Radical Democracy within Limits
Andrew Schaap
While Hannah Arendt hardly mentions democracy explicitly throughout most of her work, when she does, her comments about it are often disparaging. This has led even her most sympathetic interpreters to take issue with an apparently elitist and anti-democratic streak within her political thought. With her apparently reactionary critique of the rise of the social (the reduction of politics to collective housekeeping) and her aristocratic celebration of self-selected elites (striving for distinction within the public sphere), Arendt seems to share philosophy’s traditional “hatred of democracy.”1 Like Plato, Arendt appears to loathe the poor who enter politics driven by their appetites and to dread the arbitrary will of the masses who do not appreciate the joys of public life. When read in this light, Arendt is better understood as a conservative republican who fears democracy in the form of mob rule, rather than a democratic theorist.
Despite this, Arendt has had an extraordinary influence on democratic theory over the past thirty years. In particular, she has inspired radical democrats who are dissatisfied with the liberal view of democracy as an institutional arrangement that is justified insofar as it enables individuals to protect their private interests. Against the liberal view, radical democrats value collective self-determination as a good intrinsic to a democratic way of life. Arendt implicitly articulates this ideal in her account of the achievement of political action as the constitution of a world in common. Following Arendt, a democratic polity can be understood as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.”2 With this famous image of the portable polis, Arendt offers an arresting image of democracy as constituent power: the potential of a people to produce its own world through an emancipatory praxis.
The apparent contradiction between the democratic and elitist tendencies in Arendt’s political thought3 can be clarified in terms of three dimensions of democracy outlined by John Dryzek.4 On the one hand, Arendt’s image of politics as an activity through which we constitute a world in common expands our understanding of democratic politics in terms of its authenticity (the meaningfulness of control exercised by a people). On the other hand, however, Arendt’s insistence that social issues are not properly political limits the scope of democratic control (those areas of social life that should be subject to democratic processes). Furthermore, her stipulation that political actors should be animated by a care for the world and a desire to distinguish themselves before their equals seems to limit the franchise (who is able to participate in democratic deliberation and decision-making). This tension is apparent in her celebration of the council system, which can be understood as the “concentrated expression of her political philosophy.”5 The council system promises to expand democracy in terms of its authenticity (enabling its members to participate directly in public affairs). Yet it also limits democracy in terms of its franchise (since it is composed of a self-selected elite) and scope (since it properly excludes social matters such as the organization of the workplace).
By focusing on her depiction of the council system, I will examine how Arendt addresses a distinction relevant to each dimension of democracy: representation and participation (authenticity), masses and elites (franchise), and social and political (scope). In order to highlight the distinctiveness of Arendt’s political thought, I will situate her treatment of each dimension of democracy in relation to the tradition of radical democracy. Radical democrats, such as Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière, point out that Arendt does not acknowledge how social inequality conditions political action. Nor does she recognize the legitimacy of democratic politics as a struggle to abolish social inequality. However, Arendt draws attention to an aspect of democratic politics that is often occluded by radical democrats. Democratic politics, on this account, is not entirely reducible to an emancipatory and transformative politics, but it also involves self-limitation: a struggle to constitute and preserve a space for politics against the possibility of extreme violence that produces superfluous human beings.
