(AMY ALLEN) Solidarity After Identity - Hannah Arendt and The Power of Feminist Theory

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Amy Allen
Solidarity after identity

politics: Hannah Arendt and
the power of feminist theory
Abstract This paper argues that Hannah Arendts political theory offers
key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement the
power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were
grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions
of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and
repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity
altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (frag-
mented) non-identity is a false opposition, and the Arendtian account of
solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus,
Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity
politics feminist theory in good stead.
Key words Hannah Arendt feminist theory identity politics power

solidarity
In what follows, I argue that an appropriation of certain aspects of

Hannah Arendts political theory can provide feminists with key insights
into the power that binds together an oppositional social movement,
such as the feminist movement, and that fosters coalitions between
feminism and other social struggles, such as the struggles against racism
and heterosexism. I shall contend that an Arendtian analysis of this
modality of power that is, of solidarity can help us find a way out
of the impasse into which we have been led by current debates over
identity and identity politics. By making such an argument, I am tread-
ing on dangerous, and continually shifting, ground. For although there
has recently been something of an Arendt renaissance among feminist
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 25 no 1 pp. 97118

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (1)
theorists,1 the implications of her political theory for oppositional social
movements such as feminism are far from clear. Arendt for the most part
evaded the woman question, steadfastly refused to identify herself with
the womens liberation movement, and relegated any discussion of
women and their position in the vita activa to the footnotes of her monu-
mental work, The Human Condition. And although she did not evade
what we might call the race question, the way she dealt with it may well
make her admirers wish that she had: her extremely negative portrayal
of the black student movement in America (Arendt, 1969: 44) and her
public opposition to federally enforced desegregation in the American
south (Arendt, 1959)2 make it difficult to see how her political theory
can have anything productive to say to theorists who are interested in
challenging racism. Finally, given Arendts apparent desire to keep the
body and its needs, wants and desires out of the public political sphere
and in the private world of labor, it is easy to conclude that Arendt tacitly
rejects the possibility of a politics of sexuality.3
These troubling aspects of Arendts work are no doubt conceptually
related. In each case, Arendts positioning vis-a-vis three of the most
important and intricately linked social movements of our time stems
precisely from their social character. Given her sharp distinction between
the public sphere of political action and the private sphere of necessity,
and her disdain for the eclipse of the political and the rise of the social
that have come about as a result of bringing so-called private concerns
into the realm of public political debate, it is difficult to see how Arendts
work can be brought to bear on a discussion of these social movements.
These difficulties might well be intractable if my goal here were to
evaluate the implications of Arendts work as a whole from the perspec-
tive of feminist theory, critical race theory, or queer theory, or if it were
to explore the nascent feminism, critical race theory, or queer theory in
her work. Although these might be interesting and important ways of
thinking about her work, I intend to approach the intersection of Arendt
and feminist theory from another direction. My focus is on the theor-
etical resources that we can cull from Arendts work that might then be
put to use in a feminist critical theory of power designed to illuminate
the intersecting axes of domination of gender, race, class and sexuality,
and to highlight the possibilities for individual and collective resistance
to such domination.4 Specifically, I argue that Arendt offers us a view of
power that can enable us to thematize the solidary ties that bind
members of social movements together and thus make collective resist-
ance possible. Moreover, I shall argue that an Arendtian account of soli-
darity5 is particularly appealing because it does not rely on essentialist
and, thus, exclusionary notions of group identity. Instead, the account
of solidarity that can be culled from Arendts work grows out of the
dialectical interplay between identity and non-identity, between equality
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Allen: Arendt and feminist theory
and distinction, that is at the heart of Arendts understanding of politi-
cal life.
The need to theorize collectivities without appealing to exclusionary
identity categories has become more and more urgent as the identity
politics debate has heated up and dragged on. In the first section, I argue
that this debate has led to an impasse: on the one hand, we are tempted
to embrace identity categories, such as the category of women, so that
we can talk about the common experiences and shared goals that bring
the members of the feminist movement together, and on the other hand,
we are urged to reject any and all identity categories because of their
exclusionary and repressive nature. Thus, we are compelled to choose
between (exclusionary) identity and (fragmented) non-identity, neither
of which is a tenable option. In the second section, I turn to feminist
assessments of Arendts work and argue that feminists have tended to
interpret her in terms of this identity/non-identity opposition. Those
who read her work through the lens of identity categories either criticize
or praise Arendt for being false or true to her identity as a woman.
In contrast, those who read her from the perspective of non-identity
conclude that Arendt rejects all identity categories in favor of an open-
ended, non-repressive, non-identitarian view of politics. I argue that
each of these readings misses the dialectical nature of Arendts account
of group identity; thus, neither captures Arendts position accurately.
Furthermore, each remains stuck in the terms of the identity politics
debate. Once we move beyond the terms of this debate, we can see that
Arendt operates with a dialectical understanding of collectivities that is
predicated on a mediated conception of group identity. Finally, I draw
on this interpretation to sketch out an Arendtian account of solidarity.
The limits of identity politics

