1.2 - Schwatz, Joseph M. - Arendt's Politics. the Elusive Search for Substance (en)

7/30/2019 1.2 - Schwatz, Joseph M. - Arendt's Politics. the Elusive Search for Substance (en)

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ARENDTS POLITICS:

THE ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR SUBSTANCE

Joseph M. Schwartz

1. Arendts Anti-Politics: The Hostility to Social Interests

The radical traditions critique of the atomized society and acquisitive humannature of modern liberalism led them to search for more cooperative modes ofsocial organization. Rather than envisioning the democratization of political life,theorists such as Rousseau, Hegel and Marx sought the withering away of politicalconflict, as the particular interests which threaten to tear liberal society apart wouldeither be subsumed or transcended by a universal conception of the good.1 Thereis one school of contemporary political thought which shares the radical tradi-tions hostility to liberal interest-group politics, but which appears to break withthe radical tradition by asserting the virtue of the political. The stated goal ofthese communitarian theorists is not to transcend politics, but to revitalize it.Those contemporary political theorists writing in the civic republican or

communitarian tradition (Hannah Arendt, Alasdair Maclntyre, J. G. A. Pocock,Michael Sandel, Sheldon Wolin among others2) praise the politics of the ancientpolisas a model of public discourse in which citizens deliberated upon the highesthuman aims. Only in a political arena sheltered from the instrumental pursuit ofmaterial well-being can human beings deliberate as equal citizens upon the natureof the common good. Only the separation of the public arena from the pursuitof interests can make political equals of those whose natural endowments renderthem unequal in the marketplace.

This promise-making among free citizens, according to the communitarians, hasbecome a rare activity in a mass consumer society where reason is instrumentally

subordinated to the pursuit of material wealth. Politics is no longer the realm offreedom but a subverted servant of the utilitarian, consumptionist goals of propertyowners, producers and bureaucrats. Action the realm of speech and physicalcourage has been supplanted by the conformist behaviour of mass society, whilebureaucracy (the rule of no-man) has supplanted political decision-making.Public man has fallen and modern men are left to search for meaning in theinner subjectivity of the isolated individual.3

While there are evident distinctions to be made between Hannah Arendt andcontemporary communitarian theorists, Arendts attack on modern society andthe conformist, apolitical life of the masses under the bureaucratic state is

common to all subsequent communitarian thought. Maclntyre does not fixate onthe political as the sole site of virtue, looking more favorably upon the Aristoteliannotion of virtue embodied in the structured social roles of various non-politicalpractices.4 Wolin takes issue with Arendts ignoring of the structural barriersto equal political power posed by socio-economic inequalities. But he too ultimately


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Praxis International26

wishes to banish the socio-economic from the realm of the political because, inhis view, economic categories of political deliberation promote the bureaucraticwelfare/warfare state.5 Sandels work so far has focused primarily on acritique of the deontological assumptions of rights-based liberalism, while leavingopen his own particular vision of the politics of the good.6 But all thesetheorists share Arendts critique of modern representative democrats limitedavenues for political participation and her desire to banish the influence of socio-economic interests upon political deliberation.

Arendts thought will be examined here in some detail because it illustrates alarger difficulty the communitarian school has had in advancing a substantive andrealistic vision of political life. Rather than offering an institutional descriptionof how political conflict might be humanized, the communitarian vision of politicsis limited to a community solely engaged in meta-discourses about the nature ofthe good life. The creation of community appears to be the only substantive goalof politics. But community or politics cannot be an end in itself becausethere can be virtuous and evil communities, just and unjust politics. Whilecontinually asserting the need for common values and institutions, Arendt and com-munitarian theorists such as Maclntyre and Sandel fail to advance any substantivemoral or political criteria for choosing among competing values and institutions.Also, to the extent to which communitarian theorists join Arendt in wishing tobanish the social question (the issues raised by differentials in political and socio-economic power) from political deliberation, then the republican vision may

ultimately be as anti-conflictual - and therefore as anti-political as both the liberaland radical traditions it derides. Discourse about the good life will not transformthe mere life of citizens if it avoids the nitty-gritty of political argument andconflict among competing societal and state interests. Disinterested politicaltheory cannot advance a theory of politics relevant to a world characterized bysocial interests and political conflicts over how to restructure them.

Arendts stress on individual diversity or the plurality of human beings leads her to reject Rousseaus conception of a universal general will and Hegeland Marxs teleological reconciliation of freedom with necessity. In Arendts view,the outcome of political struggle will never be certain; the plurality of the human

species renders the results of their social interaction inherently unpredictable. Inpolitics, Arendt contends, human beings should be judged neither by their motiva-tions nor by the consequences of their actions. Motives are affairs of the heartwhich can only be made public through terror. And as no one can know in advancethe endless chain of consequences set off by an individual act, no one should beheld responsible for the ultimate results of their action. Rather, human beings shouldbe judged by the principles according to which they act, by their code of conduct the pursuit of honor, virtue, distinction or excellence.7

Arendt contends that true political freedom results in mutual promise-making(the institutionalization of which are constitutions). A free society cannot be

constituted by a monolithic general will that violates the plural nature of humanity.Though rejecting the radical attack on individual plurality, Arendt believes thatsocial pluralism economic and social interests must be removed from the politicalarena if political freedom is to be reconstituted. Conflicts over the social question(socio-economic distribution), in Arendts view, destroyed the promise of political

aCEEOL NL Germany


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Praxis International 27

freedom of all modern revolutions, save the American.8 The fortuitous economiccircumstance of pre-revolutionary America meant that the social question didnot emerge to prevent the establishment of constitutional liberties as a barrier againstthe rise of an omnipotent state. While poverty existed, Americas newness andrelative affluence precluded the existence of widespread social misery.9 Buteven the only successful of modern revolutions failed to establish institutionswhich would facilitate the public happiness of participatory politics. In Europethe passions released by the pity of misery destroyed any potential for the consti-tution of political freedom. The politics of human compassion produced ideologicalparties bent on serving the interests of the masses, thereby reducing politics to aninstrumental concern for social well-being.10

