HANNAH ARENDT, COUNCIL DEMOCRACY AND (FAR) BEYOND.

A RADICAL VIEW

MATTEO BORTOLINI (DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PADUA, ITALY)

MATTEO BORTOLINI Dipartimento di Sociologia Via San Canziano, 8 35122, Padova Italy Email: matteo.bortolini@unipd.it

Keywords: Arendt, democracy, council system, State, individual.

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5/19/2003 The question of the common. European political philosophy beyond liberalism European Universitary Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole

HANNAH ARENDT, COUNCIL DEMOCRACY AND (FAR) BEYOND. A RADICAL VIEW

It is likely that without this interrelated condition of natality and mortality, which guarantees change and makes the rule of wisdom impossible, the human race would have become extinct long ago out of unbearable boredom (Arendt 1972a: 78).

1. Crises, Solutions, and Hannah Arendt Almost fifty years have passed since Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition, and the times have dramatically changed. Facing the rise of globalization and the growing tribalization of society, the decline of the nation-State and the end of sovereignty, the political thinkers of our age are trying to address the new problems that burden Western political institutions: the loss of confidence in the old liberal model of societal integration based on abstract citizenship, the erosion of social capital, the quest for recognition as societies become more multicultural and, most of all, the crisis of top-down styles of imperative government traditionally associated with territorial representative institutions.1 In this postmodern political condition, Arendts work has enjoyed the latest of its many renaissances, even if the problems that burdened her time especially the unprecedented event of totalitarianism and the rise of the mass society seem very different from our own. If Seyla Benhabib (1996: 215) wrote that from her reflections on the paradoxes of the nation-State and the rights of man to her cultural sociology of the pariah and the parvenu, and to her firm faith in the capacity of ordinary citizens to reignite the embers of civic and democratic activism, Hannah Arendts legacy continues to inspire, according to Jeffrey C. Isaac (1998: 61), Arendts courageous defiance of our conventional wisdoms makes her thinking greatly relevant for our post-Cold War age, in which the ideological simplicities of that era have been replaced by new and equally disturbing forms of thoughtlessness. In answering to the question Why Hannah Arendt, now?, Agnes Heller (1999: 160-161) concluded: Because of all the things that link her thinking with the spirit of our times just now fragmentation, the sense for discrepancies and shifts, activism, her openness for liberty, the situations for democracy. Thinkers as diverse as Cornelius Castoriadis (1991), Jrgen Habermas (1976), Bonnie Honig (1995), Jean-Franois Lyotard (1991) and Paul Ricoeur (1983) all dedicated superb pages to Arendts work on acting and judging, power and violence, totalitarianism and revolution. Among the many aspects of Arendts thought that have been rediscovered, the idea of a council-based political system discussed in On Revolution and in the interview Thoughts on Politics and Revolution is a resounding, if understandable, exception. In fact, the most enthusiastic interpreters of the core distinctions of Arendts political theory the distinction
1

See for example: Hirst (1990); Held (1996); Habermas (1997); Hadenius (1997); Archibugi et al. (1998); Beck (1998); Butler et al. (2000); Hardt, Negri (2000); Friese et al. (2002).

between labor, work and action; between politics and the social; between the public and the private realm; between worldliness and worldlessness are often the sharpest critics of her institutional suggestions. Margaret Canovan (1993: 237) wrote that for the majority of Arendts readers her views on the council system are something of an embarrassment, a curiously unrealistic commitment in someone who laid particular stress on realism in politics. George Kateb first called council democracy Arendts only utopia, then wrote that for Arendt authentic politics is rare and either episodic or short-lived (Kateb 1983: 118; Kateb 2000: 144). Even for a sympathetic theorist like Benhabib (2000: 165) Hannah Arendts model is flawed, because more often than not, it seems to fly in the face of the realities of the modern world. And Richard J. Bernstein, who doubtlessly took Arendt seriously, considered her informal remarks on council democracy at best as a point of departure to discuss the problems of her distinction between the social and the political. In analyzing what he considers to be the inconsistencies and simplifications in Arendts thought, Bernstein (1986: 256-257) wrote that her concepts help us to not become mesmerized into thinking that politics only occurs in what is conventionally called politics and presents the council system as a critical standard of what might be achieved by the participants in social movements: Arendtian politics is something that has to do with an extrainstitutional world that apparently cannot be constitutionalized. Therefore, though appreciated today, Hannah Arendts intellectual effort seems incapable of being productive in terms of viable political and institutional models.2 Still, I suspect that the reasons are deeper than a respectful appreciation of the fact that, as Claude Lefort put it, the use of the term model would be a betrayal of her intentions (Lefort 1988: 50; see also Enegrn 1984). In this essay, I shall claim not only that in Arendts political theory do we find an institutional model that stands in an eccentric position, external to the mainstream tradition of modern political philosophy,3 but also, more importantly, that this difference is so radical that a mere correction of the latter by the former (what present-day Arendt fans would like to accomplish) is an inconsistent and paradoxical operation. In itself, Arendtian politics is not flawed at all. It is utopian only because nobody is ready to abandon, not even from a theoretical point of view, our current, State-centered political system. Instead of yet another close investigation of Arendts oeuvre in a pointless search for a real Arendt to oppose the false Arendt of contemporary debates, I try to think together with her to clarify how every political model is predicated on a complex conceptual and normative logic implying radically different, and even incompatible, conceptions of social relationships, political action and democracy. I begin sketching Arendts idea of a council system. After that, I develop my main thesis: the architecture of Arendtian thought does not offer us the problem of representative versus direct democracy, as many scholars believe, but the question of the Stateform itself, and most of all the issue of the concept and the practice of modern sovereignty. Once we realize this, we understand why contemporary political thinkers see Arendts council republic