As the identity politics debate has heated up and dragged on, appeals to
feminist solidarity have grown increasingly problematic. Early second-
wave feminists saw no problem with brandishing the slogan sisterhood
is powerful; implicit in this slogan is an appeal to the common interests
of women, a call for a response to a shared experience (oppression) that
binds women together as sisters, in other words, an appeal to solidarity
(at least in one sense of that term).6 However, by the late 1980s the
critique of any notion of the common interests of women, the common
oppression of women, even the category of women per se, was in full
swing. In the wake of this critique, the sisterhood model of solidarity
has been shown to rely upon exclusionary notions of women or of
womens experience. In other words, the feminist critique of identity
politics seemed to necessitate a corresponding critique of solidarity.
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Yet the current debate among feminists over the uses and abuses of
identity politics has led to a critical impasse. This debate has been framed
in such a way that theorists have been offered two diametrically
opposed, and ultimately untenable, ways of thinking about identity
categories: either we embrace identity categories that are fixed, pregiven
and perhaps even natural, or we reject any and every notion of iden-
tity in favor of a theorization of multiple, shifting, open-ended processes
of identification. For the most part, feminists have contented themselves
with adopting one or other of these two options, without questioning
the way in which the opposition itself has been posed.7 The result of the
failure to question the terms of the opposition itself has made the iden-
tity politics debate seem unresolvable. Ironically, the debate is unresolv-
able in the way that it has been posed precisely because neither of these
positions can do justice to a feminism that attempts to understand the
multiple array of axes of stratification in contemporary western
societies.
This is not to deny that the fight for recognition and reclamation of
the devalued aspects of the identities of women, African-Americans, and
gays and lesbians has been an important and fruitful aspect of each of
these social movements. The shift to a politics of identity was prompted
by a dissatisfaction with earlier attempts to end sexism, racism and
heterosexism that had accepted the terms of the dominant social order
and argued that women, people of color, and gays and lesbians should
be assimilated into that order.8 Such attempts at assimilation were crit-
icized, rightly, I think, for leaving the values and standards of the domi-
nant social order untouched and thereby surreptitiously reinforcing the
privilege of a white, masculine, heterosexual view of the world. As an
alternative, theorists began to reassert and demand recognition for the
valuable and positive aspects of their oppressed and marginalized iden-
tities. So, for example, many second-wave feminists rejected so-called
equality feminism on the grounds that such an approach accepted a set
of standards that were defined by men and served the interests of men,
and, as a result, were themselves masculinist. Such feminists argued
instead for a difference feminism that would revalue and appreciate
feminine specificity.
Almost immediately, however, these appeals to a feminine, black, or
gay identity were criticized for the ways in which they repress differences
among women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians. For instance,
any affirmation of feminine specificity presumes that it is possible to talk
about the feminine, which, as Elizabeth Spelman has argued, has the
effect of making certain women rather than others paradigmatic
examples of women namely, those women who seem to have a
gender identity untainted (I use the word advisedly) by racial or class
identity (1986: 186). Although identity politics may represent an
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advance over assimilationist approaches, as Jodi Dean puts it, that
advance seems to come at the cost of difference and reflection: those
aspects of our identities that differ from those designated by our iden-
tity categories, those aspects that remain unique and particular to us as
individuals, have to be suppressed or denied (1996: 48).
The relevance of this critique of identity politics for solidarity is
readily apparent. If one understands solidarity as grounded in an essen-
tialist and, hence, repressive notion of group identity as those who
accept the sisterhood model tend to do then it seems clear that soli-
darity is also an essentialist and, hence, repressive concept. It is for these
reasons that Judith Butler, one of the most incisive and influential crit-
ics of identity and identity politics, claims that solidarity is an exclu-
sionary norm . . . that rules out the possibility of a set of actions which
disrupt the very borders of identity concepts (1990: 15). The impli-
cation of Butlers claim is that a non-repressive, non-exclusionary model
of solidarity is impossible.9 Indeed, this implication is not too surpris-
ing. Given Butlers reluctance to talk about women as a group at all
because the category of women can refer only to an undesignatable
field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a
descriptive identity category (1995: 50), it is difficult to imagine her
being willing to talk about solidarity among women.
The problem with this extension of the critique of identity politics,
however, is that if we reject solidarity altogether, as Butler does, it
becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand how oppo-
sitional social movements can formulate common goals and strive to
achieve them. Allison Weir nicely sums up the difficulties of this aspect
of Butlers position:
Solidarity . . . is rejected as a basis of feminist politics, because it excludes

the possibility of subversions or disruptions of the group identity, and,
presumably, of disruptions of group actions aimed at the achievement of
agreed-upon goals. In other words, a coalitional activist group should
refrain from affirming any solidarity or common purpose, because it might
thereby thwart its own subversion. An interesting notion, in the abstract,
but its difficult to imagine how such a group could actually get anything
done. Or why it would want to. (1996: 12930)
Ultimately, Butlers position seems to rest upon two assumptions: first,

that all group identity categories necessarily repress differences among
group members, and second, that solidarity can only be based on such
pre-given, fixed and homogenized identity categories. Thus, she writes,
the insistence in advance on coalitional unity as a goal assumes that
solidarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action (1990:
14, emphasis added). Since she assumes that solidarity must be given in
advance, as a prerequisite for political action, and since she assumes
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also that solidarity can be based only on repressive notions of group
identity, Butler concludes that solidarity comes only at a price, and that
the price is too high for us to pay. However, she fails to confront the
possibility that non-repressive group identities could be forged out of
shared political commitments and that solidarity could be achieved
through collective political action, rather than assumed in advance.10 As
I shall argue, Arendt offers us the theoretical resources for thinking
about identity and solidarity in precisely this way, a possibility that
allows us to imagine non-repressive, non-exclusionary, but solidary
forms of collectivity.
Arendt: for or against identity?