In Arendts opinion, only by delegating the social question to the realm ofadministrative and technical expertise can a political realm be constructed in whichinterest free discourse the pursuit of public happiness will reign. In thisdesire to expel social interests from political deliberation, Arendt unconsciouslyembraces the radical traditions impulse to transcend social pluralism. Arendtcriticizes Kants practical reason for conceiving moral actors to be isolated,free-willing agents divorced from the phenomenal world. While Arendt rejectsthe Cartesian distinction between Being and Appearance (accepting the phenomenalworld to be the only realworld), she retains the Kantian notion that free politicaldeliberation must be divorced from considerations of both desires and conse-quences.11 This radical divorce of politics from considerations of both interests

and outcomes yields (as Benjamin Schwartz has perceptively termed it) a religionof politics in which a meta-political discourse of glory and memorable speechesabout community replaces the baser political discourse about conflicts amonginterests.12

As George Kateb has observed, war and constitution-making appear to be theonly vehicles for Arendtian politics.13 Arendt laments that the rise of the secularworld strips humanity of its classical concern for immortality. The classical strivingfor immortality (through glorious deeds in the founding or defense of regimes)is the highest political principle. Political accomplishment, in Arendts view,is located in the quality of the performance, not in the end product. Politics for

Arendt is an art of performance in which the polis serves as a public theater whereones virtuosity can be judged by ones peers (ones fellow citizens freed fromthe necessities of labor and work): This is the realm where freedom is a worldlyreality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, andin events which are talked about, remembered and turned into stories before theyare finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.l4

Modern liberalism banishes freedom from political life by relegating it to theinnocuous realm of opinions, while subordinating political actions to thepursuit of material interests and mortality: For politics, according to [the liberalphilosophy] must be concerned almost exclusively with the maintenance of life

and the safeguarding of its interests.15 Freedom as action is epitomized forArendt by Machiavellis concept of virtu, the excellence by which man respondsto his fortuitous opportunities in the public arena.16 Virtuous politics must disdainmere life and strive for remembrance and immortality. Arendts contempt formodernitys preference for worldly and bodily concerns grounds her judgement


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that the Jewish faith, being the most this-wordly of religions, hindered the Jewishpeoples development of a politics of public virtue.17

In order for there to be politics as theater citizens performing before an audienceof peers the theater must be set apart from nature to provide a space in whichhuman survival (and human interests) are not at issue.18 In a society characterizedby scarcity this can only be accomplished by limiting the rights of citizenship toan elite sheltered from the realm of necessity. Arendts conception of the goldenage of Periclean politics rests on a self-admitted elitism. Only inequality in societycan produce equality among citizens in the polis. The Periclean citizen, as PeterFuss reminds us, left household administration to his wife, cultivation of his fieldsto his slaves, the conduct of commercial affairs to foreigners, and sailed forth intothe polis to act and speak in the company of his true peers. Here alone he couldbreathe the air of freedom free from private concerns those governed bystandards of utility as well as those under the sway of necessity.19 The Atheniancitizens mistrust of expertise and professionalism and his willingness to assumethe burden of adjudicating and administrating public affairs stands in stark contrastwith Arendts attitude towards modern bureaucracy. Expertise and professionalism,in Arendts opinion, can solve the social question and (more importantly) removeit from the realm of politics. But if the bureaucracy interferes with politics (therealm of speechmaking) then it is guilty of the tyrannical no-rule of the massbureaucracy. Arendt fails to recognize that establishing a division of labor betweenthe bureaucratic and legislative branches of government is a political issue. And

her disdain for representative government precludes any serious discussion of thefeasible role for direct and representative democratic institutions in a complexindustrial society. Nor does Arendt recognize that executive powers existed in everher favorite participatory institutions: the magistrates of the New England townships,the officers of the polis (usually held by large landholders), and the executive bodiesof the revolutionary councils. Arendt can maintain a permanent disdain for represen-tative government only by ignoring the conditions for its emergence the inabilityof even virtuous citizens to make a full-time occupation of politics.

For politics to be truly a theater the community as a whole must subsidize itsperformance. Arendt fails to comprehend that such a subsidy immediately brings

material and distributional questions back into the realm of politics. Politics astheater also cannot avoid the question of how the community structures politicalparticipation. Would everyone devote equal time to acting and spectating?Would only an elite perform? Would some prefer only to be critics, reservinga veto power over the actors through representative forms of government? Wouldthe remainder of the community be relegated to the status of slaves, building thetheater and tending its actors, but never judging their performance? In On RevolutionArendt implies that even in a federation of councils where politics nominally isopen to all, only a self-selected elite with a predilection for politics would partici-pate. The majority would go on with their daily material pursuits, uninterested

in the speeches about the nature of politics occuring in the councils.20Arendt ontologically links the capacity for action to the condition of human natality

mans continual rebirth always initiates new acts and reshapes the world.21 Butto reshape the world, human actors must be cognizant of the possibilities of trans-formation. The world that actors attempt to comprehend is the creation of prior


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human collective action be it the acts of production, administration or politics(or the outcome of the inevitable interaction of these spheres). While Arendt astutelyrejects the Hegelian and Marxian view that freedom ultimately concords withteleological necessity, her efforts at defining an alternative radical philosophy ofpolitical action are severely disabled by her refusal to examine the relationshipbetween politics and social transformation. Arendt ends up divorcing her conceptionof politics from considerations of cultural or economic domination. Arendtsproposed politics of agonal struggle, though divorced from social reality, can onlybe comprehended in light of her analysis of the depoliticization of modern masssociety. For it is modern society the public emergence of labor from theprivacy of the household which obliterates the public realm. Only by transcendingthe interest-based structure of modernity does Arendt believe politics can bereborn.22 Like Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx before her, Arendt declares war onprivate social interests. But she does so in the name of politics. Whether thereis any substantive content to her interest-less politics of virtue remains to beexamined.

2. Modern Society: The Enemy of Politics

Hannah Arendts vision of politics cannot be comprehended apart from her ownattempt to develop a phenomenology of human activity in The Human Condition.The Human Condition delineates a hierarchical ordering of three basic human

activities: labor, work and action. The book is haunted by the vision of a consumersociety about to be freed by technological innovation from the burdens of labor.The vision haunts Arendt because she fears that this society of laborers aboutto be liberated from labor [knows] nothing about the higher and more meaningfulactivities for which freedom would deserve to be won.23 Labor held thelowest position in the classical order of human activity because it only reproducedthe biological conditions of human life. The telosof labor is simply to assure themeans of the species survival. Human beings labor in order to consume andconsume in order to labor in a never-ending cycle tied to the natural existenceofanimal laborans(the human being as a laboring animal).