As far as I know, the deepest and brightest analysis of Arendts ideas about council democracy is Sitton (1987). However, I hope it will be evident that my strategy and argument are completely different from Sittons. It should be added that in his essay on Arendt and the American Revolution, Robert Nisbet (1977) writes that the main accomplishment of On Revolution is the recognition of the importance of local government and the federal system. Unfortunately, Nisbet is so sympathetic with Arendt that he does not discuss the problem at length. 3 Which does not mean, obviously, that it is external to modernity in itself. For a very good argument about the two traditions of modern political thought see: Hardt, Negri (2000) and especially Negri (1992). It should be added that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt do not recognize Arendt as a part of the alternative tradition of modernity Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx and Lenin , which is, actually, one of the claims I want to advance here.

as an embarrassment4 and why it cannot be a supplement or an integration of existing institutional forms. To be sure, my goal is not to decide if this or that theory is worth some licence of Arendtian orthodoxy actually there is no orthodoxy to defend. Neither do I want to close by proposing any political [prescription] backed up by philosophical arguments (Canovan 1998: viii). Rather, I think that the political theorist5 can contribute in concrete ways to the intellectual and political debates of his time by analyzing concepts and models, illustrating differences and difficulties, and suggesting to his fellow citizens an understanding of politics and plurality that, however particular, clearly admits all its paradoxes and imperfections. 2. Councils Republic: Arendts Institutional Model In the last few years Arendts ideas about the council system have been accused of being romantic, unrealistic, untimely, elitist, even cryptofascist.6 In particular, Hannah Arendt has been charged of being an enemy of representative democracy: according to Claude Lefort, for example, the disturbing thing about Arendt is that she has never given any attention to the topic of modern democracy, neither in her study on totalitarianism nor in her book on revolution. For Lefort, this has something to do with the fact that modern democracy is representative and that the notion of representation is alien or even repugnant to her (Lefort 1988:55, my italics). One standard counterclaim has been that Hannah Arendt was very cautious about the possibility of establishing a council system and that, after all, hers was only a plea to a renewal of American democracy which she considered to be very different from continental multi-party democratic systems (Canovan 1993: 232-237). On the other hand, the few advocates of Arendtian institutional politics have often called for the pluralization of existing political spaces and the supplementing of present institutions with councils, grassroots initiatives, voluntary associations and the like, suggesting that actual institutions can be stripped of their sovereignty and gently steered to something different. According to this view, Arendtian more participatory forms of democratic citizenship are not alternatives to mass democratic citizenship. They are complements to it (Isaac 1998: 120). This kind of defense seems to be entirely consistent with some of Arendts best-known remarks on representative democracy and its problems. Take, for example, her famous essay on Civil Disobedience, first published in 1970. There she wrote that representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties tendency to represent nobody except the party machines (Arendt 1972a: 89). The language used has lost, in the course of time, it is now gravely affected, etc. suggests that Arendt was writing of the degenerative processes of a system that, in its first days, had been wholly satisfactory and should now continue to uphold the overall frame of political life. Opening spaces for direct participation, then, could cure the malaise of American democracy. For example, the government could constitutionalize the right of association that the First Amendment did not cover and grant civil disobedients the status of registered lobbyists (Arendt 1972a: 101), while people could force political parties to be representative of society and not (only) of themselves. It seems, in other
4

It can be said, also, that the stress put on catchwords like natality, contingency, and unpredictability has been a powerful rhetorical device aimed at covering Arendts most radical and controversial thoughts on the council system. 5 I deeply agree with Adriana Cavareros view of what political theory should be (Cavarero 2002: 528-529). 6 See Isaac (1998: 110-114) for a review and an answer to this (frankly incredible) critique.