Authenticity: Representation and Participation
Radical democrats understand democracy primarily in terms of popular sovereignty. They privilege the constituent power of the people over the constituted power of the state. Democratic politics is thus authentic to the extent that the people constitute for themselves the terms of their own political association. Democratic politics is less authentic when the state represents the people through the constituted offices of government. In her advocacy of council democracy, Arendt seems to share radical democrats’ antipathy to representation in favor of direct participation.6 Indeed, she claims, the issue of representation presents a “decision on the very dignity of the political realm itself,” since political freedom “means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it me ans nothing.”7
Arendt certainly is a critic of representative government, which she identifies with competitive elitism, political parties, and the welfare state. Such a system, she says, is democratic insofar as “popular welfare and private happiness are its chief goals.”8 Yet it is fundamentally oligarchic insofar as “public happiness and public freedom” are the “privilege of the few.”9 Within this system, parties function as “organs of representation,” nominating candidates for elective office while most citizens only participate by voting out of concern with their private lives.10 Such a system is nominally democratic in terms of scope (concern with social welfare) and franchise (anyone can vote for their private interest). However, it lacks authenticity, since only an entrenched political class participates in public affairs. Consequently, according to Arendt, within this system of government, parties are the “instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled.”11
For Arendt, the point of (democratic) politics is to constitute a world in common through the inter-action of a plurality of actors. This plurality is expressed through opinion (doxa), which is unique to the perspective that an individual brings to bear on the public realm. In contrast to interests, which are always only relevant as group interests and might be judged objectively, opinions may be held only by individuals and are inherently subjective.12 The meaningfulness of an opinion depends upon it being “one’s own,” an articulation of the way the world dokei mei (or “seems to me”).13 Moreover, it is from the manifold expression of these opinions that we experience the world we share as “our own” since, as Arendt puts it, “our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the presence of others.”14 This image of politics can be understood to be more authentically democratic precisely because it presupposes an equality among citizens in terms of both plurality (that each unique perspective brought to bear within the public realm is a democratic gain) and isonomia (that equality consists in non-sovereign freedom, not self-rule but the absence of rule).15
Arendt celebrates council democracy insofar as it provides a space within which citizens can exchange opinions. The councils, she says, “sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people” in every genuine revolution, from the Parisian commune of 1871 to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.16 The council system was a “new form of government” that “owed its existence to nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”17 As “organs of action,” rather than representation, the councils were spontaneous, and enabled all citizens to participate directly in public affairs.18 The councils were “undoubtedly democratic,” says Arendt, but “in a sense never seen before and never thought about.”19 In fact, she describes the democratic character of the council system as the inverse of the party system. The councils were authentically democratic since they were the “only tangible place” in which ordinary citizens (and not just party elites) could enjoy freedom by sharing in public power.20 Yet they limited the scope of democracy to political (rather than social) issues and restricted the franchise to those concerned with the public (rather than their own private) interest.
If Arendt insists on the importance of participation insofar as it provides a basis for the people to reclaim and enact their constituent power, she does not reject representation entirely.21 In fact, Arendt recognizes how representative systems might mediate and filter opinions in contrast to the “chaos of unrepresented and unpurified opinions” that she feared in the case of plebiscitary democracy.22 She points out how both the trustee model of representation (favored by liberal democrats) and the delegate model (favored by radical democrats) might diminish the authenticity of democratic politics. On the one hand, if the representative is a trustee, representing the interests of her constituents without regard to their preferences, she effectively has become an elected ruler. On the other hand, if the representative is a delegate, acting on the instructions of her constituents without forming and expressing her own opinion, she ceases to act politically.23
That Arendt does not oppose representation per se but only insofar as it threatens the dignity of politics becomes clear when we consider a further contrast that she draws: whereas the council system is based on a federal structure and division of powers, the party system presupposes a centralized sovereign power.24 The party system is essentially “autocratic and oligarchic.”25 This is reinforced by the trustee model of representation, which divides the polity between active and passive citizens, between representatives who “know” and decide and the represented whose opinion has limited political significance.26 The “voters surrender their own power,” and the representatives become “for a limited time the appointed rulers of those who elected them.”27 Any justification for such a system, she says, must therefore “insist that politics is a burden and that its end is itself not political” since the value of democracy is reduced to protecting the interests of the governed.28
With the council system, in contrast, Arendt presents an alternative representational form in which everyone would be free to become “participators in government,” to “act and form their own opinion.”29 The councils would institutionalize “spaces of freedom” in which (in principle at least) anyone could participate and therefore enjoy their freedom among equals.30 Yet in advocating the council system, Arendt does not endorse a simple delegate system of representation since she insists that participants in the councils should be free to form their own opinion by “expressing, discussing, and deciding.”31 While anyone would be free to participate in the lower levels of the council, the federal system would mean that the upper levels would be comprised of delegates from the lower levels.32 While she is vague about specific institutional design, Arendt imagined that while remaining free to form and express their own opinions, the delegates would also reflect the plurality of opinions formed and expressed at the lower level, influencing decision-making at the upper levels in such a way that each council retained its own “original power to constitute.”33 Arendt’s interest in the council form of democracy, therefore, was not based on a celebration of direct participation as an unmediated exercise of constituent power.34 Rather, the councils exemplify for her an institutional form within which the space of appearances might be preserved.