Work distinguishes humans from other animals by creating an artificialworld of things distinct from nature. While the laboring human remains a servantof nature, the worker fabricates a world of human-made objects which distinguisheshim from his natural surroundings. The work of fabrication proceeds under theguidance of a model visible to the minds eyes. Thus, work, for Arendt, isdominated by the rationality of means-ends calculation. During the work processevery human activity is judged in terms of its usefulness for this preconceivedend. But while the utilitarian world of work creates human-made objects whichsituate man in the cosmos, this utilitarian creation of use objects can never providemeaning to mans life. It can never answer Lessings query of the utilitarians:

what is the use of use? In Arendts view: Homo faber is as incapable ofunderstanding meaning . . . as the animal laboransis capable of understanding instru-mentality.24 If the laboring human is a slave to bodily needs, homo faber issubordinate to the demands of his craft, to the model of the object.25 Action,in contrast to labor and work, is the highest form of human activity because it


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alone goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter[and] corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, notMan, live on the earth and inhabit the world.26 Human plurality, the basiccondition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinc-tion. In order to understand one another human beings must in some sense be equal.But if they were not also distinct (and, thereby, unequal in attributes) they wouldneed neither speech nor action to make themselves understood.17 In Arendtsconsciously pre-Socratic model, freedom lies in the exercise of citizenship amongequals in a public space the polis devoted not to the production of materialnecessities but to the shining brightness we once called glory.28 Arendt definesher notion of freedom as pre-Socractic because, in her view, even Plato and Aristotleeventually abandon the uncertainty of the freedom of politics as praxis for themodel of the ruler as craftsman.29 The consequences of action are inherently un-predictable because it occurs in a web of conflicting wills and intentions, in whichone small act can change the entire constellation of human relationships.30

This unpredictability of action, Arendt contends, is related to the revelatorycharacter of action and speech, in which one discloses ones self without ever eitherknowing himself or being able to calculate beforehand whom he reveals.31

Political action must be done in company with others and for the sake of allbecause one can only reveal oneself to others and never to oneself. The isonomyof the polis is not an equality of condition, but a structure of discourse that rendersmen equal when they act as citizens. No one rules in the polis because the power

of men promising together is what maintains the political life of the polis. Whatthat power is used for and whom that power benefits are questions that Arendtleaves aside in her politics without ends. Redefining power as promise-makingamong equals does not elminate the historical reality that elites have used controlover subordinate groups to achieve instrumental ends. This relationship has beentraditionally defined as power, regardless of how Arendt may wish to redefine it.

Action reveals the answer to the question of who one is not by conformingto standardized modes of human behaviour (which judge motives and intentions),but by the criteria of greatness . . . or the specific meaning of each deed [which]can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achieve-

ment.32

Arendt claims that Aristotle still had this sense of the agonal dis-tinction of the polis when he said that politics is the work of man. The humanvirtues are not fixed, ideal qualities to be achieved, but rather the actuality of onesway of life, or code of conduct.33

Arendts description of the golden age of the Periclean polis as an arena forthe demonstration of extraordinary deeds and the winning of immortal famedenudes politics of any content other than individual performance. Given that laborand work are conceptually opposed to the free nature of political action, asGeorge Kateb argues, there is little left to Arendts conception of political actionother than speaking and writing.34 If politics is synonymous with a conversation

among equals then to participate politically one needs to be a direct participant.The centrality of speechifying to Arendts politics is a major source of her hostilityto any form of political representation. Arendt grudgingly admits that there needsto be a worldly objective reality about which words and deeds, action andspeaking refer.35 But when human beings consciously endeavour to transform this


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fiction of a harmony of interest coordinated by the invisible hand. Using phrasesreminiscent of de Tocqueville, Arendt describes at length the despotism of con-formism, behaviourism and automatism that emerges from the masses crowdedtogether in modern society. Society takes on a life of its own, demanding thatits members behave as if they belong to one enormous family which has one opinionand one interest. Economics is the quintessential behavioural science because menhad become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behaviour,so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered asocial orabnormal.41 The rise of the behavioural sciences promotes the withering awayof the state into pure administration and the potentially tyrannical rule of no-man; that is, the rule of bureaucracy: the most social form of government.42

Marxs goal of emancipating man from labor turns out not to be a utopian visionbut an accurate description, Arendt believes, of the nightmare of modern society.Necessary labor is transcended by the productive power of scientific alternation.Class distinctions wither away in mass society as government is replaced by theadministration of things. The transcendence of necessary labor does not usher inthe realm of freedom because laboring man has been stripped of both his capacityto act and to craft. The major crisis facing modern society is how to createenough demand for meaningless leisure activities to entertain animal laboransandto maintain levels of production and profit.43 Marx, in Arendts opinion, refusedto realize that the degradation of man by society might well be permanent: Marxsutopian assumption derives from a mechanistic philosophy which assumes that labor

power can never be lost, so that if it is not exhausted in drudgery it will automaticallynourish higher activities.44 But the spare time of animal laborans is spent innothing but consumption and the satisfaction of craven appetites. Neither the crafts-man nor the man of action, in the Arendtian parable of history, ever demandedto be happy. The universal demand for happiness and the pervasiveness of un-happiness are manifestations of a society of laborers who live a futile existencebecause they never realize themselves in any permanent object.45

With the rise of automation the laborer loses his individuality completely,becoming a functional participant in an industrial process. Only scientists can actin modern society. But they act into nature, by designing new natural pro-

cesses, rather than creating a web of human relationships.46

Arendt concludesThe Human Conditionwith a stark vision of humanity stripped off its capacity bothto act and to create. In the few societies where negative constitutional freedomsstill exist, critical thinking remains a possible outlet for the few.47 Even thoughArendt condemns Rousseaus flight into the intimate, in her own fashion she joinshim in the solitary walk of philosophical inquiry, distancing herself from thecorruption of society. Arendts remaining hope is that the reality of human natalityalways means that thought may one day lead to meaningful action. The rarepossibilities for meaningful political action in modern society are the subjects ofher investigations in On Revolution.

