Muldoon, The Lost Treasure of Arendt's Council System

[CRIT 12.3 (2011) 396-417] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917doi:10.1558/crit.v12i3.396 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

The Lost Treasure of Arendt’s Council SystemJames MuldoonSchool of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University, [email protected]

Abstract: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution offers a critique of modern rep-resentative democracy combined with a manifesto-like treatise on council systems as they have arisen over the course of revolutions and uprisings. However, Arendt’s contribution to democratic theory has been obscured by her commentators who argue that her reflections on democracy are either an aberration in her work or easily reconcilable within a liberal democratic framework. This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive outline of Arendt’s writing on the council system and a clarification of her work outside the milieu of the post-Cold War return to Arendt. Her analyses bring to light a political system that guarantees civil and political rights while allowing all willing citizens direct participation in government. Framing her discussion within the language of the current renewed interest in constituent power, her council system could be described as a blending together of constitu-ent power and constitutional form. Arendt resists the complete dominance and superiority of either element and argues that the foundation of a free state requires nothing less than the stabilization and persistence of con-stituent power within an open and fluid institution that would resist either the bureaucratization of politics or its dispersal into a revolutionary flux. Although one may conclude that her institutional suggestions are far from flawless, her political principles allow a conceptualization of democracy in more substantial ways than current liberal political philosophy.

Keywords: Arendt; constitutionalism; council system; democracy; repre-sentation.

Introduction

One hundred years after the birth of a human being whose original-ity and profundity of thought has forced us to rethink our most basic categories of political life, we hardly need to be reminded “Why Arendt

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THE LOST TrEASUrE OF ArENdT’S COUNCIL SySTEM 397

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Matters”.1 Arendt’s writing explores the twentieth century’s most novel crises of totalitarianism, the holocaust and the irreparable severing of a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato. In one of her later books, On Revolution, Arendt conducts a twin study of the French and Ameri-can revolutions and offers a damning critique of modern representative democracy while searching for the “lost treasures” of citizens’ councils. Arendt proposes that the system of liberal representative democracy is deeply flawed and analyses the merits of a council system in which citizens must “protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity.”2 However, Arendt’s contribution to demo-cratic theory has been marred by radically divergent interpretations of her thought that either obscure or dismiss Arendt’s writing on democracy. There is no single clear text we can turn to for an illumination of Arendt’s most perplexing of reflections in the final chapter of On Revolution on the shortcomings of representative democracy. On the one hand, Margaret Canovan, one of Arendt’s most ardent supporters, believes Arendt’s views on the citizens’ councils are “something of an embarrassment”, which are at best a nostalgic reflection on a series of failed political systems and at worst a dangerous call for the dismantling of universal suffrage and the creation of a new political elite.3 In contrast, Jeffrey Issac, who writes in response to Canovan, goes too far in attempting to save Arendt from Canovan’s criticism and ultimately reduces Arendt’s critique to little more than a call for greater civic participation.4 After being rescued from the depths, Arendt’s treasure of a council system has once again sunk back into obscurity and misunderstanding. This essay seeks to return to Arendt outside the milieu of the immediate post-Cold War rejuvenation of interest in her work. It offers a novel inter-pretation of Arendt’s council system as based on an innovative theorization of constituent power beyond the sovereign paradigm. Arendt is the often unacknowledged cornerstone of radical democratic theorists today. How-ever, the same theorists who draw upon her study of constituent power do so in a highly critical manner and often fail to grasp the essence of her alter-native council system.5 I demonstrate that Arendt’s council system is best

1. Elisabeth young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, CT: yale University Press, 2006). 2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New york: Penguin Books, 1963), 267. 3. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237. 4. Jeffrey C. Issac, “Oases in the desert: Hannah Arendt on democratic Politics”, American

Political Science Review 88(1) (1992),156–68. 5. The three most noteworthy of these theorists are Jacques rancière, Antonio Negri and Andreas

Kalyvas.

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described as a combination and blending together of constituent power and constitutional form. Arendt resists the complete dominance and superiority of either element and argues that the foundation of a free state requires noth-ing less than the stabilization and persistence of constituent power within an open and fluid institution that would resist either the bureaucratization of politics or its dispersal into a revolutionary flux. Arendt’s theory deserves our attention, not because it is theoretically flaw-less or pragmatically sound, but because its underlying political principles allow us to conceptualize democracy in a manner that is vastly different to current liberal ideology which privileges the pursuit of individualistic private ends over public virtue. Arendt encourages us to think critically about the institutions of representative democracy and how compatible these really are with public freedom.6 First we will see that Arendt’s council system would not strip citizens of any of their current civil rights or constitutional guaran-tees. rather, it encourages all citizens to participate directly in government while maintaining the right of freedom from politics for those who choose. Next, it will be shown that, contra Isaac, Arendt’s critique is not compatible with the central principles of current liberal theory; attempts to incorporate her critique as a call for civic participation within a representative system face irreconcilable difficulties. I will then discuss Arendt’s retrieval of constituent power and her relation to current theorists of radical democracy. Finally, I will develop and explore Arendt’s institutional model of the council system in order to highlight the principles of her theory and reveal potential con-tradictions that would be arise in practice.