Up to now, feminists who have commented on Arendt have tended to
accept the identity/non-identity dichotomy and to interpret her work in
terms of it. Thus, although feminists have produced many interesting and
fruitful readings of her work, I contend that they have failed to utilize
some of its most powerful assets. In what follows, I examine some
examples of feminist interpretations of Arendt in terms of first the iden-
tity and then the non-identity side of the debate.11 I argue that reading
Arendt in either of these ways is unsatisfactory for two reasons: first, such
readings rest on misunderstandings of Arendts work insofar as they fail
to illuminate the dialectical nature of the relationship between identity
and non-identity that is at the very heart of her view of politics; second,
regardless of whether or not they get Arendt right, such readings remain
caught in the false antithesis between identity and non-identity.
Adrienne Rich, in her oft-quoted polemic against Arendt, offers
perhaps the paradigmatic example of reading Arendt through the lens
of feminist identity politics. From this perspective, Rich finds Arendts
monumental work, The Human Condition, woefully inadequate. Rich
faults Arendt for failing to document the withholding of women from
participation in the vita activa, the common world, and the connec-
tion of this with reproductivity (1979: 212). In Richs view, this omis-
sion is especially unforgivable because, as a woman, Arendt is expected
to speak to womens issues. Her lack of attention to such issues leads
Rich to conclude that The Human Condition embodies the tragedy of
a female mind nourished on male ideologies, and, as a result, is a lofty
and crippled book (1979: 212). Thus, for Rich, Arendts failure turns
on the fact that she is a woman who has embraced a putatively mascu-
line view of the world.12 Mary OBrien offers a similar assessment of
Arendt. She claims that Arendt is a woman who accepts the normality
and even the necessity of male supremacy, and even goes so far as to
label her a female male-supremacist (1981: 100, 9). Since Rich and
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OBrien read The Human Condition through the lens of identity, they
are able to cast Arendt as a traitor to her identity as a woman.
While Rich criticized Arendt for failing to live up to her identity,
some of Arendts admirers have read her through the lens of identity and
praised her for her nascent feminism. For instance, Nancy Hartsock
praises Arendt for the woman-friendly aspects of her concept of power.
Hartsock groups Arendt together with a group of women, feminist or
not who have written about power not as domination but as capacity
. . . as a capacity of the community as a whole, a conception of power
that, according to Hartsock, suggests that womens experience of
connection and relation have consequences for understandings of power
and may hold resources for a more liberatory understanding (1983:
253).13 By interpreting as an expression of the womanly experience of
connection and relation Arendts characterization of power as the abil-
ity to act in concert, Hartsock reads Arendt through the lens of and
perhaps even reduces her to her identity as a woman. Arendt, who
threatened to turn down her full professorship at Princeton when the
university made too much of the fact that she was the first woman to
attain that rank (see Young-Bruehl, 1982: 2723), would most likely
have resented Hartsocks interpretation.
Yet despite how Arendt herself might or might not have reacted to
these interpretations of her work, a significant problem emerges as a
result of each of these attempts to read Arendt through the lens of iden-
tity politics. In the end, each interpretation attempts to answer the
following question, aptly summarized by Mary Dietz: Is Arendt a
woman who thinks like a woman, or a woman who thinks like a man?
(1995: 23). As Dietz argues, when feminists read Arendt in terms of this
question, they assume that her concept of politics is gendered, when in
fact it is not (1995: 2932). For instance, Rich assumes that the public,
common world that Arendt theorizes as the space for action is gendered
masculine; thus, she criticizes Arendt for failing to recognize that women
have historically not been (allowed to be) a part of the (masculine)
common world. Similarly, Hartsock assumes that Arendts conception of
the power that nourishes the public realm and thus provides the
condition of possibility for action corresponds to womens experience
with power, and, thus, is gendered feminine. But Arendt herself insists
that the central concepts of the vita activa labor, work and action do
not correspond to any particular set of gendered historical or socio-
logical categories. On the contrary, in her attempt to think what we are
doing, Arendts focus is on the most elementary articulations of the
human condition . . . those activities that . . . are within the range of
every human being (1958: 5). Thus, Arendt believes that the capacity
to act in concert with others in the public sphere, which is what Arendt
calls power, is neither masculine nor feminine, but distinctively human.14
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More recent feminist assessments of Arendt have interpreted her
work from the other side of the identity politics debate, through the lens
of a deconstructive critique of identity concepts and an embrace of
difference and non-identity. For instance, Bonnie Honig finds in Arendt
a rejection of an expressive, identity-based politics (1995: 136). Honig
arrives at this interpretation through a discussion of Arendts account of
the founding of America via the Declaration of Independence. She claims
that Arendts reading of the famous phrase We hold these truths to be
self-evident emphasizes the performative we hold over the constative
self-evident truths. In this emphasis, Honig sees a performative decon-
struction of identity, akin to Nietzsches, in which there is no being
behind this doing. The doing, the performance, is everything (1995:
138).
With this performative interpretation as a guide, Honig draws atten-
tion to those aspects of Arendts work that emphasize difference and
distinction over and above sameness, identity and equality. Thus, refer-
ring to Arendts discussion of Rosa Luxemburg in Men in Dark Times,
Honig claims that Arendt admires in Luxemburg a quality that she
herself strove for: the refusal of membership, the choice of difference or
distinction over a certain kind of equality (1995: 151); she treasures
difference, even a petite diffrence, over and above . . . equality or same-
ness (1995: 153). Honig draws on this putative emphasis on difference
over sameness in order to sketch out an agonistic, performative Arendt-
ian politics whose goal is
. . . unmasking the would-be irresistible, homogeneous, constative and
univocal identity in question as a performative production, fractured, frag-
mented, ill-fitting, and incomplete, the sedimented and not at all seamless
product of a multitude of performances and behaviors, the naturalized
product of innumerable repetitions and enforcements. (1995: 154)
Indeed, Honig is dismayed that Arendt herself did not adopt the perfor-
mative, non-identitarian strategy that was already implicit in her analy-
sis of the Declaration of Independence in her correspondence with
Gerschom Scholem after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1995: 14956).
Joanne Cutting-Gray finds a similar rejection of identity and
celebration of difference in Arendts early biography of Rahel Varn-
hagen. Like Honig, Cutting-Gray emphasizes those aspects of Arendts
work that focus on difference, and attempts to draw out of these aspects
a politics of alterity. Thus, Cutting-Gray praises Arendt for realizing
that difference is our human condition, and claims that Arendts
alterity reconceived in terms of multiplicity opens the possibility for
the community of plurality, a coalitional politics based on difference
(1993: 41). This means that, according to Cutting-Gray, an Arendtian
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feminism will be most closely aligned with deconstructive critics of iden-
tity like Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell (1993: 52, n. 12).
Much of Cutting-Grays argument for this non-identitarian reading
of Arendt comes from her analysis of the following passage from The
Human Condition:
While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics,
this plurality is specifically the condition not only the conditio sine qua
non, but the conditio per quam of all political life. . . . Plurality is the
condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in
such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives,
or will live. (Arendt, 1958: 78)
Cutting-Gray interprets this passage in the following way: we are both