3. The Failed Revolution: Workers Against Society

On Revolutionis not so much a study of revolutions, but an examination of thepossibilities for political promise-making among equals in modern society. The


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American founding fathers are the heroes of the work because they alone utilizepolitical power (the we can of mutual promise-making) to construct an abidingstructure of shared public principles a constitution which is a prerequisitefor the restoration of public happiness (public political life).48 Thismonumental creation of human artifice has preserved the negative freedomsof civil liberties for almost two centuries. But because it did not institutionalizea realm for the pursuit of public happiness (direct political participation), theprivate pursuit of happiness has fostered a representative democracy in Americaruled by bureaucrats, experts and professional politicians. The vast majority ofcitizens seek their happiness through the pursuit of insular, material concerns. WhileOn Revolution is mostly a tale of how modern revolutionaries obsession witheconomic equality (the social question) disables them from institutionalizingeven the limited, negative constitutional freedoms of America, it is also a parableof how the condition of human natality facilitates episodic, spontaneous effortsat republican government in the form of revolutionary councils.

Arendt foreshadows this theme ofOn Revolutiontowards the end of the earlierwork, The Human Condition, where she describes working class political resistanceto incorporation into society as an alternative form of liberation to Marxs Utopianvision of the transcendence of necessary labor. Though Arendt continually termsMarx the philosopher of labor, his vision of free labor approximates Arendtsdescription of work. Under communism, man would rationally organize and plannecessary production so that the realm of necessity would allow for considerable

freedom. Truly free labor, beyond the realm of necessary labor, would approxi-mate the craftsmanship of Arendts work. Here human beings would strugglenot with necessity but with their human capacities to achieve the vision of aestheticcreation Marx associated with free labor.49 Arendt derides this free labor asindividualistic hobbies.50 But Marx likened it to the individual effort of thesculptor or musician.51 Whether or not Marxs dual vision of autonomy freedom achieved through the rational collective organization of necessary pro-duction and freedom achieved through the individual realization of creative talents is realistic is a matter for debate. But that Arendt did not take Marxs visionof labor seriously (and in fact misrepresented it) is without a doubt. She did so,

however, not because she was incapable of reading Marx seriously, but becauseshe had no faith that human freedom could be achieved in eitherthe realm of laboror work. Arendt had no faith that Marxs vision of meaningful labor (or her visionof work) would be able to withstand the inexorable scientific processes comingto dominate both the mode of production and the human producers.52

In The Human Condition Arendt implies that the working class last chance foremancipation was its political revolt against incorporation into modern society.The rise of wage-labor, the emancipation of labor (freeing the laborer fromthe specialization of craft production so that he might be dominated by the divisionof labor) preceded the political emancipation of the laborer (the incorpora-

tion of the working class into societys political system of representation).53Arendt believes that the periodic emergence of workers councils across Europein the late nineteenth and early twentieth century represented a conscious politicalrevolt by the working class against the incorporation of its interests into thesystem of interest-group liberalism. The alleged virtue of the council movement


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was its complete disinterest in economic affairs, workplace management and partypolitics. (Arendts description departs freely from the historical record). Rather,the council movements sole aim was to create a new public space for face-to-facepolitical discourse. Thus, the movement was joined by citizens outside the workingclass who formed councils in their neighborhoods, universities and workplaces.54

The council movement also resisted (unsuccessfully) domination by the variousreformist and revolutionary working class political parties. The councils realizedthat political representation by a party would end the freedom of direct democracy.In Arendts analysis, the demise of the working class movement for freedom iscaused by the amelioration of working class economic suffering and by workingclass incorporation into the formal political system. Class society is transformedinto mass society by the elimination of massive injustice. The substitution of theguaranteed annual wage for daily or weekly pay means that the worker today nolonger stands outside society. Workers form just another pressure group they havebecome jobholders like everyone else. Thus, the proletariat can no longer repre-sent the interests of the people as a whole.55 The incorporation of the workingclass into the welfare state may have improved their material lot. But it also meantthe end of resistance to the anti-political materialist logic of society.

This hostility to the welfare state is a characteristic shared by other communitariantheorists. The welfare state, in their view, is not an arena for political reform orcreative decentralization, but a paternalist, interest-regarding machine thatdepoliticizes the very constituencies which win political rights within it.

Resistance from within is impossible; even the most insurgent of political partiesmust accept its logic. Only resistance from without is possible by the few whoreject its bureaucratic paternalism.56

In her discussion in The Human Conditionof the working class inability to sustaina political revolution against economic society, Arendt notes that Marx and Leninmomentarily transcended the destructive revolutionary obssession with the socialquestion, urging the oppressed to seek power and freedom rather than materialgain. Marxs embrace of the Commune reflects, in Arendts interpretation, a returnto the focus of his early writings on political emancipation. All his other writingsafter The Communist Manifesto, Arendt argues, defined the plight of the working

class in strictly economic terms. In their search for a society transcending scarcityMarxs later writings abandon the political vision of his early works.57 In herdiscussion of the laborers revolt, Arendt again exhibits a fervent desire to eliminateeconomic issues from politics. She hopes that the social issue will finally besolved by politically neutral technical means (similar to Engels and Lenins scien-tistic vision of the administration of things). Arendt praises Lenins belief thatcommunism equals electrification plus Soviets because for a fleeting momenta revolutionary leader recognized that the social question could be solved technicallyrather than politically. Arendt breaks with Lenins claim that only the BolshevikParty could produce Soviets plus electrification. By politicizing the social question,

Lenin eliminated the possibility that political liberty might result from an apolitical,technical solution to the social question.58 For Arendt, experts do not rule, butonly solve technical questions which ought not to be politicized. But is a politicallyneutral technocracy any less of a utopian vision than a one party democracy?Has ruling been abolished or is Arendt unconsciously proposing the rule of a new


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bureaucratic elite which strikingly resembles Hegels interest-free universal classof dispassionate civil servants?