On Revolution

It is at times unclear what Arendt is attempting to achieve in On Revolution. Her central thesis appears to be the development of a distinction between the concepts of “the social” and “the political” and their guiding roles in the French and American revolutions respectively. For Arendt, the French revolution was characterized by the emergence of the working class on the stage of history whose demands generated an irresistible necessity that led to the rise of the social and the denial of political freedom. On the other hand, the poverty and misery of the French sans culottes did not exist, according

6. Arendt’s understanding of freedom is a notoriously difficult concept that is best explained by Margaret Canovan and ronald Beiner. See Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 211–16; Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (eds), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philoso-phy (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 349–70.



to Arendt, to the same degree in America, which allowed the Americans to conduct a genuinely political revolution.7 However, Arendt was not with-out criticism of the Founding Fathers. The greatest failure of the American revolution for Arendt was its inability to preserve a space for direct citizen participation in the institutional form of a council system.8

In the final chapter of On Revolution Arendt seeks to recover a lost revo-lutionary spirit of direct participation in government that has been con-sistently repressed by the party system over the course of revolutions and uprisings. Arendt analyses various citizen’s councils which arose organically at different times and places in relative isolation and with little knowledge of one another. She traces these spontaneous gatherings through the writings of Thomas Jefferson, the sociétés populaires of the early French revolution, the Parisian Commune of 1871, the russian workers councils of 1905 and 1917 and finally the councils of the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956. Arendt presents these examples of citizens participating in spontaneous and organically produced council systems as a direct critique of modern repre-sentative government which institutionalizes the rule of an elite and results in the denial of freedom to the majority of citizens. A council system allows citizens to participate directly in government through a participatory struc-ture based on the principles of political equality and plurality.

Civil Rights and Constitutional Democracy

Margaret Canovan goes to some lengths to account for the aberration of the embarrassing “council system” in a writer whom she otherwise greatly admires. She alludes to the “romantic sympathy” which Arendt had for the political ideal of citizens’ councils suggesting that perhaps we could dismiss this section of her work as irrational or utopian nostalgia.9 In one of her early essays, Canovan compares Arendt to rousseau “who oscillated between moralistic utopianism and rejection of all modern politics on the one hand, and practical commitment (even to the extent of writing consti-tutions for Poland and Corsica) on the other.”10 However, this conclusion appears unduly harsh both because the council system is central to Arendt’s later work in On Revolution and Crises of the Republic and because it follows

7. For criticism of the historical accuracy of Arendt’s analysis see Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: democracy and the Political”, Salmagundi 60 (1983): 3–19.

8. Arendt, On Revolution, 231. 9. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 235. 10. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”, 7–8.

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directly from her own understanding of freedom and politics developed in The Human Condition. Arendt’s argument deserves more respect and critical attention than to conclude that it is “a curiously unrealistic commitment” which serves only to embarrass us liberal-minded democrats with its aris-tocratic sympathies.11 Far from being an outrageously fanciful or utopian dream, I suggest Arendt’s reflections reveal a political system that guarantees civil and political rights while allowing all willing citizens direct participa-tion in government. Canovan wrote a number of essays and books on Arendt that have highlighted the “serious and unresolved contradiction which allows her work to be read in two incompatible ways.”12 In an earlier essay she notes the inconsistency between Arendt’s elitist and democratic strands, and between her concrete political proposals and utopian imaginings.13 To be fair to Canovan we should focus on her final “reinterpretation” of Arendt’s work in which she has produced her most mature and scholarly work.14 In Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Canovan raises a number of objections with Arendt’s proposal for a council system. Most importantly, Canovan jumps on two oft-quoted passages to conclude Arendt’s proposals are “fatally damaged” as a realistic alternative to liberal democracy. First, Canovan is concerned with Arendt’s statement that “[a]nyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied with their being decided without him.”15 Arendt adds that this would “spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today.”16 To Arendt’s critics this is indis-putable evidence of a dangerous elitist tendency in her thinking which does away with liberalism’s rights-based conception of citizenship and democracy. They believe a move to an Arendtian council system would entail the dis-mantling of institutional safeguards which guarantee individual rights and

11. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 237. 12. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”, 7. 13. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”. 14. This is supported by Canovan’s claim in the preface to “A reinterpretation” that “I found

myself obliged to revise my previous understandings of many aspects of her thought, and to suspect that what was needed was a full-scale reinterpretation.” While it is difficult to determine how this specifically affected her views on Arendt’s council system, one of the most striking differences between the two works is that Canovan is no longer as convinced that Arendt considered her proposals to be a realistic political alternative in the near future. Presumably this was influenced by her reading of Arendt in A. Klein (ed.), Dissent, Power and Confrontation, which is notably absent from the references of her first study.

15. Hannah Arendt, “Thought on Politics and revolution”, in Crises of the Republic (New york: Penguin Books, 1969), 190–91.