words, that Arendt was defending a combination of representative and direct democracy in which the latter, by means of voluntary associations, would assist and complete the former. On the other hand, this does not cope well with the emphasis Arendt puts, in On Revolution and in Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, on the radical differences between her idea of the council system and the sovereign State. Most of all, it does not cope well with the intuitions we can develop from her understanding of political action and its meaning. As a matter of fact, the modern State is not a generic, all-encompassing political form. It has particular attributes that define it as a distinct and unique polity territoriality, its being a corporation, i.e. an abstract organization, and sovereignty, and they derive straightly from a particular interpretation of the modern idea of the abstract individual.7 Together with the modern idea of representation (which is not limited to what we usually call democracy) they constitute a conceptual constellation that stands at odds not only with Arendts outline of a council system, but also with her idea of the public realm as the common. This means that trying to complete or supplement modern representative democracy with Arendts suggestions results in a paradoxical and, ultimately, futile task.8 To show that this is no mere lexical problem, a deep understanding of the anthropological implications of Arendts idea of political action is needed. Still, before moving to the theoretical level, I think it would be interesting to sketch Hannah Arendts ideas about a council-based political system. In the summer of 1970, Hannah Arendt was asked to imagine a new concept of the State consistent with her idea of the political realm.9 The interviewer wanted her to address the crises of the republic, as the title of the book in which the conversation was published read, with the proposal of a new political and institutional model. Arendts answer, a masterpiece of understatement, was probably the only episode in which she directly addressed the classical theme of the right, or the good, political order (Strauss 1958: 10-12). She pointed to the council system, as it emerged directly out of the course of revolution itself, as the form of government that seemed to correspond to and to spring from the very experience of political action as she understood it (Arendt 1972b: 231). Historically, the councils arose from the will of the people to participate, to debate, to make their voices heard in public and thus to have a possibility to determine the political course of [their] country (Arendt 1972b: 232). In councils people exchanged views about common problems in order to produce a rational formation of opinion that was public in its development and consequences. In Arendts model, power would flow from below: every council would designate a delegate to take part in a higher council, in which trustees would present, discuss and cooperatively clarify their views to reach some kind of consensus, and so on, in a process that would ultimately lead to a parliament. Arendt was clearly thinking of a horizontally directed federalism in which the federated units mutually check and control their powers and no institution would retain any sovereign power over the others (Arendt 1972b: 230).

See, for example, Dumont (1986), Poggi (1992), Hueglin (1999), and Young (1990). See also, for a different but converging thesis: Hardt, Negri (1994). The work of German philosophers and historians Roman Schnur, Reinhardt Koselleck, and Manfred Riedel, as well as Carl Schmitts work on neutralization, and especially his Rmischer Katolizismus und politische Form, are also relevant for this point. 8 To be sure, I am talking from a political theoretical point of view from the conceptual and ideal point of view of the justification and legitimation of power. Legitimation does not mean that an existing political form comes to be legitimized ex post, but that the social and political order of a society is deeply innerved with its overall symbolic framework something similar to Montesquieus spirit of the laws which Arendt (1972a: 85) appreciated so much. 9 It is clear that the interviewer was using the State as an equivalent for political institution. Later in the essay, we will see that the idea of the (modern) State and the political theory of Hannah Arendt stand conceptually at odds.

Hannah Arendt had no illusions about the strength of the council system against the modern State-form, admitting that every time this kind of political institution had emerged from the revolutionary struggles in the West in the French and American Revolutions, but also in Russia in 1917 and in Hungary in 1956 it was destroyed either directly by the bureaucracy of the nation-States or by the party machines (Arendt 1972b: 231). At the same time, Arendt emphasized that this weakness in terms of sovereignty and power was the direct consequence of the systems nature as an expression of the experiences of political action enjoyed by common citizens during the revolutionary uprisings. She also made a telling comparison between the councils and the communes of hippies and dropouts that were so popular in the Sixties and the Seventies both in Europe and in America. Such communes represented, for Arendt, a renunciation on the whole of public life, for they tried to protect people who suffered political shipwreck which separated them from the world. She added that joining a commune was on the whole understandable and justified as a personal choice, but politically it was meaningless. Councils, however, fulfilled the opposite need, providing a public space in which people could participate directly in the political life of their country (Arendt 1972b: 232). This brings us to the last feature of the council system: the premises and rules of inclusion in the political sphere. According to Arendt, by no means every resident of a country needs to be a member in such councils (Arendt 1972b: 233). The selection of political lites becomes a selfselective process: a person must want to participate, he10 should already be concerned with resolving a common problem. This person should have a calling that pushes him unite himself with others for a specified political purpose (Arendt 1963: 182; see also Kateb 2000: 136-137). However, anyone has the chance to participate: Not everyone wants to or has to concern himself with public affairs [] But each person must be given the opportunity (Arendt 1972b: 233, my italics). Somehow, an institutional system should be created that would encourage those citizens who are already motivated and capable to organize their fellow citizens for political purposes. Just as today every citizen has the right to vote and can decide whether to vote or not, in a council system everybody should be granted the right to participate in public debates and political action. Anyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied with their being decided without him (Arendt 1972b: 233). 3. The Disclosure of Who Somebody Is: Political Action as Public Self-Discovery In her book on the Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes between three different kinds of activity, the first being labor the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body and the second being work the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence. The third activity, action, has something to do with human plurality and, in the end, is the political activity par excellence (Arendt 1958: 7-9). But why is it political? And why does politics have to do with plurality? According to Arendt, in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities. Moreover, this revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others (Arendt 1958: 179180). Action, then, is political because acting means to stand in front of others, means to be seen and talked about. The puzzle is that in Arendts concept of action the actors identity is not something pre-existent that is communicated to other human beings via political action; rather,
10