infinite and yet particular, possessing the paradoxical plurality of
unique beings. Paradoxical because we are indefinable, unrepre-
sentable, contingent yet particular; unique but not self-made because we
are shaped in concert with others (1993: 47). She contrasts her interpre-
tation of this passage with what she calls an essentialist concept of our
being which, as she says, is really a form of identity. The Arendtian
account of our being is to be preferred over the essentialist one, accord-
ing to Cutting-Gray, because identity reduces all to a false unity, the
projecting and controlling self; plurality multiplies our sense of the great
variety of the world and in exchange grants us our own uniqueness
(1993: 47). Thus, Cutting-Gray positions Arendt firmly on the non-
identity side of the identity politics debate.
Although the deconstructive reading has some advantages over the
earlier identitarian reading, it seems to me that it over-emphasizes
Arendts focus on difference and, thus, misses the dialectic of identity
and difference that runs through her work. For instance, Cutting-Gray
claims that, for Arendt, because all our definitions and concepts are
distinctions . . . difference is our human condition (1993: 41). However,
in the passage on which Cutting-Gray bases this interpretation, Arendt
actually says something quite different: otherness . . . is an important
aspect of plurality, the reason why all our definitions are distinctions,
why we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from
something else (Arendt, 1958: 176, emphasis added). Not difference,
but plurality is our human condition (or, more precisely, part of our
human condition), and although non-identity (otherness) is an impor-
tant aspect of plurality, it is not all that Arendt means by this term.
Plurality means that we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way
that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will
live. In other words, there is a dialectical tension between identity and
non-identity, between sameness and difference, at the very heart of
Arendts definition of plurality; since plurality is the condition of the
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possibility for political life, this dialectic is at the heart of Arendts under-
standing of politics as well.15
Honig and Cutting-Gray might object that my criticism holds them
to an unfair standard. Perhaps they are not seeking to be faithful
exegetes of Arendt; perhaps they are instead concerned with using
Arendt as a springboard for developing their own feminist critique of
identity. Honig, for one, explicitly indicates that this is how she under-
stands her project (Honig, 1995: 1367). If this is the case, then it is of
no interest if their work is faithful or unfaithful to Arendt. However,
even if we let go of faithfulness to Arendt as a criterion for a moment
and evaluate this deconstructive appropriation on its own merits, it still
comes up short. Honig finds in Arendts work a focus on difference and
plurality, not identity that provides a model for those feminisms that
seek to put woman into question rather than take that figure to signify
an identity that is always already known (1995: 160). Given the way
Honig frames her appropriation of Arendt, it is evident that she has
accepted the basic terms of the identity politics debate, according to
which the only available options are feminism based on difference and
plurality (that is, non-identity) or a feminism that attempts to signify
an identity that is always already known (that is, exclusionary identity).
But, as I argued above, neither side of the identity/non-identity debate is
ultimately fruitful for feminist theory, and feminist appropriations of
Arendts work (or anyones, for that matter) that fail to question the
terms of this opposition will ultimately founder on it. I shall argue in the
next section that paying attention to the dialectic of identity and non-
identity in Arendts account will reveal that her work has much more to
offer feminist theorists than either her critics or her admirers have yet to
realize.
Beyond identity/non-identity
In order to respond to concerns over what, if anything, can bind the
increasingly fragmented feminist movement together and link it to
related social struggles against racism and heterosexism, and yet to do
so in a way that avoids excluding and marginalizing individuals who do
not fit neatly into fixed identity categories, feminist theorists must move
beyond the terms of the identity politics debate and formulate non-
repressive, non-exclusionary conceptions of group identity. Arendts
dialectical account of equality and distinction, of commonality within
difference, offers resources for a feminist critical theory of power that
supersedes the opposition between exclusionary identity and fragmented
non-identity, and that reformulates solidarity as the result of concerted
action, rather than as a pre-given, fixed and, hence, repressive identity.16
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Thus, Arendt helps us to think about how members of oppositional
social movements can be united in a way that, far from excluding or
repressing difference, embraces and protects it.
Arendt implicitly rejects the notion that group solidarity rests on a
shared identity if that identity is understood as resting on an inherent
sameness, be it a shared essence, a shared experience of oppression, or
what have you. Indeed, for Arendt, sameness cannot be the basis for any
political action because the unitedness of many into one is basically
antipolitical; it is the very opposite of the togetherness prevailing in
political . . . communities . . . from the viewpoint of the world and the
public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are
non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences (Arendt,
1958: 21415). Arendt maintains that all communication and action in
concert would be unnecessary, even superfluous, if we were all the same:
everyone would immediately intuit the needs, wants, hopes and dreams
of others because they would be the same as ones own needs, wants,
hopes and dreams. Thus, the very fact that communication and
concerted action are necessary in political life indicates the truth of the
claim that sameness and, thus, any notion of group identity and/or soli-
darity that is predicated on an appeal to an inherent sameness is
antipolitical.
However, the flip side of this is the claim that communication and
action in concert would be impossible if we were all radically different,
if we had no commonalities whatsoever. Communication and action in
concert depend on some sort of commonality between individuals; with-
out that commonality, it would be impossible to formulate political goals
and/or to strive to achieve them.
Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the
twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they
could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor
plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them.
If men were not distinct . . . they would need neither speech nor action to
make themselves understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immedi-
ate, identical needs and wants would be enough. (Arendt, 1958: 1756)
Thus, while Arendt rejects the idea that political action can be based on
an appeal to sameness, she nonetheless insists that political action cannot
be understood at all if one abandons any and all notions of commonal-
ity among actors.
In this way, Arendt highlights the dialectical relationship between
equality and distinction, commonality within difference. All action
involves this dialectical relationship because, for Arendt, it is an
unchangeable aspect of the human condition that we are all the same,
that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone
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else who ever lived, lives, or will live (Arendt, 1958: 8). Thus, for
Arendt, action in the political sphere always involves both appearing
before our equals and revealing ourselves as unique, distinct persons;
action both individuates and establishes relationships; it sets us apart
and binds us together. For this reason, it seems clear that Arendt would
refuse to accept the terms of the identity politics debate, opting instead
for an account that stresses the dialectical relationship between iden-
tity/non-identity, commonality/difference, and equality/distinction.
However, thus far I have been concentrating on Arendts discussion
of the human condition; it is a characteristic of the human condition of
plurality that we are both set apart and bound together through action.
But, given that my concern is relating Arendts political theory to a
discussion of feminist solidarity, this is not the level of specificity in
which I am most interested. Instead of focusing on the universal
conditions under which life is given to humans on earth that is, the
level of universal humanity the identity politics debate focuses on what