16. Arendt, On Revolution, 271.



the creation of a new class of elites who would rule over a disenfranchized majority. The first objection to this interpretation, a seemingly obvious point that is overlooked by her critics, is that Arendt’s council system does not detract or take away from any of a citizen’s current political rights. For example, in the existing constitutional arrangements in the United States people have the right to vote for a representative if they wish but Presiden-tial and Congressional elections are considered well attended if they can attract 45-50% of the eligible population. In a liberal democracy with a non-compulsory voting system citizens can spend a lifetime without having made a single contribution to formal political life. Thus, to say that Arendt is ignoring the procedural benefits of liberalism which act as a bulwark against a politically interested minority is overstating liberalism’s achieve-ments. Instead of merely receiving a right to vote, all citizens in Arendt’s council system can participate in governing. George Kateb, a liberal scholar, raises a similar point argued by Canovan in an earlier essay that Arendt fails to acknowledge representative democ-racy’s ability to generate political debate and participation through its citi-zens’ defence of negative liberties.17 In one sense her critics are correct in stating that Arendt does not devote much time to extolling the virtues of modern representative democracy and, somewhat characteristically, gives it a partisan, one-sided reading. However, the example of public participation given by Canovan of the anti-Vietnam war movement hardly deflects the critical thrust of Arendt’s critique. The fact that this was an extraordinary movement which had to fight against considerable institutional repression to appear for a brief moment in history supports Arendt’s concern that representative democracy relies predominantly on the vote which does not create an institutional space for participation.18

Second, we can presume with Isaac that Arendt’s council system would preserve all of the checks and balances and civil rights of current liberal con-stitutional political systems. There is considerable evidence in On Revolution and Crises of the Republic that point to Arendt’s respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards. For example, Arendt was a strong supporter of the American Constitution which she saw as the “greatest achievement of the American people.”19 She believed that the American Constitution con-solidated the revolutionary power of the people and that it had established

17. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: rowman and Allanheld, 1984), 132.

18. John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council democracy”, Polity 20(1) (1987): 93.


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“the foundation of freedom.”20 She particularly admired the separation of powers which did not rest on the false notion that power can be successfully checked by laws but rather took heed of John Adams’ teachings that “power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength” and that this would paradoxically generate a new form of power stronger than before.21 Her only objection to the institutions of the Senate and the Supreme Court, which were so successful in maintaining stability, was that they in themselves failed to preserve the revolutionary spirit of participation in government.22

Arendt was never critical of the American Constitution in and of itself and admired the stability and longevity of the republic it founded. Furthermore, Arendt praised the “blessings of ‘limited government’ ” and confirmed that “the distance between tyranny and constitutional, limited government is as great as, perhaps greater than, the distance between limited government and freedom.”23 despite her criticism of liberal representative democracy for denying its citizens genuine political freedom, she did not believe that every aspect of the political system was worthless or should be abandoned. After having her rights stripped from her as a Jew in Nazi Ger-many, Arendt did not underestimate the value of a constitutional govern-ment. This is due primarily to the need to create a “stable institutional world in which laws are not totalitarian laws of motion but secure fences inside which men can dwell.”24 Indeed, Arendt consistently supported civil liber-ties in political debate. While her emphasis in her analysis of constitutions is usually not on the negative liberties of property and civil rights but upon “the constitution of political freedom”,25 it does not follow that she did not view such protections as important in their own right. She believed that the Bill of rights had been a necessary supplement to the United States Con-stitution in order to guarantee basic constitutional liberties.26 Although she sought to distinguish civil rights from political freedom, this was not simply to discount the protection of rights as some of her critics would suggest. In a more confused line of critique, some of her critics have accused Arendt of neo-conservative or proto-fascist tendencies. In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber places Arendt in the company of Leo Strauss, rousseau and other writers he accuses of adopting a “unitary theory” of

20. Arendt, On Revolution, 145. 21. Arendt, On Revolution, 143. 22. Arendt, On Revolution, 223. 23. Arendt, On Revolution, 210. 24. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 201. 25. Arendt, On Revolution, 141. 26. Arendt, On Revolution, 143.



public life which reduces politics to a national homogeneity.27 However, as Canovan points out, this is a serious misreading. One of Arendt’s most significant contributions to political thought is the concept of plurality, the acknowledgement that “men, not Man, live on the Earth and inhabit the World.”28 rather than reduce political life to a “General Will” where “the citizens hav[e] but one interest, the people … but a single will,”29 Arendt views politics as the space between plural human beings which cannot be controlled unilaterally by a single party. Canovan summarizes the difference succinctly in stating that for Arendt “citizens are held together not by a com-mon will but by a common world.”30 Arendt’s council system preserves the institutional safeguards of current liberal representative democracy while allowing for greater participation in government by ordinary citizens.

Arendt’s Elites

While the words “end of general suffrage” are enough to strike fear in the hearts of modern liberal democrats, they need not have such elitist overtones as Arendt’s critics suggest. The charge of elitism is contradicted by the cen-tral argument of Arendt’s work which forces us to put into context her final provocative statement regarding the creation of a new elite. Arendt’s council system is better interpreted as an extension rather than a limitation of politi-cal rights and participation. Her main thesis in On Revolution is that repre-sentative democracy denies people genuine political freedom and self-rule and puts in its place a “government of the people by an élite sprung from the people.”31 For Arendt, voting for rulers in periodic elections from a profes-sional class of party politicians is entirely missing the point of politics. “For political freedom, generally speaking, means the right ‘to be a participator in government’, or it means nothing.”32 Politics is not concerned with “ruling” but rather the creation of a public space between plural human beings where they may act in concert. despite contrary interpretations, Arendt does not wish to further limit democratic participation to a privileged few but extend the opportunity of direct participation in government to every citizen.

27. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, CA: Uni-versity of California Press, 1984), 118.

28. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 7. 29. Jean-Jacques rousseau, The Social Contract, Maurice Cranston (trans.) (New york: Penguin

Classics, 1968), Book IV, chapter II, 87. 30. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 226. 31. Arendt, On Revolution, 269. 32. Arendt, On Revolution, 210.

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However, Canovan believes her reading of an elitist strand in Arendt’s work is supported by Arendt’s “distrust of the mass of ordinary voters” evi-denced in her previous works The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.33 A key theme in Canovan’s reinterpretation of Arendt is that Arendt’s political thought developed from her reflections on totalitarian-ism.34 Canovan asserts that as a Jew who witnessed the rise of Hitler, Arendt carried with her a distrust of “the masses” that taints her work. According to Canovan, Arendt also “expresses contempt not only for the activity of labouring but for the characteristic tastes and dispositions of labourers.”35 However, it is problematic to read into On Revolution an assumption about the inadequacies of human nature similar to Schumpeter’s view that citizens are bad and corrupt judges of public affairs. Arendt disavowed any attempt at positing a universal Human Nature in politics.36 Furthermore, there are numerous passages in On Revolution which contradict Canovan’s reading through their praise of the capacities of ordinary citizens. Arendt refers to the “political maturity” of the working class who are “entirely capable of acting in a political capacity.”37 She mourns the loss of the “the townships and the town-hall meetings, the original springs of all political activity”38 attended by “the many” in American society, alongside the suppression of the popular societies by robespierre during the French revolution. Isaac believes that this misunderstanding in Arendt’s work is due to her use of the term “the masses” as a sociological category to designate the type of person produced by a mass society: the anonymous individuated consumer who votes according to private interests and participates infrequently in public affairs. But Isaac stresses “‘the masses’ is not a psychological category intended to denigrate the capacities of ordinary men and women.”39 Arendt herself notes the dangers in the simple “equation of ‘people’ and masses,”40 highlighting the clear distinction in her mind. Whereas a member of the masses is conformist and is controlled by mainstream media and “Madison Avenue” politics, Arendt urges ordinary citizens to break out of this cycle by forming citizen’s councils and creating a public space in which to act. It is only through “breaking up ‘the many’ into assemblies where one could

33. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 236. 34. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 7. 35. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”, 7. 36. Note that her magnum opus was called The Human Condition not Human Nature. 37. Arendt, On Revolution, 266. 38. Arendt, On Revolution, 231. 39. Isaac, “Oases in the desert: Hannah Arendt on democratic Politics”, 162. 40. Arendt, On Revolution, 262.



count and be counted upon”41 that the perversions of mass society could be remedied. Arendt’s critics have also been concerned that her council system would lead to a new reified political elite in the place of the old. However, Arendt was against all forms of “mercilessly centralized power”42 which denied the basic fact of human plurality and diversity of opinion and judgment. There are no passages to suggest Arendt supported the establishment of a new fixed and permanent political elite. Her rhetorical argument seeks to break down the distinction between “those who were in power and those who had helped them into it, between the representatives and the represented … between the rulers and the ruled.”43 Arendt approvingly quotes Jefferson’s belief that “the ward system was not meant to strengthen the power of the many but the power of ‘every one’.”44 The life of the republic is secured when “there shall not be a man in the State who is not a member of some one of its councils, great or small.”45 In principle, Arendt concurs with Jefferson that each citizen should participate in the actual governing of the state. However, there are also a number of troubling statements in Arendt’s work regarding the limitations of freedom and the role of elites that place her democratic credentials in doubt. While some of them fit within a demo-cratic framework others remain more ambiguous. First, Arendt believes as a historical and theoretical fact that freedom is spatially limited and that the political spaces of freedom are like “islands in a sea or oases in a desert.”46 However, this does not imply that certain categories of people must be excluded, nor does it entail the separation of a political aristocracy from the masses. It infers that Arendt considered equality among humans as a politi-cal construction rather than a self-evident natural fact. Her vivid metaphor of an island in a sea echoes the description of classical republicans such as Machiavelli and rousseau for whom the city-state had to be defended against the inevitable decay of corruption and war. Indeed, it is true that throughout history, republics of the kind Arendt admired have seldom come into existence. However, there is no logical inconsistency with modern dem-ocratic societies creating similar spaces of public freedom on a larger scale. Building upon her metaphor, Arendt states that “the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of life of the many”47 and that

41. Arendt, On Revolution, 246. 42. Arendt, On Revolution, 236. 43. Arendt, On Revolution, 233. 44. Arendt, On Revolution, 246 (my emphasis). 45. Arendt, On Revolution, 246. 46. Arendt, On Revolution, 267. 47. Arendt, On Revolution, 267.