Franchise: Masses and Elites
If radical democrats find much to admire in Arendt’s understanding of politics as a collective enterprise through which we constitute a world in common, they tend to scorn her various depictions of democratic masses as driven by the needs of their bodies and as people who fall short of the aristocratic ideal of citizens striving for excellence (aretē) in the public sphere.35 While recognizing that politics always concerns everyone, Arendt observes that “the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of life of the many.”36 Similar to Plato, she suggests that the problem of the many is that they are concerned with their immediate self-interest and gratification. As a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, one can well understand why Arendt might regard the “democratic” masses with suspicion.37 If Arendt advocates council democracy because it makes available spaces of freedom, which are in principle open to all, she also insists that those who participate should do so in a properly political way. On Arendt’s account, this means that they should not be motivated by the concerns and attitudes of labor, which she associates with consumer society.38
Fundamentally, the problem with mass society, based on the values of labor, is that it involves a way of being together that is anti-political. For it mistakes shared suffering for oneness, involving a form of unity based on an identity of needs rather than a plurality of opinions.39 This was apparent, she thinks, in the role of the people during the French Revolution whom she characterizes as “raging masses,”40 “driven by the needs of their bodies”41 who “streamed” into the public sphere.42 In this context, Arendt seems to agree with the disparaging view of democracy held by the American Founding Fathers as “a government devoid of public spirit and swayed by unanimous passions” within which there is no genuine exchange of opinion but only fickle and unreliable moods.43 Indeed, they associated democracy with a tyranny based on unreflective and unanimous public opinion.44 The problem with this way of being together is not only that the reduction of plurality leads to a loss of common sense of the world. It is also that the form of togetherness is based on the sameness of isolated individuals rather than a plurali ty acting in concert, which opens the way for the emergence of despotic and even totalitarian forms of rule.45
Arendt seems not to share the faith of radical democrats in the educative effects of political participation, accepting the “obvious inability and conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in political matters as such.”46 If Arendt feared the corrosive effect of mass society on the public realm, however, she did not oppose democratic politics with the rule of reason. As Jeffrey Isaac rightly emphasizes, Arendt saw the councils as “oases” of authentic political action within a “desert” of mass society.47 The councils would not be constituted by experts but by self-selecting elites animated by “courage, the pursuit of public happiness, the taste of public freedom, an ambition that strives for excellence.”48 Indeed, she insists that “only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world” would “have the right to be heard.”49 Yet Arendt thinks that this self-selected elite would be more democratic than those associated with the party system precisely because they are not preselected by a centralized party bureaucracy according to “standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical.”50 Rather, they would self-select according to their “passion for distinction.”51 They would be motivated not by the desire to make life easier and longer but to “endow life with splendour.”52
As Jeffrey Isaac explains, Arendt is no elitist in the sense that she wants to protect a “privileged few” against an “incapable many.”53 Rather she emphasizes that political action should be undertaken with the “proper” attitude exemplified by self-selecting elites, namely, care for the world and a desire for distinction as opposed to the conformity of mass society. Indeed, the value of the councils, in Arendt’s view, is that they help to break up mass society by providing spaces for plurality and the exchange of opinion at the grassroots level.54 By participating in these spaces, “those who revolt against the conformity of modern society constitute themselves, through their action, as citizens of an elementary republic.”55 The self-selecting elites of the council system “were those who cared and those who took the initiative; they were the political elite of the people brought into the open by the revolution.”56 In contrast to the masses who could only acclaim yes or no, these self-selected elites value plurality since they recognize that the public realm is “constituted by an exchange of opinion between equals.”57
The self-selected elites of the councils, then, are fundamentally different than the party-selected elites since they are “distinguished by their insulation from the many, not by their rule over them.”58 While these self-selected elites who are drawn from the people might be more democratically constituted than those selected within party system, radical democrats are quick to point out that structural inequality creates barriers that prevent people from participating in politics “whether they want to or not.”59 Disadvantaged groups often lack time, capacities, and resources. Moreover, as Arendt recognized, councils may only be able to stimulate mass participation during revolutionary moments. Moreover, opinions and perspectives are often marginalized even when the members of different groups do participate. Without a welfare state to enable citizens to develop their capacities to participate, council democracy is as likely to reproduce structural inequalities as the party system that Arendt criticizes.60