4. The Virtues and Limits of Liberal Constitutionalism

Arendt contends that when revolutionary leaders supplant political passion fordistinction with social compassion for the poor they inevitably embrace a concep-tion of the general will which eliminates the differences among people integralto politics. The specification in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of positiverights inherent to mans nature reduces politics to the satisfaction of materialnecessity.59 Meaningful freedom, Arendt claims in On Revolution, cannot bederived from abstract claims to positive social goods, but only from the existenceof a body politic which facilitates mutual promise-making. Once the revolutionariesattempt to provide their subjects with the rights of life and nature instead ofthe rights of freedom and citizenship there is no future for political liberty. 60

The numerous liberal constitutions of the French Revolution are reduced to mean-ingless pieces of paper, their meaning destroyed by the masses hunger forliberation from material oppression.61 The demise of freedom in every revolutionsince the French derives from the fact that this passion for public or politicalfreedom can so easily be mistaken for the perhaps much more vehement, butpolitically essentially sterile, passionate hatred of masters, the longing of theoppressed for liberation from material want.62

The genius of the American Revolution was, for Arendt, its location of sovereigntyoutside the body politic, not among the people (who are the source of power),but within the law the Constitution. The French Revolutions deification of thegeneral will was the inevitable consequence of attempting to derive both powerand authority from the sovereignty of the people. The American revolutionariesconcurred with Montesquieu that laws were inherently artificial, conventional andman-made. Their authority (unquestioned respect) could only be derived froman absolute, superhuman source. In America that absolute authority was to becomeenshrined in the self-evident truths of the founding itself. Instead of restingsovereignty in the people, the American revolution rested it in the founding, in

the Constitution itself. In Arendts view, in America power is situated in thelegislature (the representative of the people), but authority is situated in theConstitution and the Supreme Court.63

Arendt is acutely aware that both the Exodus story and Virgils Aeneid teachthat freedom does not automatically follow liberation from oppression.64 Post-liberation authority an obedience [to law] in which men retain theirfreedom65 Arendt claims has been particularly elusive historically. Thefounders could solve the problem of legitimacy in America because the revolu-tion fortunately did not deal with the social question. The American revolutionrepresents the only modern revolution in which social compassion did not play

a significant role.66 (As Arendt notes, 400,000 Black slaves were excluded fromthe freedom achieved by 1,850,000 whites.67) The American revolution was ledby an established political elite who believed that colonial rule denied them fullpolitical freedom. This elite was blessed with the love of distinction which Arendtbelieves is necessary for the culture of politics. As John Adams wrote of the


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5. The Councils: Participation Without Substance

But Arendt does not conclude her parable of revolution with representativeconstitutional government as mans highest achievement. Though the masses forcepolitics to become the servant of society, their natality and capacity for freedomalso enables them to embark periodically on a course of republican revival.Periodically, federations of revolutionary councils spontaneously arise from thepeople themselves. It is the people who spontaneously form the forty-eight sectionsof the Paris Commune and transform them into a municipal revolutionary govern-ment. And they do so again in 1871. On Revolutions final chapter is a saga ofthe struggle of the popular associations, political clubs and councils of the republicantradition against the bureaucratic, parliamentary party system which continuallycrushes them. The sans-culottes, who in the opening of the book are blamed formaking the social question central to the French Revolution, are celebrated at theend of the work for defending their socits revolutionnaires against Jacobincentralism. (Arendt appears oblivious to her contradictory portrayal of the sans-culottes within the same work.)

Jeffersons repeating of Catos invocation of: divide the counties into wardsanticipates the councils, soviets, rte and socits revolutionnaires which springup as spontaneous organs of the people in every revolution, not only outsideof all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders.82

Arendt believes these councils are ignored by the revolutionary tradition and by

historians because they are viewed only as temporary organs of dual power whichfade away once the revolutionaries seize the state. They are never treated properlyas an entirely new form of government. (Though since Arendt wrote On Revolutionthe council communist tradition has been recognized by many left intellectualsas an attractive, if utopian revolutionary tradition.) The councils defy the nation-state tradition of party politics which asserts that power and violence go together.The power of the Soviets rests strictly on the action of the people. Violence playsno role in their establishment or maintenance. This revolutionary republicanabhorrence of violence is one of the reasons why the councils are so easilycrushed.83

Arendt claims that political parties play no role in the establishment of the councils.Rather, as soon as the councils emerge the parties try to control them for theirown instrumental purposes. While it is true that the Jacobins and Bolsheviksultimately smashed all the clubs and soviets which they did not control, Arendtis completely ahistorical when she disassociates party politics and ideologicalstruggle from the origins of the councils. Nor is her radical disjunction betweendirect and representative democracy an accurate history of the struggle betweendemocratic councils and authoritarian parties. The most celebrated example ofcouncil government, the Paris Commune, elected its representatives alongparty and district lines (while subjecting them to mandate and recall). The

representative and party-based Constituent Assembly of post-revolutionaryRussia more democratically reflected the political diversity of the Russian peoplethan did the disproportionately urban Soviets.

Throughout her work Arendt manifests a deep hostility to political parties. Allmodern parties, Arendt believes, rapidly degenerate into Michelian oligarchies.


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They are interested only in implementing their programs. They demand theexecution of their programs, but they eschew political action. Arendt believesthat both one party and multi-party systems become oligarchic and eventuallytotalitarian. Only the two party systems of Britain and the United States avoid sucha fate because they recognize the opposition party as an institution of govern-ment.84 But all that the two party system guarantees is constitutional liberties. Thetwo parties can only represent interests: the only thing which can be representedand delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actionnor their opinions.85 The passive voter lobbies through interest groups in anattempt to blackmail the government into fulfilling material needs. Interest groupsonly represent their pre-determined needs. They do not engage in open discourse,creating the power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation. Modernrepresentative government degenerates into an oligarchy of professional politicalward-healers. The government is democratic in that popular welfare is its goal;but the privilege of public happiness rests only with the oligarchy of represen-tatives.86 Nowhere does Arendt envision a revitalization of democratic life withinpolitical parties as a means to escape the political passivity of representativedemocracy. Even in a direct democracy, in the absence of vibrant internal partylife, how would a diversity of popular opinions be constituted? Would politicaldeliberation only go on in the plenary sessions of the councils? Would there beno secondary political associations in a radical democratic republic?

