–11, 105; and American Revolution, 109, 123–24; and Jewish army, 60, 62–67, 71, 74–76; nuclear war, 152–54, 162–65; and Rome, 134; the Vietnam War, 150, 154, 161, 165–68, 201 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 71 Weber, Max, 1 Weizmann, Chaim, 61 will: in ancient Greece and Rome, 34 work, 10, 17, 43, 50, 53–56, 76, 99, 237; and action, 18, 44, 51–54, 57, 84, 90, 100, 104,

275

125; in the American Revolution, 116; and the political, 18, 51–52, 211–13 and violence, 50, 54, 103–6, 122–26, 129–30. See also art, fabrication worldlessness, 149 worldliness, 5, 52–54, 69, 126, 128–30, 156, 212; as counter to action, 4, 18, 56; and tradition, 101–2, 105, 128; See also action, Roman Republic Young, Iris Marion, 8–9 Zionism, 24, 59, 63, 76–77; American Zionist Organization, 73; German Zionist Organization, 24, 60; Revisionism, 73–74, 81

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

When I came across Arendt’s work for the first time as an undergraduate student at Cambridge, I was immediately taken with her writing and way of thinking, which was to my mind something rather extraordinary. As a result, Arendt would some years later become the focus of my research, and thus this project has been the product of more than ten years of work, and I have many, many people to thank over that time. At Cambridge, Helen Thompson and David Runciman are among the most inspirational teachers I’ve ever known, and to Helen in particular I owe a great deal: her teaching has unquestionably and fundamentally shaped the way I think about political questions. However, first and foremost my deepest thanks must go to Duncan Kelly, whose advice and support throughout this project has been indispensable and unfailingly insightful, and to whom I am deeply grateful. I must also extend my gratitude to Cambridge University for its generous financial support during my doctoral study, without which I would not have been able to undertake the research that this book would ultimately grow out of. Two former teachers, then colleagues, at Queen Mary University of London have also been impor tant and valued sources of guidance and have both provided feedback on this work in various ways: Richard Bourke and Georgios Varouxakis, and to them I give my thanks. To my friends and colleagues in the history of political thought whether in London, Cambridge, or further afield—Max Skjönsberg, Signy Gutnick Allen, Jessica Patterson, Julia Nicholls, Adela Halo, Alasia Nuti, Joanne Paul, and many others—thank you for your input, advice, and our discussions, all of which have played a part, direct or indirect, in writing this book. Numerous individuals at journals and conferences have helped to shape aspects of this work, and particular thanks go to the editors and readers at Modern Intellectual History and History of European Ideas, and to comments from attendees at the Western Political Science Association Conference 2015, “Resistance in Intellectual History,” at the University of Sussex, the Cambridge Intellectual History

278

Acknowledgments

Seminar, the Institute of Historical Research History of Political Ideas Seminar, and the Politics and International Studies Colloquium at Cambridge, among others. There are many people whom I must thank simply for their continued and deeply valued friendship: Sonja, Hannah, Fionnuala, Chantelle, Graham, Narin, Alys, Gemma, Mark, Kathryn, Taryn, and Zoe. My gratitude and love to my family, particularly my mother, Margaret Ashcroft, for the opportunities she has given me and for her endless confidence in me. Finally, my love and thanks go to Joby, who has been a support in all matters non-Arendt over the whole project, and to Harrison, who has been part of our lives for a rather shorter time, but who has immeasurably enriched the final months of writing this book.