I will use male pronouns only to match Arendts writing, which is always masculine.

political action is the only means the actor has to discover himself and his uniqueness. When an extraordinarily sensible and sympathetic interpreter of Arendts thought, Adriana Cavarero, paraphrases Arendtian politics as a relational space [] that opens when unique existents communicate themselves reciprocally to one another with words and deeds (Cavarero 2002: 514), she is pointing precisely to this quality of action. Defending Arendt from the accusation of being a neoaristotelian, Cavarero adds that the intrinsic political character of speech does not consist, for Arendt, in its function of expressing that which is good, right, useful, and harmful for the community but instead consists in the ability to express and communicate to others the uniqueness of the speaker (Cavarero 2002: 517). I think, however, that in writing of Arendts concept of action, the interpreter should be very careful in using the right words and phrasing. Sometimes, as in the quotes from Cavarero, it may seem11 that the actors unique personality is something that exists before he enters the public realm to expose it to other human beings. This language risks to veil what I think to be the most essential and radical feature of Arendts thought: the fact that action, visibility and the common world are necessary to reveal the actor not only to the others, but most of all and in the first place to himself. Arendt is very explicit on this point: It is more than likely that the who, which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself (Arendt 1958: 179, my italics). Every human being needs the other not only to confirm what he thinks of himself, but also to discover and confirm who he is. The intrinsic value of the public sphere as visibility depends entirely on our theoretical judgment about this dilemma: are personal identities created outside of it or do they need the public sphere to institute themselves and gain permanence? Arendt sides unmistakably with the second answer: Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear (Arendt 1958: 57). This worldly reality comprises, in the first place, the actors identity: the other is needed to tell the actor who he is. In acting and speaking publicly every one of us (pro)poses himself as the object of his peers sight and discourse, as the object to be confirmed.12 As Bonnie Honig (1995: 140) put it: Prior to or apart from action, the self has no identity: it is fragmented, discontinuous, indistinct, and most certainly uninteresting. Political action is that particular kind of vita activa in which the human being offers his deeds and words as that something that should be assured in its reality by other human actors. Political conditions for this self-discovery are well known: the existence of a public sphere as a space of visibility and stage for interaction; the (political) equality of the parties involved (Arendt 1958: 49); and, last but not least, their plurality, that is, their difference: Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position (Arendt 1958: 57, my italics). Between these different positions no common measurement can be devised. This is why political action always involves (mortal) risk because : the public image of the actor is all he is for us, appearance [] constitutes reality (Arendt 1958: 50). On the one hand, the actor is asking his peers to pay attention to that particular who that his deeds and words are revealing and to give it back to him, so that he can find out and
It should be clear that Cavarero knows perfectly not only the revelatory character of action but also the fact that the actor only knows himself (Cavarero would certainly write herself) via his public action. In this case, then, my example becomes even more significant, for it shows that the singularity of Arendts position can engender ambiguities even in the work of her most thoughtful interpreters. See, for example, Cavarero (2000), especially part one, to which my line of reasoning owes a lot. 12 This does not mean that we can handle human identities as material objects: see Arendt (1958: 181-182).
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understand who he really is.13 On the other hand, in proposing himself as an object that should be discovered and confirmed by his peers, the actor loses control of himself. The paradox lies in the fact that this is the only way he can really know who he is; before his actions and speeches take place in the public realm, we can say, he does not really exist as a human being. His urge towards self-disclosure can be satisfied only by putting his own identity at risk.14 This is why in the Greek world courage was the first political virtue: Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom (Arendt 1958: 36). But this is only the first move of a much more intricate game. For it is only by speaking and disputing about what is good, right, useful, and harmful for the world they share, it is only by speaking about the thing they have in common, that men can create, show and understand their own difference and uniqueness. Without a thing-in-common to speak about, the communication and exposition of ones uniqueness would be a senseless, pointless, and rather boring activity. For that, Andy Warhols fifteen minutes would probably suffice. Or else, we should be forced to ask everybody some kind of supererogatory conduct (listening to the other showing himself) as an ordinary way of behaving and Cavareros altruist identity seems to go in this (quite questionable) direction. In other words, acting means not only speaking and behaving in public, but also speaking of, and addressing, the public, i.e. the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it (Arendt 1958: 52). The public as the world we share as the common is not only a stage on which words and deeds are to be performed. It is not only a means to something other. Rather, it is the very object needed to create and uphold real and concrete social relationship between men: we speak in public (i.e. visibly) of the public (i.e. the common), and in the process our unique personalities emerge. Just think of one of Arendts preferred examples, Pericles Funeral Oration, or of one of her definitions of politics as the right to participate in the management of public affairs.15 Only the world as the common can gather people together and sustain the web of their relationships which, as an intangible in-between, is overlaid and overgrown on the physical, worldly in-between (Arendt 1958: 182-183). Men rush and crowd around what they share, and while they talk (and act) about it they discover and reveal their identities by reflecting themselves in the gaze of the other. Without the world as the common object of our commitment, this openness towards the other would be only a matter of individual attitude (or taste), or even a matter of conscience. But conscience is unpolitical precisely because it is not interested in the world (Arendt 1972a: 60-61). Our game still needs a last move. In fact, it can be shown that the uniqueness of the actor acting politically finds a societal anchorage in what Arendt calls principles of action. In What Is Freedom?, Arendt shows another side of political action: its necessary relationship with freedom. Freedom, she writes, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. More than caring for the common, even more than self-disclosure, freedom is the raison dtre of politics (Arendt 1968b: 146). This freedom, which obviously has nothing to do with the moderns negative freedom, is actualized
13