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furthermore, there is a “bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity.”48 But this seemingly elitist position is based on Arendt’s personal belief that not every citizen would be interested in participating in government – as is the case now under a liberal democracy. We should read this passage as a sociological observation of modern mass society rather than a normative prescription for political life. And indeed, her pessimism should not be overstated for this is quali-fied by her position that “political passions … are perhaps not as rare as we are inclined to think, living in a society which has perverted all virtues into social values.”49 Furthermore, the lofty ideals which Arendt sets for her citi-zens as someone who “strives for excellence regardless not only of social sta-tus and administrative office but even of achievement and congratulations” demonstrates that we should not be too disheartened to find that Arendt’s citizens are “certainly out of the ordinary under all circumstances.”50 Arendt’s council system grants the negative political freedom from politics to those unwilling to participate and allows them the freedom to re-enter political debate whenever they wish. But if it will only be “those few from all walks of life who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be ‘happy’ without it”51 participating in govern-ment what should we make of the problem of democratic exclusion? On the one hand, Isaac chastizes Canovan for supposing that Arendt’s coun-cil system restricted politics to an “aristocratic leisure class” as he believed “[Arendt’s] ‘aristocracy’ is an aristocracy of civic-mindedness, not a heredi-tary elite based on access to wealth.”52 However, it seems to be a legitimate question to ask who exactly are these “happy few” and what structures of power would manifest themselves in this new system to exclude certain types of people. Canovan is rightly concerned for those who are “too old, too ill, overburdened with work, or too inarticulate” to participate.53 While exclu-sion may not operate solely on the basis of wealth alone, Arendt’s notion of power not as something one can possess but as existing in the space of appearance between humans when they act together leaves her vulnerable to the criticism that she does not properly consider socio-economic inequali-ties which lead to power imbalances in the public sphere.54 In principle,

48. Arendt, On Revolution. 49. Arendt, On Revolution, 268. 50. Arendt, On Revolution. 51. Arendt, On Revolution, 271. 52. Isaac, “Oases in the desert: Hannah Arendt on democratic Politics”, 160. 53. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”, 19. 54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 200.



Arendt’s council system would have no institutional barriers to prevent citi-zens from participating. However, Arendt’s idiosyncratic theory of power leaves her blindsided and does not allow her to imagine how structures of power would operate to exclude citizens in unjust and undemocratic ways. This is a genuine problem for Arendt’s theory and perhaps a fertile ground in which to commence a dialogue with post-structuralist theorists of power such as Michel Foucault.

Arendt’s Critique as Civic Participation?

Isaac challenges Canovan’s interpretation of Arendt as advocating for a dis-mantling of liberal representative democracy in favour of a council system. Instead he believes Arendt imagined the council system as a complement to current representative institutions which would invigorate democratic prac-tices through greater debate, political involvement and participation within the sphere of civil society. This would lead to greater accountability of the professional class of politicians and would constitute a form of empower-ment in its own right. However, on this point, Canovan’s more scholarly book length treatment of Arendt’s work is to be preferred to Isaac’s who confuses civic participation with direct political participation in govern-ment. While offering some important correctives to Canovan’s work, Isaac ultimately does Arendt an injustice by attempting to accommodate her work into a liberal representative paradigm. Isaac draw upon one of the final paragraphs in On Revolution to con-clude that Arendt’s council system was a way to break up modern society at the grass roots with voluntary associations rather than a replacement of current representative institutions. Arendt notes, “it would be tempting to spin out further the potentialities of the councils, but it certainly is wiser to say with Jefferson, ‘Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments’ – the best instruments, for example, for breaking up the modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass movements, or rather, the best, most natural way for interspersing it at the grass roots with an ‘elite’ that is chosen by no one but constitutes itself.”55 Isaac seems to place considerable emphasis on the ambiguous phrase “interspersing it at the grass roots” as evidence which supports his reading of Arendt as pro-moting participation in civil society rather than an overhaul of representa-


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tive democracy. However, such a reading runs contrary to the main body of Arendt’s work both in On Revolution and in her other texts. We cannot forget that Arendt immediately followed this passage with her infamous reference to “the end of general suffrage” and a statement that only those who have demonstrated that they cared about the public world would “have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic.”56 We have seen that these remarks can be interpreted differently than Canovan, but to insinuate that Arendt’s council system is a mere supplement to liberal representative democracy is to be missing Arendt’s point and ignoring the main thrust of her valuable critique. robert Putnam has conducted important study in the field of civic par-ticipation and has demonstrated that there appears to be a positive correla-tion between higher levels of private association and a better functioning of democratic institutions.57 This is a highly worthwhile project yet at its base rests a functionalist argument that civic participation will lead to a more vigorous democracy and better outputs. Arendt’s point on the other hand is a critique of the institution of representative democracy which limits genuine political freedom to a privileged few representatives who are only free when they move amongst their peers in Parliament or Congress. At the risk of repetition, Arendt stressed that “political freedom … means the right ‘to be a participator in government’, or it means nothing.”58 Any attempt to dilute Arendt’s critique to make it more palatable to today’s liberal readers faces the considerable difficulty of bypassing passage after passage of clear, direct condemnation of representative democracy in all its forms and an emphasis on the radical difference between these institutions and those of a council system. In her historical analyses of council systems, Arendt notes that the party and council systems were “so utterly unlike and even contradictory to each other.”59 This contradiction is due to the different political principles which provide the normative foundations for each system. representative democ-racy produces a conception of legitimate authority through the consent of the governed. yet in a council system each citizen may be a participator in the government thus generating authority through the consensus of politi-cal equals. Arendt is very self-conscious of the stark differences between the two systems. She makes it clear that the council system in fact repre-