Nancy Fraser calls the intermediate zone of group identity. This zone
is intermediate between the universal level of the human condition and
the particular level of the unique individual. When we focus on this zone,
we highlight people as members of collectivities or social groups with
specific cultures, histories, social practices, values, habits, forms of life,
vocabularies of self-interpretation and narrative traditions (Fraser,
1986: 428). In order to see what Arendt says about this zone of group
identity, I shall examine her more explicitly political writings; in so
doing, I shall suggest that the dialectic of commonality and difference
present in her account of the human condition is reflected in her discus-
sions of Jewish identity.17
For instance, Arendts address on accepting the Lessing Prize of the
Free City of Hamburg illuminates some of the implications of her
account of plurality and action for her conception of group identity. In
that address, Arendt claims that
. . . the basically simple principle in question here is one that is particularly
hard to understand in times of defamation and persecution: the principle
that one can resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack. Those
who reject such identifications on the part of a hostile world may feel
wonderfully superior to the world, but their superiority is then truly no
longer of this world; it is the superiority of a more or less well-equipped
cloud-cuckoo-land. (Arendt, 1968: 18, emphasis added)
The first thing to notice is that these remarks imply that the attempt to
reject all identity categories whatsoever, especially when those identities
are under attack, is profoundly antipolitical insofar as it renders all
resistance to persecution and domination impossible. To be sure,
Arendts remarks in the Lessing Address are directed not against
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 109
109
deconstructive critics of identity but against humanists who favor
assimilation over a celebration of the unique identity of oppressed and
marginalized groups (or pariah peoples, to put it in Arendtian parlance).
That this group is her target is evident when she says: for many years,
I considered the only adequate reply to the question, who are you? to
be: a Jew. That answer alone took into account the reality of persecu-
tion. As for the statement with which Nathan the Wise . . . countered
the command: Step closer, Jew the statement: I am a man I would
have considered as nothing but a grotesque and dangerous evasion of
reality (Arendt, 1968: 17). In other words, to appeal to the ideal of
humanism and respond I am a man (and not just a Jew) to the
command of a persecutor is indeed grotesque in that it rests on a seri-
ous distortion of political realities and dangerous in that such distortions
seriously undermine attempts to resist persecution. Nevertheless, it
seems to me that her critique applies equally as well to the deconstruc-
tive critique of group identity categories as it does to the humanistic
denial of it. After all, in the face of the realities of systematic domination,
the claim I am not a member of any repressive identity categories in
fact, I am not even an (identical) I is no less grotesque and dangerous
than I am a human being.
While it seems clear that Arendt would have opposed the kind of
radical deconstruction of identity that rejects any and all appeals to
group identity categories as inherently repressive and exclusionary, her
statement I am a Jew should not be taken to indicate a naive or essen-
tialist view of Jewish identity, either. For her, Jewish identity is not predi-
cated on a shared essence or even on a shared experience of oppression:
. . . when I use the word Jew I do not mean to suggest any special kind of
human being . . . [nor do I] refer to a reality burdened or marked out for
distinction by history. Rather, I was only acknowledging a political fact
through which my being a member of this group outweighed all other ques-
tions of personal identity or rather had decided them in favor of anonym-
ity, of namelessness. (Arendt, 1968: 18)
Thus, Arendt insists that one can affirm that one is a Jew without imply-
ing that being a Jew involves partaking of some fixed essence that all
Jews share. Affirming membership in an identity group is a recognition
of a political fact: as fact it is undeniable, and to attempt to deny it is
dangerous and deluded; but as political, it is resistable and, ultimately,
changeable.18
From this example, it seems clear that although Arendt emphasizes
difference, distinction and uniqueness in her account of politics, she is
unwilling to do so at the expense of any and all invocation of identity
categories. Similarly, although she embraces group identities, she is care-
ful to point out that such categories are not fixed, natural, or even
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 110
110
historically determined, but are always knit out of the fabric of differ-
ence and distinction. Sometimes political realities compel us to acknow-
ledge the political fact of certain identity categories, identities that are
under attack, and, if we wish to resist, to resist in terms of them. Arendts
refusal to understand Jewish identity in terms of an inherent sameness,
a shared essence, or even a shared history of oppression, makes it clear
that any conception of solidarity that one might find in her work would
not be predicated on a repressive and exclusionary conception of iden-
tity. This fact, together with her insistence on acknowledging the politi-
cal fact of her Jewish identity and her resolution to resist in terms of that
identity when it is under attack, indicates that her work might provide
an excellent starting-point for rethinking the concept of solidarity after
identity politics.
These various strands of Arendts thought are woven together in her
discussion in Eichmann in Jerusalem of the way that the Danish govern-
ment and people behaved toward Jews in their country during the
Second World War; as a result, this discussion provides a good indication
of what a conception of solidarity inspired by Arendt might look like.
Arendt prefaces this discussion with the following remark: one is
tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science
for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power
potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent
possessing vastly superior means of violence (Arendt, 1963a: 171).
Indeed, the story of the Danish peoples collective resistance to the Nazis
is tremendously illuminating for any discussion of the power that can
emerge when individuals act in concert. As Arendt reports it, when the
Germans approached [the Danes] rather cautiously about introducing
the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first
to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out
that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate
resignation (1963a: 171). Similarly, when the Germans demanded that
the Danes turn over the stateless German Jewish refugees who had found
asylum in Denmark prior to the war, the Danish government flatly
refused: the Danes . . . explained to the German officials that because
the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Nazis could
not claim them without Danish assent (1963a: 172). Later on, in the
fall of 1943, when the Nazis sent police units from Germany to Denmark
to round up Jews and ship them off to Theresienstadt, the Danish
government warned Jewish officials of the impending roundup, who in
turn warned Jews ahead of time to go into hiding; the majority of them
were able to go into hiding rather easily because, in the words of the
judgment, all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to
simple citizens, stood ready to receive them (1963a: 174). Finally,
toward the end of the war, wealthy Danish citizens paid for those Jews
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 111
111
who could not afford it to cross the water into Sweden, where they were
able to receive work permits. This was in marked contrast to the
behavior of citizens in most other countries; even in places where Jews
met with genuine sympathy and a sincere willingness to help, they had
to pay for it, and the chances poor people had of escaping were nil
(1963a: 174). All of these events led Eichmann himself to conclude that
for various reasons the action against the Jews in Denmark has been a
failure (ibid.). Arendt notes that
. . . politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this inci-
dent . . . [is that] it is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with
open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed
to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked
upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had
met resistance based on principle, and their toughness had melted like
butter in the sun. (1963a: 175)
Arendts discussion of this case is fascinating on a number of differ-