Arendt has made clear that this process of self-discovery cannot be completed, for the story of an human being becomes clear only after its conclusion, that is after the actors death (Arendt 1958: 193 ff.). His story, then, can be only narrated by somebody else. The best accounts on this particular side of Arendts thought are, to my knowledge, Cavarero (2000) and Guaraldo (2001). 14 It should be said that, while I am stressing, political action is risky for the actor also because it happens to us. 15 For this definition of politics see Arendt (1968a: 119). For a very Arendtian interpretation of Pericles famous speech see Castoriadis (1991: 122-123).

in action. Men are free only when they act (politically), and being free acting cannot be confused with a right, a state or even a gift. As such, free action cannot be said to have an end or a explicit goal; rather, it finds its end in itself, in the very moment in which an actor can freely stage himself in front of his peers. Politics, then, is about establishing and preserving a space open for action, that is, for the enactment of freedom. Still, freedom/action is not without a structure. A principle is precisely what guides action from without, something that inspires it at a high level of generality, so that no particular goal can be deduced directly from it although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started (Arendt 1968: 152). Arendt goes back to Montesquieu to illustrate how men choose to follow one or more principles as an inspiration for their political action, and names a few of them: honor, glory, love of equality, distinction and excellence.16 But her most telling example calls into question Niccol Machiavelli and his idea of virt, that is the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna (Arendt 1968b: 153). If political action is always contingent, unpredictable, and open in its consequences, action principles give it a recognizable form, some sort of inner unit according to which it can be evaluated and assessed. This is necessary to bridge the gap between the absolute difference of human plurality and the fact that our political action always has to take our common world as its object. The actors uniqueness, then, finds in Arendtian action principles a social, or societal, track of sort, the possibility of being recognized, understood and, ultimately, judged. Principles can be interpreted as a paradoxical guideline for (reflective) judgment, both on the part of the actor and on the part of the people to whom he addresses his words and deeds.17 By acting on the common in front of his fellow citizens, the actor discovers himself following the lines of the principle of action he has chosen to inform his life with and while every performance will be totally unique, the principle will give him the guidelines to follow to be fully free and understandable (and hence remembered). This explains why we cannot remit political action to other people: we would be deprived of the possibility to enact our chosen principle(s) in front of the others within concrete situations. We would be denied the possibility of knowing who we are. 4. The Modern State as an Immunitary Machine It is now time to understand why the modern State stands as the perfect negation the antithesis, we could say of Arendtian political ontology.18 From a political-juridical point of view, modernity19 can be tentatively depicted as the rise of what, following Roberto Esposito, can be called the immunitary theory of the political subject.20 Esposito (1998) proposes an

Arendt mentions also negative principles fear or distrust or hatred (Arendt 1968b: 152), from which the opposite of freedom appears in the world. On this not-so-cryptic assertion see at least Kateb (2000: 138-139). 17 For a rather different, but nonetheless relevant, version of the play between authenticity and reflective judgment see Ferrara (1998). 18 For the relationship between politics and ontology in Arendtian terms, see: Cavarero (2002: 518). 19 I want to stress that in describing modernity, I am not advancing any claim about the constellation of events that brought it about. The emergence of capitalism, the Protestant Reformation (and European religious wars), and the revolution of modern science (as well as many others) are all part of this constellation, but no factor can be singled out and made responsible of modernity. See Arendt (1958), especially the last chapter, and Parsons (1971), for a complex and multidimensional sociological account of the origins of modernity. 20 This means at the same time (a) that it is not the only idea of the individual we find in modernity but, at the same time, (b) that it is precisely the idea on which our (Western) political constitutions and institutions have been