Arendt associates representative party politics with the rise of the welfare state.

She condemns the welfare state with equal vigour as being contrary to the spiritof politics. This is a refrain voiced frequently by communitarian theorists: thedefenders of this system, which actually is the system of the welfare state, if theyare liberal and of democratic convictions, must deny the very existence of publichappiness and public freedom; they must insist that politics is a burden and thatits end is itself not political.87 Even though the communitarian critique of thebureaucratic paternalism of the welfare state is aprofoundpartial truth, the seriousradical democrat cannot simply call for the welfare states abolition. This is notsimply because mass democratic movements have fought to achieve the social rightsthat the welfare state institutionalizes. Movements can, of course, sometimes fight

the wrong battles or realize that prior gains bring with them new problems. Butsocial provision of adequate levels of health, education and income are necessaryif citizenship is to be meaningful to all, regardless of socio-economic status.Obviously the welfare state can be restructured. It can be decentralized; variousschemes can be advanced for the democratization of social provision. The rigidpublic/private distinction which governs most thinking about the welfare state mightbe transcended by (for example) community-administered health clinics andcooperative workplace-sited day care centers which are neither state nor privatelyrun. But no matter how we democratize social provision, there can be no doubtthat the democratic state would have to assure adequate funding and minimal

standards of provision. (Unless we abandon the belief that the state should guaranteecertain social rights a laissez-faire position that few communitarians are willingto express, at least openly.)

As noted earlier, Arendt continually vacillates between attacking the welfarestate and recommending that all issues of the welfare state be treated by experts


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outside the realm of politics. Towards the end of On Revolution Arendt seemsto realize that if all the questions which the welfare state deals with were solvedby experts in the realm of the administration of things there might not be anythingleft to deliberate about within the political sphere. If what provisions the welfarestate should provide; how it should be structured; and how it should be financedare all questions for the experts, then what issues are left for politics? As Arendtherself notes:

[If] all political questions in the welfare state are ultimately problems of administra-tion, to be handled and decided by experts, in which case even the representativesof the people hardly possess an authentic area of action but are administrative officers,whose business, though in the public interest is not essentially different from thebusiness of private management . . . then, to be sure, the councils would have to be

considered as atavistic institutions without any relevance in the realm of humanaffairs . . . In a society under the sway of abundance, conflicting group interests needno longer be settled at one anothers expense, and the principle of opposition is validonly as long as there exist authentic choices which transcend the objective anddemonstrably valid opinions of experts. When government has really becomeadministration, the party system can only result in incompetence andwastefulness. . . 88

Arendt, unlike Marx and Lenin, is worried by this image of scientific manage-ment eliminating the need for politics. But like the revolutionary theorists shecritiques as anti-political, Arendt fails to see that how we structure both production

and social provision are inherently political questions. The allocation of social rolescan never be a strictly scientific matter.

Arendt insists on drawing a radical distinction between politics and economics.While admitting that council governments often are rendered politically vulnerablebecause they do not adequately attend to the functions of governmental ad ministra-tion,89 she insists that to be true to their purely political purposes the councilsmust not engage in economic management:

In the form of workers councils, they have again and again tried to take over themanagement of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure.

The wish of the working class, we are told, has been fulfilled. The factories willbe managed by the councils of the workers. This so-called wish of the workingclass sounds much rather like an attempt of the revolutionary party to counteractthe councils political aspirations, to drive their members away from the politicalrealm and back into the factories.90

Arendt congratulates the political maturity of those workers councils whicheschew the role of economic management, whereas the workers wish to runthe factories themselves was a sign of the understandable, but politically irrele-vant desire of individuals to rise into positions which up to then had been openonly to the middle classes.91 Arendt insists that political criteria are improper

for choosing talented managers. By exorcizing the social question from politics,Arendt loses all interest in the possibility of democratizing social organization.Political and managerial talents may well be somewhat distinct. But their differentnature does not necessarily mean that some degree of democratic participation wouldnot be of aid in discerning both enterprise goals and managerial talent.


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Arendt, however, believes that social organizations must be governed by rulesof efficiency which inherently conflict with principles of participation: the [politicalman] is supposed to know how to deal with men in a field of human relations,whose principle is freedom, and the other must know how to manage things andpeople in a sphere of life whose principle is necessity.92 Councils should notmanage the economy because they improperly bring an element of action (i.e.,political participation) into the administration of things. In Arendts opinion theparty apparatus is admirably suited to run an economy because it is oligarchic andthereby well suited to functions of command and control.93 The experience ofcommand economies, however, demonstrates just the contrary. Oligarchic partiesare disastrous managers of economies. The absence of participation and marketinformation leads to massive inefficiency. Arendts disdain for macrohousework,political economy, is accompanied by a striking ignorance of that subject. Mostcommunitarian theorists have demonstrated a similar inability to analyze the complexrelationships among political economy, social organization, and the state. Bothpolitical participation and sound administration would have to characterize thegovernance of each of these arenas in any radical democratic society.

The prescience of Arendts critique of the absence of public space for politicaldeliberation in modern representative democracies is undeniable. As early as thelate 1950s she perceived that the relationship between representative and voterin western democracies was being transformed into that of seller and buyer. Butalleviating this situation necessitates the democratization of political party life as

well as a vitalization of council life in neighborhoods and workplaces. Each ofthese institutions would have to deliberate upon substantive issues deemed appro-priate to their jurisdiction by political society as a whole.94 The national represen-tative assembly would set the broadest social priorities. The existence of internallydemocratic political parties would facilitate the articulation of competing conceptionsof national priorities. In order for local councils to engage in meaningful deliberationthey would have to control certain socio-economic resources and be in charge ofimplementing national priorities at the local level.