ent levels, but for my purposes, three aspects of it seem particularly
important. First, Arendts characterization of the actions of the Danish
people as political offers a way of thinking about Arendts much
maligned distinction between private and public spheres, and her result-
ing disdain for social issues. Perhaps surprisingly, Arendt presents the
fact that many Danes hid Jews in their homes and many more were will-
ing to do so not as a private but as a political act, one that contributes
to the collective power that the Danes were able to exercise in resist-
ance to the Nazis. Thus, Arendts discussion indicates that these acts
were political not because of where they took place but because of how
they unfolded specifically, we might say, they were oriented toward
the common good. This provides some evidence for Seyla Benhabibs
argument that Arendts distinction between private and public can be
conceived of not as marking out substantively distinct sets of insti-
tutions, but as delineating different attitudes. If the distinction is drawn
in this way, then the private and the social, for Arendt, are marked by
an attitude of narrow self-interest, while the political is characterized
by an attitude of public or common interest. If the distinction between
private, social and public is an attitudinal one, then, as Benhabib
argues, engaging in politics [for Arendt] does not mean abandoning
economic or social issues; it means fighting for them in the name of
principles, interests, values that have a generalizable basis, and that
concern us as members of a collectivity (Benhabib, 1996: 145). This
reading of Arendt would help to mitigate the tension, discussed above,
involved in bringing her work to bear on a discussion of oppositional
social movements.
Second, Arendt makes it clear that the Danish people resisted the
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 112
112
Nazis in terms of the Jewish identity that was under attack: when the
Nazis approached them about distributing the yellow star, the King of
Denmark vowed to be the first to wear it, even though he himself was
not a Jew. Thus, it is possible to resist in terms of the identity that is
under attack without being a member of the group whose identity is
under attack. One does not need to be a Jew to resist in terms of a
Jewish identity under attack. Thus, Arendts view is that collective politi-
cal movements are held together not by a shared identity, but by the
shared commitment of distinct individuals to work together for the
attainment of a common goal.
Third, Arendt discusses this instance of Danish solidarity with Jews
in Denmark in terms of power; indeed, she indicates that it is a textbook
case of her own conception of power as the ability to act in concert.
Thus, it is clear that, according to the account that we might glean from
Arendts work, solidarity is based not on a community of feelings, but
on a community of action. But, in Arendtian terms, this is the same as
saying that solidarity is an expression or a modality of power. This seems
especially useful for a feminist account of solidarity, since feminist soli-
darity is most frequently invoked as a means to the end of strengthen-
ing feminism as an oppositional social movement that seeks to resist and
transform deeply entrenched relations of dominance and subordination.
In other words, feminist solidarity is itself a response to a modality of
power namely, domination; thus, it strikes me that it might be illumi-
nating to view solidarity as a modality of power as well.
Arendts discussion of the Danish resistance to the Nazis offers
crucial insights into the development of a feminist conception of soli-
darity that can be acceptable in light of the lessons we have learned from
the identity politics debate. Drawing on Arendt, we can view solidarity
as the collective power that grows out of action in concert, binds
members of the feminist movement together, and enables feminists to
build coalitions with other oppositional social movements. This concep-
tion avoids the problems that plague the sisterhood model of solidarity
because it is not predicated on an exclusionary and repressive concep-
tion of womens shared essence or experience of oppression. Instead, the
feminist conception of solidarity that we can cull from Arendts work
rests on her mediated conception of group identity. The category of
women is neither incontrovertible fact nor pure fiction; it is a political
fact; as fact it is undeniable, and to attempt to deny it is to blind oneself
to political realities, but as political it is changeable. One changes it by
resisting, but one can resist only in terms of the political fact of an
identity under attack. However, as Arendts discussion of the Danes
makes clear, one need not be a woman to join in the collective effort
to resist womens subordination. A consideration of Arendts work thus
prompts a shift from thinking of solidarity among women as the power
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 113
113
of sisterhood to thinking of solidarity among feminists (women and
men) as the power of those who pledge to work together to fight
relations of subordination. As Mary Dietz puts it, Arendt makes pos-
sible a politics of shared differences (Dietz, 1994: 236).
The conception that goes along with such a politics views solidarity
as something that is achieved through a shared commitment, a promise,
to act in concert, not an exclusionary unity that is presumed in advance.
As Arendt puts it, the force that keeps [people] together, as distinguished
from the space of appearances in which they gather and the power which
keeps this public space in existence, is the force of mutual promise or
contract (1958: 2445). The use of the term contract as a synonym for
promise might seem to imply that Arendt is assuming a fixity or a