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etymology for the term community that finds in the Latin word communitas (cum-munus) the idea of a shared debt munus means debt, office or a particular kind of gift that we owe to somebody else. Thus, community has something to do with an absence rather than a shared property or peculiarity. Being part of a community means sharing with other singularities a debt that de-centers the subject from himself, so that he is not completely his own.21 Modernity, then, is characterized by the growing immunization of the subject, i.e. his unceasing attempt to free himself from any bond, from any debt and from any dependence upon the other be it another individual, a collectivity, or a political authority.22 Note that this immunitary theory is strictly political and juridical in nature, not ontological nor anthropological. Its individual is not necessarily selfish and egoist: he simply wants to think of himself as somebody severed, separated, not essentialy bound to others, and strives to accomplish this immunization via juridical and political means. The immunization of the subject brings about a new classification of what counts as the public, for the only thing these individuals have in-common is the preconditions of their private lives in John Lockes classical formula, life, liberty, and property. This deprives politics of its independent meaning and reduces it to a collectively owned machine meant to protect the premises of human life. We find a classic statement of this condition in The Jewish Question: according to the young Karl Marx, in modernity political life is declared to be a mere means whose end is the life of civil society, where civil society means a right to freedom which is not based on the union of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right to this separation, the rights of the limited individual who is limited to himself (Marx 1985: 5354, my italics). With respect to classical political theory, not only the public changes its content, but it also gets completely devalued in itself. Ever since, the State has been the institutional translation of this immunitary subject, the rational and artificial device aimed to mark, nurture and preserve the only thing that a multitude of individual, immunitary subjects can recognize as the common: the premises of the pursuit of private goals in the form of individual rights. In our conceptual lexicon, then, the modern State is the form of administration of immunity. In other words, the State is the political form built by and around an aggregate of previously unrelated individuals whose life is, in Arendtian terms, radically unpolitical. The many different myths of the social contract David Humes anti-myth included represent symbolically their common understanding of what is needed to defend the conditions of their individual fulfillment in the private, non-public sphere. What Canovan (1993: 237) writes of the ethos of the citizens of a representative democracy is actually true for any State: The current system of representation suits a great many of us because we do not want to be citizens; we want to get on with our private lives indisturbed, while having our material wants taken care by politicians greedy for our votes. This explains all of the State defining characteristics. The State should be sovereign precisely because it has been created to defend and realize its constituents individual right to a peaceful and safe living. Far from being limited by individual rights, State sovereignty requires oneness and absoluteness exactly because it springs from individual rights and most of all equality and freedom and has the duty to realize these rights into historical reality (Duso 1999: 68, my
established. See Urbinati (1997). I should add that Espositos theory of immunity is cast in much more philosophical and even metaphisical terms. My interpretation, on the contrary, is strictly sociological and political. 21 Strictly speaking, a decentered subject is not even a subject. 22 Adam B. Seligman (2000) defined modernitys wager the attempt to substitute community and external authority with the authority of transcendental reason and of conscience. On conscience and political matters see also Arendt (1972a: 58-68).