Arendts wish for the political economy to be managed by experts and for councilsto engage in only disinterested discussion denudes political deliberation of any

substantive content. About what are political decisions to be made? Or is politicsnot about decision making but just a mere talkshop? In a roundtable discussion,Mary McCarthy, a close friend of Arendt, once challenged her to delineate thesubstance of modern political deliberation. McCarthy rhetorically asked: . . . ifall questions of economics, human welfare, busing, anything that touches the socialsphere are to be excluded from the political scene, then I am left with war andspeeches. But the speeches cant be just speeches. They have to be speeches aboutsomething.95 Arendts answer was that in all times people will have affairsworthy to be talked about in public.96 In medieval times, she said, peopletalked (politically?) in churches about the existence of god. Today juries deliberate

about guilt or innocence, town meetings decide where to build a new bridge. Anysubject matter which we cannot figure out with certainty, Arendt claims, isappropriate to the political sphere.97 But no amount of speeches or discussion, shebelieves, can solve the urban or housing crisis of contemporary America.98 Theseare critical social problems which can be really figured out and which should


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bound to exist in any democratic industrial society. Nor can they tell us by whatpolitical and institutional mechanisms a modern, pluralist culture will constructa sense of national community.

Social movement theory has made democratic theorists increasingly sensitiveto the distinct conceptions of community and morality that various ethnic, racialand social groups hold in modern societies. Without any guaranteed rights forparticular communities, the communitarian search for a politics of the commongood could lead to an authoritarian imposition of one idea of the good upon allarenas of life. The communitarian longing for a pre-modern view of one universalconception of the good life offers no feasible alternative to liberalisms failureto generate a compelling theory of community. What may promote a sense ofcommunity among diverse citizens and communities within a democratic state isthe common commitment of citizens to the limited, but substantive political endsof the democratic state. The central end of a pluralist democratic state may bethe shared constitutional and political practices by which distinct communities workout (and learn to live with) the differences of a pluralist society.

Communitarian critics of Rawlsian social contract liberalism have failed to makea convincing case that ontological disagreements about the nature of the self deter-mines ones politics. Pressed by the insights of communitarian critics, John Rawlsadmits that his notion of the liberal self is embedded in a conception of a liberaldemocratic community. In the Dewey lectures and subsequent articles Rawlsdescribes the original position as a heuristic device for explicating notions of

impartiality and plural conceptions of the good held by citizens living in liberaldemocratic cultures.101 Communitarians may still feel that Rawls conception ofthe self is inadequate; but they have yet to offer a concrete political alternativeto the politics of social welfare liberalism. Vague incantations of communityare no more a coherent political vision than is Arendts conception of politics asdisinterested speeches about the good life.

We do not have the opportunity to press Hannah Arendt as to what politicaland economic institutions would promote her conception of politics as promise-making among equals. But just as Arendt used politics to avoid talking aboutanything concretely political, so do the communitarians use community to avoid

discussing politics. But we can ask her communitarian epigones what institutionsand political values best fulfill their vision of community. Communitarians suchas Sandel and Maclntyre have thus far failed to advance a modern vision of politicallife that would instantiate their call for community. Saying that the goodcommunity promotes virtue tells us nothing as to the content of these virtues.Would there be a plurality of good communities in their communitarian culture?If so, would not that society need a theory of rights to protect the autonomy ofthose communities from state interference? If so, how would that theory of rightsdiffer from that derived from Rawlsian principles of justice? If democratic commu-nitarians conception of the good places a primacy on the self-development of

each individual, then would not the vision of the good society include a concep-tion of the political, educational, and social opportunities that each individualmust have to be a full citizen? If so, common political discourse would call theseentitlements individual and social rights. Might it not be possible (perhapsnecessary) for democratic communitarians to derive a conception of rights from


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their conception of the good, particularly if that good society is to resemble a politicaland social democracy?

Both Arendt and the communitarians offer a compelling critique of the instru-mental and bureaucratic nature of the political culture of mass liberal societies.But their complete dismissal of representative democracy, the welfare state andpolitical control of the economy leaves them with nothing to say about how todemocratize institutional practices. Until their critique moves from the realm ofdetached political theory into the seamy world of institutional politics the influenceof communitarian critics of liberalism will rarely exist outside the academy. Thedecline of public intellectual life may mean it is unfair to demand that politicaltheory have clear public political implications. But until political theory confrontspolitics as it is (and as it plausibly could be), it is likely to remain a peculiarlyapolitical form of studying the political.

NOTES

1. These themes are further developed in my Ph.D. dissertation, The Permanence of the Political:A Democratic Critique of the Radical Thrust to Transcend Politics, Harvard University, 1987 (AnnArbor: University Microfilms, Inc.).

2. Though theorists referred to in contemporary debates as republicans or communitariansare so diverse that they cannot be categorized as a unified school of political thought, the theoristsand works most frequently mentioned include: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1958); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1975); Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1981); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, (Boston: Little, Brownand Company, 1960).

3. Arendt advances these themes throughout all her work, but they are most succinctly presentedin Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland: World PublishingCompany, 1963), particularly in the essays What is Authority? and What is Freedom?

4. See Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 146 ff.5. See Sheldon Wolin, Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time, Social Research, 44:1,

Spring 1977, p. 100-105 and Wolin, Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political, Salmagundi,no. 60, Spring-Summer 1983, esp. p. 15-19.

6. Michael Sandel advances a tentative conception of his vision of the good society in the final

chapter ofLiberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 175-183.7. Arendt develops the philosophical basis for these political arguments in the chapter on Action

in The Human Condition, p. 175-247 and in regards to the question of motives and intention ChapterTwo, The Social Question in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press,1963), esp. p. 91-100. Arendt most succinctly develops these themes in the essays in Between Pastand Future, particularly in On History, p. 61-63; What is Authority?, p. 104-120; and Whatis Freedom?, p. 151-165.

8. See Chapter Two, The Social Question, in Arendt, On Revolution, esp. p. 53-60 andp. 83-87.

9. Arendts argument about the social question and American Exceptionalism is nude in OnRevolution, p. 62-64.

10. Ibid., on the ideological nature of the European politics of the social question see p. 116-121.

11. For Arendts hostility to Cartesian metaphysical doubt and its link to utilitarian politics, seeChapter Five, The Vita Active and the Modern Age, in The Human Condition, esp. p. 273-280and p. 305-320. The one remaining vestige of the Kantian tradition in Arendts work is her hostilityto weighing motives or consequences when judging the worth of political deliberation. For this aspectof her thought see esp., The Human Condition, p. 206-208 and Between Past and Present, Whatis Freedom?, p. 151-155. The following passage is typical: [Political] action to be free must


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be free from motive on one side [and] from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other . . . theyare [an acts] determining factors, and action is free to the extent that it is able to transcend them.,What is Freedom?, p. 151. Arendt, however, differs from Kant in believing that moral action

should not be guided by the free will, but by what she terms principles - honor, or glory,love of equality, which Montesquieu called virtue, or distinction or excellence. . . [or] Machiavellisconcept of virtu, What is Freedom?, p. 151-152. Republican theorists are attracted to Arendtsconception of virtue and practice as the highest end of politics. But they often fail to see heropposition to a politics with fixed, final ends. Political excellence, for Arendt, is in the acting, notin the making. That is, Arendt remains profoundly anti-consequentialist in her outlook on politics.