permanence to such promises. If this is the case, then she might indeed
seem to be positing in advance a unity to political movements that very
rarely, if ever, occurs, and that is probably cause for concern if it does.
However, claiming that such groups are bound together by promises,
covenants and contracts does not assume such a unity, for such agree-
ments are always open to amendment and/or augmentation. Thus,
Arendt insists that the moment that promises lose their character as
isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty, that is, when this
faculty is misused to cover the whole ground of the future and to map
out a path secured in all directions, they lose their binding power and
the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating (1958: 244). Perhaps this is
because promises that assume a permanent, fixed unity for an indefinite
amount of time cannot possibly be kept, and promises that cannot pos-
sibly be kept of necessity lose their binding force. Thus, the promises and
shared commitments that bind us together as political actors have to be
open to contestation, reinterpretation and revision, otherwise the
promises will cease to bind and the power will disappear. This concep-
tion offers feminists a way of understanding the requirements for for-
ging relations of solidarity between unique, distinct women of different
races, classes, ethnicities and sexual orientations, who are, as a result of
their differences, both subordinated and empowered in different ways.
According to Arendt, when individuals bind themselves together by
means of promises and engage in concerted action, they become power-
ful. Arendt understands power as the human ability not just to act but
to act in concert. [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 (Arendt, 1969: 44). The power that arises out of such recip-
rocal commitments to act in concert, I call solidarity. Insofar as the
account of solidarity that can be culled from Arendts work rests on such
revisable commitments and on the concerted action that grows out of
them, it represents a great advance over accounts that equate solidarity
with repressive identity categories.
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 114
114
Conclusion
Arendts dual focus on commonality within difference, on equality and
distinction, teaches us that we cannot be powerful if we are dispersed
and fragmented, if we reject any and all forms of group identity in favor
of an absolute non-identity or difference. For once we do this, it is
impossible to understand how we can talk to one another, dispute our
priorities, come to pragmatic agreements, and formulate provisional but
nonetheless shared goals. In other words, we make it impossible to have
a movement. On the other hand, Arendt also reminds us that we cannot
be powerful if we obliterate our distinctness by positing some sort of
sameness or identity that represses and excludes difference. To do so is
not only to be politically inefficacious or pernicious, it is, according to
Arendt, to be profoundly antipolitical.
Thus, once we refuse to read Arendt through the restrictive lenses of
the identity/non-identity opposition, we can find in her account of poli-
tics the resources for a conception of solidarity that moves beyond the
terms of the identity politics debate. Ever attentive to political realities,
Arendt sought to avoid the political problems associated with a complete
rejection of group identities, while at the same time refusing to sacrifice
uniqueness and individuality on the altar of identity. According to her,
it is not only the rejection of all group identities but also the embrace of
too facile an understanding of identity of identity understood as same-
ness that is antipolitical. Because of Arendts attentiveness to the dialec-
tic of commonality and difference, the account of solidarity that can be
gleaned from her work neither rests on reductive and exclusionary iden-
tity categories, nor embraces non-identity, thus implicitly rejecting the
possibility of formulating shared goals and projects. Instead, it under-
stands solidarity as a kind of power that arises when we make commit-
ments to one another and act in concert. Thus solidarity is achieved, not
assumed in advance. Such an account helps us to understand what binds
feminists together and fosters collective action while, far from repress-
ing and excluding difference, embraces and protects it.
This vision of feminist solidarity also resonates nicely with the spirit
of some of Arendts own remarks about the womens movement. In a
rare published discussion of the womens movement, Arendt writes:
Women have not come forward on the political front, which is the mens
front; and, furthermore, all the fronts of the womens movement are really
only a single front, and that a womens front. Characteristically, the move-
ment has never united to achieve concrete goals. . . . The vain attempt to
found a womens party shows the questionableness of the movement: it is
the same questionableness as that of the youth movement, which is a move-
ment only for youth as the womens movement is a movement only for
women. One is as abstract as the other.19
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 115
115
Here, Arendt cautions against a feminist movement that abstracts itself
from broader political concerns, one that confines itself simply to the
concerns of women as if that name marked off an abstract and self-
enclosed category, one that lacks a concern for building coalitions with
other movements and engaging in broader political struggles. Arendts
warning to the womens movement is not an indication that she was an
anti-feminist (or a female male-supremacist!); instead, it shows that she
was ahead of her time. For perhaps the most important lesson of the