56. Arendt, On Revolution. 57. robert d. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press,1993). 58. Arendt, On Revolution, 210. 59. Arendt, On Revolution, 239.



sented “an entirely new form of government.”60 It is not merely a means to better inform citizens about public issues, articulate public concerns or hold governments accountable. For Arendt, the councils “refused to regard themselves as temporary organs of revolution and, on the contrary, made all attempt at establishing themselves as permanent organs of government.”61 Nowhere is Arendt more explicit about this point than when she categori-cally states that “the members of the councils were not content to discuss and ‘enlighten themselves’ about measures that were taken by parties or assem-blies; they consciously and explicitly desired the direct participation of every citizen in the public affairs of the country.”62 Arendt’s historical account of old council systems cannot be incorporated into Isaac’s reading. However, Isaac believes that Arendt did not intend these historical exam-ples of council systems to be seen as realistic alternatives today. He asserts that Arendt nowhere advocated for the wholesale dismantling of the lib-eral representative state through revolution and that her conception was rather an alternative model of state power – a decentralization of power and the “pluralisation of political space”. We can certainly agree with Isaac that Arendt was sceptical about “revolution” which tended to sweep up its participants in an irresistible process in which “everything was possible”. However, it does not follow that Arendt therefore accepted the institution of representative democracy or that she would have necessarily disapproved of all attempts to change current political arrangements. Arendt herself stated that “I never believed in liberalism”63 and part of her search for the lost treasures of the past was in opposition to those who “take for granted that there is not, and never has been, any alternative to the present system.”64 Part of On Revolution reads almost like a manifesto for change and while it may be difficult to comment upon the degree to which Arendt expected her readers to take her proposals as realistic political alternatives it is unwise to assume she accepted the inevitability of a system which she so vehemently criticized. Isaac’s reading of what Arendt would have advocated in practice is far removed from Arendt’s political ideals and it is difficult to believe that she would have supported this form of liberal democracy. Second, Arendt does not seek to evacuate or ignore the site of the state as a privileged domain of analysis for democratic politics in order to concentrate

60. Arendt, On Revolution, 241. 61. Arendt, On Revolution, 256. 62. Arendt, On Revolution, 255. 63. “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt”, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World,

M. A. Hill (ed.) (New york: St Martin’s Press, 1979), 334. 64. Arendt, On Revolution, 271.

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on an exclusively local level of politics as Issac’s analysis seems to suggest.65 Arendt explains that during many of the modern revolutions, what occurred was not simply the devolution of power to local councils but “the amazing formation of a new power structure which owed its existence to nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”66 rather than moving from a state-oriented to an exclusively local level of political analysis, Arendt in fact rejected a sovereign model of politics centered on a state government as the bearer of sovereign power. It is to these issues that we will now turn.

Between Constituent Power and Constitutional Form

Arendt’s best-known contribution to political theory is perhaps her famous distinction between the political and the social and the concomitant notion that politics must be preserved from the encroachment of the social as an independent, autonomous and self-justifying sphere of human life. How-ever, equally important and, until recently, under acknowledged, is her rejec-tion of sovereignty as an organizing principle of modern politics and her analysis of constituent power and the paradox of constitutionalism. Having defended Arendt from liberal criticisms and demonstrated the novelty of her council system and its irreducibility to a form of liberal civic participa-tion I will now outline exactly how Arendt is positioned in relation to con-temporary democratic theory. Arendt is, in fact, the hidden key reference point for a whole generation of radical democratic theorists today who have questioned the dominance of sovereignty as the sine qua non of political life and explored the problem of constituent power. Arendt was one of the only major theorists of the early to mid twentieth century to take seriously the problem of constituent power and its disappearance within a formal structure of instituted politics.67 I argue that her council system relies upon a complex balancing of constituent power and constitutional form in a man-ner that requires both elements to be maintained simultaneously in order to safeguard political freedom. democratic theory is currently marked by a proliferation of new ap-proaches to radical democracy. Some of the earliest exponents of radical democratic theory are Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and William Con-nolly, whose work in the late 1980s challenged the proceduralism and uni-

65. Arendt, On Revolution, 248. 66. Arendt, On Revolution. 67. A second major figure here would be Carl Schmitt. See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory

(durham, NC and London: duke University Press, 2008).