12. See Benjamin Schwartz, The Religion of Politics: Reflections on the Thought of HannahArendt, Dissent, Spring 1970, p. 144-161.

13. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983 ,p. 16-18.

14. Arendt,Between Past and Future, What is Freedom?, p. 155.15. Ibid., p. 155.

16. Arendt,Between Past and Future, What is Freedom?, p. 153.17. On Arendts hostility towards the this worldliness of the Jewish religion see Schwartz, TheReligion of Politics, Dissent, Spring 1970, p. 151-154.

18. On this point see Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 188.19. Peter Fuss, Hannah Arendts Conception of Political Community, in Melvyn A. Hill, ed ,

Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), p. 155.20. For Arendts aristocratic conception of council democracy see On Revolution, p. 279-285.21. For the centrality of natality to political action see The Concept of History, in Between

Past and Future, esp. p. 61.22. For a dear statement of Arendts belief that modernitys utilitarian concerns obliterates the

public realm see The Human Condition, p. 220.23. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 5.

24. Ibid., p. 155.25. This summary of Arendts distinction between work and labor is drawn from her discus-

sion in Chapter IV, Work, in The Human Condition, esp. p. 136-159.

26. Ibid., p. 8.

27. Ibid., p. 176.

28. Ibid., p. 180.29. Arendt contends that Plato and Aristotle elevated lawmaking and city-building to the highest

rank in political life . . . because to the Greeks [these activities] were pre-political, The Human Con-dition, p. 195. Arendt argues that Plato and Aristotle abandon the pre-Socratic and Roman emphasison politics as legislation and foundation for a craftsmens (homo fabers) vision of making (poiesis)rather than action (praxis). Plato and Aristotle emphasize the making of laws and voting becausein them men act like craftsmen [i.e., as homo faber]: the result of their action is a tangible product,and its process has a clearly recognizable end., The Human Condition, p. 195. Praxis, thoughthe only true form of politics for Arendt, is in her view inherently uncertain, boundless and futile.Not even Plato and Aristotle were strong enough, Arendt claims, to live with this glorious uncertainty.

30. Ibid., p. 190.31. Ibid., p. 191.32. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 206.33. Ibid., p. 206.34. See Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, p. 15.35. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 182.36. Jrgen Habermas, Hannah Arendts Communications Concept of Power, Social Research,

Vol. 44, no 1, Spring 1977. p. 21.

37. For Arendts idiosyncratic conception of power see The Human Condition, p. 200-205 andOn Violence, in Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972),p. 139-155.

38. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 28. On Violence further develops the argument thatthe unhealthy political concern with the economic and social has engendered modern bureaucracies,the rule of no man. See On Violence in Crises of the Republic, esp. p. 137.


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39. For Arendts view on the relationship between property and political freedom see The HumamCondition, p. 58-66.

40. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 33.

41. Ibid., p. 42.42. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 40.43. In Arendts view Marx denigrates work and the objects (i.e., commodities) it creates while

embracing labor and the possibility of machines transcending labor, while failing to abolishmans subordination to a mechanized labor process. Arendt advances this argument in The HumanCondition, p. 126-135. For a perceptive argument that Arendt radically misperceives Marx by fail-ing to comprehend that his distinction between alienated and non-alienated labor is quite similarto her distinction between labor and work (the conscious creation of objects) see MildredBakan, Hannah Arendts Concepts of Labor and Work, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of thePublic World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill, p. 49-65.

44. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 133.45. Ibid., p. 135.

46. Ibid., p. 323-324.47. Ibid., p. 324-325.48. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 143 and 149.49. For further discussion on the relationship between Arendts concept of work and Marxs concept

of free labor see Mildred Bakan, Hannah Arendts Concept of Labor and Work and Bikhu Parekh,Hannah Arendts Critique of Marx, both in Melvyn A. Hill, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World.

50. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 118.51. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 14252. For this pessimistic conclusion see the end ofThe Human Condition, p. 320-325.53. Ibid., p. 216.54. For Arendts view of the central role of the working class in spontaneously fighting for a

council system which placed politics above economic interests see The Human Condition, p.215-219 and On Revolution, p. 259-271

55. Arendt blames the rise of the welfare state and the incorporation of the working class intosociety for ending the revolutionary political role of the working class. For this view see The HumanCondition, p. 218-220.

56. For an example of the communitarian hostility to the bureaucratic welfare state see SheldonWolin, Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political, Salmagundi, no. 60, Spring-Summer 1983,p. 17-19.

57. For this analysis of Marx see Arendt, On Revolution, p. 260-262.58. On Revolution, p. 59-60.59. Ibid., p. 55.60. Ibid., p. 108-109.61. Ibid., p. 122.62. Ibid., p. 121.63. On the American genius of resting authority and sovereignty not in the people, but in

the Constitution itself see Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 155-156 and p. 200.64. Ibid., p. 206.65. Arendt What is Authority? inBetween Past and Future, p. 106.66. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 65.67. Ibid., p 66.68. John Adams quoted in Arendt, On Revolution, p. 63.69. Robert Nisbet in Hannah Arendt and the American Revolution, Social Research, Volume

44, no. 1, Spring 1977, p. 66-69, succinctly summarizes the work of such historians as Carl

Bridenbaugh, Jackson Turner Main, Bernard Bailyn, R. R. Palmer and Richard Morris on socialconflict in the American revolution.70. For Arendt on Montesquieu, see On Revolution, p. 148-153.71. On Revolution, p. 187.72. Ibid., p. 165-166.73. Ibid., p. 161-162.

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