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italics). Every power, then must be subordinated to or delegated by the State (Hall 1984: 17). And the State can be an objective, abstract and impersonal organization23 rather than an association of citizens, like the Greek polis or, mutatis muntandis, a council precisely because its existence is thought to be wholly technical in nature, pointing toward an end outside of itself (Miglio 1988: 822-823). As an impersonal corporation, the State monopolizes the right to declare not only what is good for the public but also what is directly connected to the public, once again because its actions are deemed to be technical in nature. But what about representation? In mainstream Western political lexicon representation is a feature of certain democratic political systems those in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and the cooperation of their elected representatives (Schmitter and Karl 1991: 76, my italics). In fact, representation is a much more comprehensive concept, which constitutes, so to speak, the crossroads where the sovereignty and the abstractness of the State come together and merge into the States foundations. This different, broader way to conceive representation is already evident in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan and in his conceptual dichotomy actor/author. There, State power is representative because before the establishing of a sovereign artificial person the people cannot exist as such, but only as a multitude of (warring) individuals . The heart of this kind of reasoning, as Giuseppe Duso has shown, is that the State as the complex of all political institutions is held to represent the whole body politic, on the one hand because the modern notion of the people as the sum of free and perfectly equal individuals needs such an instrument to form and express its unity, on the other hand because the common to which the State is committed is exactly the same for everyone. This means that only through the fiction of a representative person being it an individual or and assembly the one (and absolute) will of the people can emerge.24 As Duso notes, this representative unity of modern political institutions filters directly from Hobbes discussion of the possibility of having an assembly, instead of a monarch, as the sovereign to current parliamentary systems: even in this case, being one person, the State cannot but express one will. The essence of the modern representative system, then, lies in the fact that the parliament is that space in which the existing minority can peaceably, by means of the vote, turn into a majority. We do not have different political actors, but rather one actor which can express its, each time different, will (Duso 1998: 175). The connections between the sovereign, corporate and artificial nature of the State, its representative function and the paramount value of individual immunity emerges clearly in many Arendtian passages,25 especially in The Human Condition and What is Freedom? In the former, Arendt opposes the concept of plurality to that of mon-archy, in its many varieties, from outright tyranny [] to those forms of democracy in which the many form a collective body so that the people is many in one and constitute themselves as a monarch. According to Arendt, this form
Unlike any of its predecessors at any other time and place, [the State] is not identical with either rulers nor ruled; it is neither a man nor a community, but an invisible being known as a corporation. As a corporation it is an independent persona (van Creveld 1999: 416). According to Christopher W. Morris (1998: 45, my italics), the modern State constitutes a unitary public order distinct from and superior to both ruled and rulers, one that is capable of agency. See also Hall (1984: 19). 24 See Duso (1998), especially the fourth and sixth chapters. Carlo Galli (2001) has called Hobbes the absolute theory of the modern State, rather than the theory of the absolute State. See also Arendt (1968b: 162-165) for a penetrating, if too concise, insight on the relationship between freedom, free will and modern sovereignty. 25 This is not the place to analyze the very strict conceptual relation between the concept of immunity and the Arendtian idea of the social. Still, I think that the two concepts do not fully overlap, and this has something to do with the rigidity of Arendts ideas about what should pertain to the public and private realms.
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of democracy in which the possibility of political action is inherently denied and the public realm is altogether abolished proves to be particularly palatable to modern ears, for it can assure what modern individuals appreciate the most: stability, security, and productivity (Arendt 1958: 221-222). Following the same line, in What Is Freedom? Arendt describes the advent of modernity as an overturn of the classical relationship between politics and liberty. In classical liberal political thought the highest purpose of politics, the end of government, was the guaranty of security; security, in turn, made freedom possible, and the word freedom designated a quintessence of activities which occurred outside the political realm. The idea of government as the protector of life and of societal and individual interests emerges here, and Arendt remarks bitterly that when the masses asked to take part to the political process that is, when the masses asked to vote and modern representative democracy was born, it was not out of a desire for freedom, but out of mistrust in those who held power over their life and goods (Arendt 1968b: 149-150). Self-government is limited by by what is held to be shared by everybody: the absolute supremacy of individual, immunitary rights. The slow process of the constitutionalization i.e. the process by which individual rights have been rendered explicit, ordered, written out, and, in the last instance, entrusted to the highest court of the judicial (rather than political) system is only the last attempt to force political power not to exceed its (already narrow) limits. It should be evident by now that Arendts concept of action is radically incompatible with both the modern individual, with his quest for immunity, and the monopoly of the public on the part of the State. On the one hand, where in Arendtian political theory the other is necessary for the actor to be the unique himself he could be, the modern subject wants the other to be worthless.26 On the other hand, those who want to commit themselves to the public those who want to pursue a full political life have to be given from the State both the authorization to do it and the recognition of the publicity of what they (believe to) have in common. In other words, if only the State can attend to what is public, if everything political should be filtered by the State, the (private) citizen is never free, as such, to act politically. The overall frame in which modern representative democracy is embedded i.e., the sovereign State, with his general representative quality and his necessary mission of defending the individuals immunity is far more important than its distinctive character as a parliament or a government elected by the whole citizenry. Listen now to a telling passage from On Revolution: There is no question that in our dealings with other nations and their governments we shall have to keep in mind that the distance between tyranny and constitutional, limited government is as great as, perhaps greater than, the distance between limited government and freedom. But these considerations, however great their practical relevance, should be no reason for us to mistake civil rights for political freedom, or equate the preliminaries of civilized government with the very substance of a free republic. (Arendt 1963: 220, my italics). To paraphrase Hannah Arendt once again, the sovereign State is the political institution of Man, not of men (and women, one should add). 5. Associations, Confederalism and the Political Theorist What we got from Hannah Arendt, then, is not a generic call to supplement or complement existing representative institutions with more human grassroots politics or voluntary, civil society associations. Quite the contrary. Envisioning a truly new political system based on her
Just think of the moral and political centrality gained by the emblem of privacy the right to control ones public image in modern society. See Prandini, Bortolini (2001).