identity politics debate has been that if we are to be successful in build-
ing a feminist movement that is truly inclusive of women of diverse
sexual, class, ethnic and racial identities, we must build solidary coali-
tions with gay rights movements, movements for racial equality, and new
labor movements. Arendts own insistence on situating womens
concerns in the context of broader political struggles indicates that the
model of solidarity that we can cull from her work can stand a post-
identity politics feminist theory in good stead.
Dartmouth College, Department of Philosophy, Hanover, NH, USA
PSC
Notes
I am grateful to James Bohman, Nancy Fraser, Johanna Meehan, and partici-
pants at the Colloquium on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague, the
Midwest Critical Theory Roundtable, and the Political Theory Colloquium at
the New School for Social Research for their helpful comments on and criticisms
of earlier versions of this paper.
1 For some examples of the recent literature, see Benhabib (1996), Dietz
(1994; 1995), Disch (1994; 1995), Honig (1995), and the last three essays
in May and Kohn (1996).
2 For an insightful commentary on this essay, see Bohman, The Moral Costs
of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendts
Reflections on Little Rock , in May and Kohn (1996).
3 But see Kaplan (1995) for an attempt to tease out an Arendtian politics of
sexuality.
4 I have attempted to develop such a feminist analysis of power in Allen
(forthcoming b). In this paper, I draw on and extend some of the ideas and
formulations developed in Chapter 4 of that book.
5 Let me emphasize that my focus here is not on Arendts own use of the
term solidarity, but on the account of solidarity that we might construct
from resources found in her analysis of power. Arendts own use of the
term solidarity is somewhat confused, and although my understanding of
the term quite plausibly overlaps with some of her uses of it, it does not
overlap with all of them. For a helpful delineation of the different concepts
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 116
116
of solidarity (four in all) that can be found in Arendts work, see Reshaur
(1992).
6 On this point, see hooks (1984: 4365).
7 For two recent exceptions to this trend, see Weir (1996) and Dean (1996).
8 I am drawing here on Deans insightful discussion of the phases of identity
politics in Chapter 2 of Solidarity of Strangers. For a somewhat different
account of the unfolding of identity politics, see Dietz (1995).
9 I develop these criticisms of Butler in more detail in Allen (1998) and
Chapter 3 of Allen (forthcoming). For criticisms of Butler along similar
lines, see Weir (1996: 129 ff.) and Dean (1996: 15).
10 On this point, see Fraser (1986).
11 Mary Dietz offers a similar sort of account of feminist interpretations of
Arendt; see Dietz (1995). However, my reading diverges from Dietzs in that
she claims that those who read Arendt as embracing the non-identity side
of the dichotomy get her more or less right.
12 On this point, see Dietz (1995: 23).
13 For similar arguments regarding Arendts conception of natality, see
Elshtain (1986) and Ruddick (1989).
14 On this point, see Dietz (1994: 233).
15 Although this dialectical side of Arendt has been missed by many of her
feminist readers, it has been recognized by Seyla Benhabib, who writes,
Arendt repeatedly focused on the dialectic of equality and difference. In
this sense, her political thought anticipates some of the major preoccupa-
tions of todays identity politics (Benhabib, 1996: xxxiii). See also Bohman
(May and Kohn, 1996).
16 For an account which also draws on Arendt to discuss feminist solidarity,
see Disch (1995). Disch, however, seems to equate Arendtian solidarity with
the radical deconstruction of identity, and thus to position her on the non-
identity side of the identity politics debate.
17 In drawing on Arendts writings about Jewish identity, I am not assuming
that her analysis of the oppression of Jews is generalizable to all types of
oppression; in fact, I think that it is very likely that it is not. Indeed, the
assumption that the oppression of women and of African-Americans can be
understood on the same model as the oppression of the Jews was one of
Hannah Arendts own blind spots; it is this assumption that led her to some
of her more perplexing and troubling political positions, including those
voiced in Arendt (1959). My strategy is to use her discussions of Jewish
identity as a way of getting at a mediated conception of group identity and
of solidarity that I think can be helpful for feminist theory; I leave aside
questions of whether or not her analysis of the Jewish question is general-
izable (or even correct).
18 On this point, see Disch (1995: 287). But Disch interprets this formulation
as compatible with a radical deconstructive critique of identity, whereas I see
it as incompatible with indeed, as an implicit critique of such a position.
19 Quoted in Young-Bruehl (1982: 96).
PSC
05 Allen (cr) D 12/11/98 1:40 pm Page 117
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Solidarity after identity

Key words Hannah Arendt feminist theory identity politics power

In what follows, I argue that an appropriation of certain aspects of

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 25 no 1 pp. 97118

The limits of identity politics

Solidarity . . . is rejected as a basis of feminist politics, because it excludes

Ultimately, Butlers position seems to rest upon two assumptions: first,

Arendt: for or against identity?

Cutting-Gray interprets this passage in the following way: we are both

Arendts discussion of this case is fascinating on a number of differ-

Dartmouth College, Department of Philosophy, Hanover, NH, USA

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