versality of liberal democracy, seeking to open it to notions of contestation, agonism and difference. However, in spite of their posturing, these theorists did not stray far from the liberal model and remained tied to the presupposi-tions of identity, sovereignty and representation. More recently, a number of theorists have challenged this position and produced more radical critiques of liberal and deliberative democracy. While one would not go so far as to say these authors constitute a “school” of democratic theory, Alain Badiou, Jacques rancière, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and Andreas Kalyvas all owe a significant debt to Arendt. Interestingly, references to her in their work are often highly critical despite a shared concern for the problems of sovereignty and constituent power. In addition to being a touchstone for contemporary radical democratic theory I argue that Arendt’s council system also surpasses current theoriza-tions of radical democracy in the nuance with which it conceptualizes the relation between constituent power and constitutional form. Her analysis of the modern problem of constitutionalism is animated by the search for a constitutio libertatis, foundation of freedom. In Arendt’s opinion, the ques-tion which has plagued all modern revolutions is this: how does one found a free state and commence a cycle of ordinary/instituted politics without the extraordinary moment of political freedom inherent in the founding act disappearing in the process? The question of the priority of – and the con-nection between – constituent power and constitutional form has remained an open one to this day. For the most part, political philosophy has attempted to contain constitu-ent power within a structure of formal politics operating within established institutions with authority emanating from a centralized sovereign power. We could refer to this as the “juridical containment thesis,” present in most liberal theories, whereby constituent power is exhausted by and fully incor-porated within a new constitutional structure so that it may no longer make any claim to power or authority outside of an established system of law. In opposition to this thesis, radical democrats inspired by Antonio Negri have sought to rethink the notion of constituent power and extend its radical potential beyond liberal constitutionalism. For Negri, constituent power is a radical, absolute and all-powerful force that must be thought of in opposi-tion to and outside of constituted power. Constituent power is diminished when subsumed within constitutional form and continuously seeks to break out of this restraint and asserts its superiority and dominance. However, the reversal of the priority between constituent power and constitutional form does little to solve the problem. While liberalism destroys constituent power and buries it within formal institutional politics, Negri fails to ground it in

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any form of structure or stability that would give it a normative foundation and prevent its descent into a form of fascism or anarchy. The experience of political freedom is, as Arendt describes, akin to an oasis in a desert, continuously threatened and prone to incorporation within a bureaucratic system or simply annihilated by tyranny. Political freedom is exercised when citizens gather in a shared public sphere in order to deliber-ate over the common good, make their own laws and participate in govern-ing. This possibility disappears in liberal constitutionalism, but it would also soon be swept into a revolutionary flux under a Negrian revolutionary government. Arendt’s council system resists the legalization of politics into constitutional form and the revolutionary becoming of absolute constituent power by combining both elements and maintaining them in their rich-ness in a true constitutio libertatis. In her alternative proposition, power emanates from the grass roots but is constituted in a federal structure of councils. These councils, which Arendt reminds us “were always organs of order as much as organs of action,”68 in fact “aimed at the foundation of a new state.”69 Her preferred conception is a “council-state” in which a federal system of councils appoints deputies to the higher councils who ultimately form a parliament.

The Institutional Model of the Council System

Arendt’s supporters are able to evade structural questions of the council sys-tem by falling back on an oft-quoted passage in On Revolution: “It would be tempting to spin out further the potentialities of the councils, but it certainly is wiser to say with Jefferson, ‘Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what they are the best instruments’ ”.70 This highlights an important point: for Arendt the council system is first and foremost the embodiment of her conception of political action and as human action is unpredictable it is necessary to allow the councils to develop in a manner of their choosing. Indeed, Arendt states in an interview that the continual reappearance of the council system throughout history was evidence that “the council system seems to correspond to and to spring from the very experience of political action.”71 However, Canovan makes a valid point that if Arendt believed so strongly in the council system “she ought to have

68. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 255. 69. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 253. 70. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 271. 71. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, 189.



made a much more serious case for it, and to have tried to answer the many objections that can be raised against it.”72 Arendt does provide small frag-ments of institutional plans which are enough to provide a brief sketch of what the council system might look like in practice but it still leaves many questions unanswered. These problems are not necessarily alleviated by John Sitton’s observation that Arendt believed “important studies on this subject have been published in recent years in France and Germany,”73 as neither Arendt nor Sitton cite any of these studies or provide evidence of what they had in mind. In some respects, the elaboration of the actual institutions of the council system reveal many of the weaknesses, or at the very least uncer-tainties, with Arendt’s proposals. Arendt believes that our primary source of information for how a council system would operate is historical experience. We should first look to “the February revolution of 1917 in russia and to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, both of which lasted long enough to show in bare outlines what a government would look like and how a republic was likely to function if they were founded upon the principles of the council system.”74 Arendt is amazed that although these councils only lasted a short duration, it “took these independent and highly disparate organs no more than a few weeks, in the case of russia, or a few days in the case of Hungary, to begin a process of co-ordination and integration through the formation of higher councils or a regional or provincial character, from which finally the delegates to an assembly representing the whole country could be chosen.”75 Following these historical examples, Arendt’s council system would be a federal sys-tem of councils with deputies being selected from the lower councils to the higher ones until they formed a parliament.76 The project is a national one which seeks to co-ordinate the various lower councils into a national body through democratically appointed deputies. At first glance this appears simi-lar to current representative institutions but there are a number of defining characteristics. First, all citizens are permitted to sit on the lower councils, as one of the central principles of the system is that anyone can participate and this opportunity should be open to all. The various lower councils which would be distributed territorially across a nation-state should be the result of the spontaneous organization of the people. Arendt does not envision

72. Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”, 8. 73. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, 191. 74. Arendt, On Revolution, 258. 75. Arendt, On Revolution, 259. 76. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, 189.