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ideas means to indicate a principle for the legitimation and organization of political institutions that is not reducible to that liberal individualism that supports the foundations of the modern State. This should explain why present-day Arendtian interpreters are so shy (or bitter) on this point: embracing a radical outlook on Arendts remarks on the council system seems to lead to selfexclusion from nearly every current political theoretical debate. In fact, while being fully hostile to the State-form, the idea of a council system does not question the necessity of creating permanent and authoritative institutions for the managing of our common (i.e. public) world.27 Rather, it calls for the substitution of modern representation and sovereignty with a confederative principle of subsidiarity as the formal and practical principle on which the political architecture can be based and legitimized. I have already noted that Arendt spoke of higher councils in which the trustees of grassroots councils would go and discuss common problems. Thanks to this network structure, federated units would be able to control and check each others powers, on the one side, and to decide and act collectively, on the other. In Arendts words, a council-state of this sort, to which the principle of sovereignity would be wholly alien, would be admirably suited to federations of the most various kinds, especially because in it power would be constituted horizontally and not vertically (Arendt 1972b: 233, my italics).28 This takes us, maybe paradoxically, back to the main insight of associational theories of democracy and to the role of voluntary associations and groups for political life. To be sure, Hannah Arendt did not write about associations, and it can convincingly be demonstrated that her concept of political action as individual self-disclosure stands at odds with the idea of channeling ones political action into pre-determined organized, single-issue, or identity groups.29 In fact, in a fully realized council system that is one without any paramount, sovereign institution,30 one in which the concept of the State does not even appear, voluntary associations can be understood as the closest council, i.e. the first space in which the actor can show his desire, and his aptitude, to speak and act in public not as a generic member of society, or humanity, but from the point of view of a specific inter-est or chosen principle.31 As Paul Lichterman (1999: 104) has shown, associations and grassroots movements can have a forum quality when they value positively critically reflective discussion about members interests and collective identities.32 This plurality of political-discoursive arenas would also prove to be all-important, for they can nurture the possibility of acting politically: individual selves and identities could emerge, express themselves,
It should be recalled that the word State comes from the latin stare, and means both something that is stable and the action needed to give it stability. See Miglio (1988) and Skinner (1989). 28 Whatever opinion had Hannah Arendt on the foundations, or the spirit (Arendt 1972a: 85), of American political life, it is evident that the vertical, i.e. Hobbesian and immunitarian, version of the social contract has come to prevail even in the United States a process that began immediately with the uneasiness which the American founding fathers proved in rooting the Constitution in inherited rights rather than natural law (see Arendt 1963). 29 For a first assessment on Arendt and identity politics see Honig (1995). 30 About associative democracy see Cohen, Rogers (1995) and Hirst (1994; 1997; 2000). As I wrote elsewhere (Bortolini 2000), in both theories the State retains the role of paramount political institutions. 31 Within the standard modern paradigm, the work of political theorist on associations is usually concerned with their impact on civic culture and the functioning of existing representative institutions. See, for example, Alexander, Smelser (1999), Warren (2000), Rosenblum (1998), and Putnam (1993). 32 I want to emphasize can: Lichtermans case studies show that while in intra-group relationships identities are often the object of free and deep discussions, inter-group relations tend to be more instrumental and stiff.. This is obviously a serious problem, but I suspect that it has something to do with the overall structure of current political systems, on one side, and the lack of political training on the part of the citizens of Western societies, on the other. See, on these topics, the work of Benjamin R. Barber (1984; 1988) and Chantal Mouffe (1993; 2000). For excellent fieldwork see also Lichterman (1996) and Eliasoph (1998).
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confront and, at last, get accustomed to the constitutive riskof their own contingent identity, acquiring irony (Rorty 1989). Speaking and acting in the public sphere individuals could understand and master the basic virtues and qualities of the council-citizen: Reflexivity about ones own value positions; capacity to distance oneself from ones convictions and entertain them from the perspective of others; the ability to live with religious, ethical, and aesthetic incommensurables (Benhabib 2000: 176). Moreover, if we abandon the example of the Greek polis and start to think of the common as something which is not as monolithic (i.e. individual rights) and/or territorially and ethnically circumscribed as default liberal or nationalistic rhetorics assume, we understand why Arendt wrote that the in-between with which most action is concerned varies with each group of people (Arendt 1958: 182). It is the same world that today is fragmented in an almost infinitesimal motes made of problems, social and properly political questions, small conflicts and common endeavors. It is the same plural world in which we find the many neighborhood councils, professional councils, councils within factories, apartment houses, and so on (Arendt 1972b: 232) that we call grassroots politics, social movements and citizen initiative groups. And a confederation is the only way to harbor and constitutionalize a social and political landscape whose boundaries, limits and structures are endlessly altered and rebuilt.33 But how can we bring about this confederative council system if the existent political form, the modern sovereign State, is radically hostile to it? How can we, in other words, replace the State? And what will this council system look like? These are preciselythe questions that we cannot give an answer to. Hannah Arendt has taught us that every attempt to answer questions like this constitutes a betrayal of politics, an attempt to transform politics into something other.34 In the last chapter of On Revolution, Arendt called the councils the lost treasure of revolutions. In the interview she gave in the summer of 1970 she said that every large upheaval has actually developed the rudiments of an entirely new form of government, which emerged independent of all preceding revolutionary theories (Arendt 1972b: 231, my italics). That is, for Arendt the council system could only be the spontaneous, unconstrained outcome of a revolution. We should resist, here, the temptation to close indicating in the so-called end of the State a possibility for the collapse not revolutionary only in the modern sense of an organized insurgence of the people against some tyrant of sovereignty and, with it, of the State-form. Not only the political theorist should refrain from proposing ready-made models because to impose the procedures, tests of validity and the demands that are appropriate to truth on politics is in effect to destroy politics with its essential and nonreducible plurality and variability of opinions (Bernstein 1986: 227). He should also be aware of the difficulties and intricacies of concrete social processes and should not be over-enthusiastic in front of social changes that seem to spring directly from his ideas. His role is to help people elucidate concepts and their normative consequences for the political life of the community in which he lives at most, he can mark a new edge to be crossed. In doing so, he risks himself in the public sphere offering his opinion and political stance to the scrutiny of the others. As an answer to practical criticism how can we replace the State from both the structural and the functional point of view? the political theorist can only endorse that famous Arendtian quote of Thomas Jeffersons view on councils: Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments (Arendt 1963: 283).

33

See Honig (1991) for a masterful rendition (and augmentation) of Arendts thoughts on the problem of the continuous foundation of a republic. 34 On the relationship between politics and philosophy see Arendt (1968a) and, among contemporary works, Rancire (1999).

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