Scope: Social and Political
Like Arendt, radical democrats are less interested in democracy as a form of government than as a mode of action. Unlike Arendt, however, they endorse a view of democratic politics as a struggle to democratize society.61 For radical democrats, collective self-determination should extend to fundamental structures of society, such as the workplace, market, and family. Since Arendt’s concept of the political is opposed to precisely this conception of politics, it is not surprising that most radical democrats balk at her insistence that the scope of democratic politics should be limited to what she views as properly political concerns. Against a view of democratic politics as a process of equalization, Arendt presents an image of politics as concerned with constituting a public space of appearances that should be free from private, economic, and social concerns.
Arendt can be viewed as an anti-democratic thinker to the extent that she wants to arrest and turn back the process of democratization that most radical democrats valorize and that she characterizes as “the invasion of the public realm by society.”62 In her view, the “rise of the social” comes about in modernity when life itself is treated as the highest good in politics and the “life process of society is the very centre of human endeavour.”63 Arendt’s concerns about making the preservation of life the main business of the public realm are that it is intractable, infinite, and destructive. She insists that it is a “political mistake to try to solve the social question with political means.”64 For claims based on necessity are immediate and urgent and, therefore, intractable within political practices of deliberation and persuasion.65 Moreover, because they are endless, the cares and worries associated with sustaining life cannot be completely satisfied and thus tend to overwhelm public life.66 The destructive aspect of making the preservation of life itself the highest good is that, when confronted with populations of superfluous people, even nominally “democratic” governments will be tempted to resort to totalitarian means to solve the problem, such as the use of border controls and camps. If the elevation of life to the highest good is, in Arendt’s view, the “politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age,”67 she associates it as equally with liberalism as she does socialism. Indeed, in her view, liberal democracy creates the conditions in which totalitarianism becomes possible as much as the socialist valorization of labor.68
Although council democracy emerged in the context of the labor movement and within the workplace, Arendt insists that the councils “were infinitely more interested in the political than in the social revolution” than the revolutionary parties.69 Yet the “fateful mistake” the councils made was when they “did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest,” seeking to take control of the management of factories.70 On this point, Arendt’s characterization of the councils is historically inaccurate. In fact, the councils did not separate political from social concerns and were preoccupied with economic questions and the organization of the workplace.71 Indeed, it is often pointed out that Arendt’s exclusion of social concerns from the proper scope of politics actually undermines her argument in favor of council democracy more generally. For what would participants deliberate about if not the social conditions of their political existence?
If we are to retrieve a democratic impetus in Arendt’s insistence on limiting the scope of democratic action, then we would need to consider this as a form of collective self-limitation. Arendt suggests that just as the masses produced a new form of government with totalitarianism, so the people produced the council system. In “rare and decisive moments,” people “had their own ideas about the possibilities of democratic government under modern conditions.”72 The democratic character of the councils, on her interpretation, is different in kind from that of mass society in terms of both the mode of comportment with which participants engaged in politics (limitation of franchise) and the demands that they made (limitation of scope). What distinguished the councils was a concern to constitute and preserve a world in common and within which their lives could be meaningful. Yet rather than the political theorist determining dogmatically what counts as part of the proper scope of democratic action, as Arendt is often tempted to do, we would need to follow Arendt’s own insight that there is no higher faculty that can redeem the world from the predicaments that action creates, except action itself.73 In other words, like the activities of promising and forgiving, we might view democratic politics as also entailing a practice of self-limitation in order to preserve a space for democracy against, for instance, the emergence of populism.
Such a retrieval of a democratic impulse in Arendt’s political thought seems true to the spirit if not the letter of her writings. If Arendt shares Plato’s fear of the masses as a “large and powerful animal,” she rejects his solution to the threat they pose, since she instead advocates a way of doing political theory that is fundamentally democratic. Rather than offering a philosophy of rights based on truths that are independent of the contingent opinions of citizens, she advocates a form of political reflection that begins with wonder at our human plurality. From this perspective, she aims to interpret and articulate the significance of events for the world the philosopher shares in common with her fellow citizens. Like the Greek polis, the council system that she romanticized provides a provocative if also sometimes inchoate image of a democratic politics predicated on the recognition of plurality as its own condition of possibility.
Notes
1 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2009).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 198.
3 Margaret Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought,” Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978): 5–26.
4 John Dryzek, Democracy in Capitalist Times: Ideals, Limits and Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4–9.
5 John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy,” Polity 20, no. 1 (1987): 80–100, 84.
6 George Kateb, “Arendt and Representative Democracy,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 20–59; Ferdinando G. Menga, “The Seduction of Radical Democracy: Deconstructing Hannah Arendt’s Political Discourse,” Constellations 21, no. 3 (2014): 313–26.
7 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 237, 218.
8 Ibid., 269.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 273.
11 Ibid., 269.
12 Ibid., 227.
13 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 73–103, 80.
14 Arendt, On Revolution, 96.
15 Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archē, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006): 1–14.
16 Arendt, On Revolution, 262.
17 Ibid., 249, 256, 257.
18 Ibid., 273, 262–63, 271.
19 Arendt, Human Condition, 119.
20 Arendt, On Revolution, 255.
21 Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (New York: Cambridge University Press 2008), 280–83; Lisa Disch, “How could Hannah Arendt Glorify the American Revolution and Revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the Historiography of the French and American Revolutions,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (2011): 350–271, 352f.
22 Arendt, On Revolution, 228.
23 Ibid., 237.
24 Ibid., 266.
25 Ibid.
26 Arendt, On Revolution, 264, 277; Arendt, Human Condition, 220–32.
27 Ibid., 237.
28 Ibid., 269.
29 Ibid., 264.
30 Ibid., 275.
31 Ibid., 235.
32 Ibid., 190.
33 Ibid., 266.
34 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 156–68, 161.
35 Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, “Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against Injustice and Domination?” in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (London: Ashgate, 2009), 43–56.
36 Arendt, On Revolution, 275.
37 See Canovan, “The Contradictions,” 9–13; Isaac, “Oases,” 160–62.
38 Arendt, Human Condition, 79-135.
39 Arendt, On Revolution, 94; Arendt, Human Condition, 212-213.
40 Arendt, On Revolution, 110.
41 Ibid., 60.
42 Ibid., 113.
43 Ibid., 228.
44 Ibid., 93.
45 Ibid., 270.
46 Ibid., 277.
47 Ibid., 275, see Isaac “Oases,” 157.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 279.
50 Ibid., 277.
51 Ibid., 238.
52 Ibid., 281.
53 Isaac, “Oases,” 159.
54 Arendt, On Revolution, 279.
55 Isaac, “Oases,” 159.
56 Arendt, On Revolution, 278.
57 Ibid., 93.
58 Isaac, “Oases,” 158.
59 John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument,” Polity 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 80–100, 84.
60 James Muldoon, “The Lost Treasure of Arendt’s Council System,” Critical Horizons 12, no. 3 (2011): 396–417, 407.
61 Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 3–19, 3.
62 Arendt, On Revolution, 221.
63 Ibid., 64.
64 Ibid., 112.
65 Ibid., 91.
66 Ibid., 94.
67 Ibid., 64.
68 See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271.
69 Arendt, On Revolution, 266, 274; Arendt, Human Condition, 212–20.
70 Arendt, On Revolution, 273.
71 Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument,” 98.
72 Arendt, Human Condition, 216.
73 Ibid., 236–37.