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that there could be a top-down distribution of boundaries co-ordinated by a central authority. The councils that she describes have always “sprang from the people as spontaneous organs of action and order”.77 Perhaps here Arendt is fortunate that the council system has never survived long enough to face the difficulties of how such a process would be co-ordinated and what would be done to resolve boundary disputes or the question of orga-nizing around other principles such as identity groups or workplaces. From within these lower councils Arendt makes clear that after a small group of citizens sit around a table and discuss their political opinions “it will become clear which one of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council.”78 This will lead to the natural sorting of a politi-cal elite who have gained the trust and confidence of their equals to be selected for the higher council. This type of selection process would be vastly different from the current representative institutions which tend to promote representatives according to standards and criteria that are unpo-litical. rather than encouraging “plain salesmen” who could survive the cutthroat world of party politics through cunning, ambition for power and with the help of money, Arendt’s elites would be selected “for their trustwor-thiness, their personal integrity, their capacity of judgment, often for their physical courage.”79 However, this observation that a council system would produce different sociological qualities in its deputies and would avoid the re-emergence of current socio-economic inequalities in the political realm is difficult to support. The different selection process would not eliminate the existence of ideology or exclude those who wish to “conduct public affairs for private advantage”. If every citizen were allowed to participate this would not necessarily result in the “political elite” of noble citizens that Arendt imagines but more likely a plurality, as Arendt would say, of different types of citizens both noble and dishonest. Arendt’s answer to these problems, although not entirely satisfactory, is a different conception of power and authority, which seeks to go beyond the concept of sovereignty. The central problem for Arendt is “not how to rec-oncile freedom and equality but how to reconcile equality and authority.”80 That is to say, how does one construct a political system which generates authority while maintaining the principles of the political equality and plurality of its citizens. In a federal council system Arendt’s solution is one

77. Arendt, On Revolution, 263. 78. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, 190. 79. Arendt, On Revolution, 266. 80. Arendt, On Revolution, 270.



in which “power would be constituted horizontally and not vertically.”81 Arendt does not want the councils to have sovereign power over each other or to be bound by each other’s decisions. Moreover, the central parliament cannot have such a power that deprives the local councils of their own grass roots constituent power to act. She believes that the councils are “bound to discover … the necessary separation of powers in government”.82 Her conception of power is one in which “power moves neither from above nor from below, but is horizontally directed so that the federated units mutually check and control their powers and that the power of each council would balance the others.”83 Although the structure ends up being pyramidal like an authoritarian government, it is one in which authority is generated at each level of the pyramid for none of the deputies are bound by a mandate of their electors nor from the orders of the central parliament.84 It is difficult to imagine how such a system with so many centres of power and legitimate authority would operate but we must remember that it is also based on Arendt’s own notion of authority as that which is neither coercion nor mere persuasion by argument but rather a power which sits at the top of a hierar-chical system.85 However, the problem of decision-making and the capacity to act in a co-ordinated manner still remains for Arendt’s system. This problem is never tackled by Arendt partly because the vagueness of her council system never led her to contemplate what the councils would actually do.86 This is where Arendt is at her most vulnerable as it is also based on her attempt to distinguish a political realm from that of a social or economic one. One of the problems she attributes to the worker’s councils was that they “did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things.”87 Arendt believes the councils only need to concern themselves with political prob-lems and need not enter into the realm of necessity which can be managed by bureaucrats. However, the distinction between these two realms is a tenuous one and a problem that has been raised by many of her critics. Bhiku Parekh, for one, considered Arendt naive in her belief in the pri-

81. Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, in Crises of the Republic, 191. 82. Arendt, On Revolution, 259. 83. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, in Crises of the Republic, 188. 84. Arendt, On Revolution, 270. 85. Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future, 93. 86. This problem is raised by Canovan in “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political

Thought”, 19. 87. Arendt, On Revolution, 265–66.

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macy of the political and the failure to deal with “the social” question.88

Furthermore, Sitton argues that Arendt failed to see that all problems in the social and economic world have political dimensions and cannot be merely reduced to Engels’ “administration of things”.89 Ultimately, even if we concede to Arendt that there could be some form of differentiation between political and non-political problems, this decision is in itself a highly political one and would differ between each council making for a very confused jurisdictional dilemma.

Conclusion

This essay has not, by any means, solved the many dilemmas troubling Arendt’s work. Her tendency to think outside of mainstream political categories enabled her to redefine many of the political concepts she was working with. But while this solved some of the impasses which Arendt was attempting to think through, it more often than not created a new problematic for those following her trains of thought. More than anything else, Arendt requires clarification. This essay has sought to dispel some of the misreadings of Arendt’s work in order to assist us in taking the political principles behind her council democracy seriously. Arendt does not offer us theory in the traditional sense of a direct political program which we can apply to our current historical situation or a guidebook on universal laws of human nature. Indeed, her anti-tradition would shun any attempt at the construction of such cut-and-paste methods. However, her political principles help us think about democracy in more significant ways than current liberal ideology whose democratic values, as Barber reminds us, “are prudential and thus provisional, optional, and conditional – means to exclusively individualistic and private ends.”90 I have specifically left the question of whether Arendt considered her principles a realistic alterna-tive for today’s democracy unanswered. After releasing her ideas into the world this is no longer a problem that is solely her responsibility. yet we should not hold our breaths for the appearance of an Arendtian council system. For it is possible that adequate conditions may only arise “in the wake of the next revolution”.91

88. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic High-lands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 170.

89. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council democracy”, 99. 90. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, 4. 91. Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and revolution”, 191.



James Muldoon is a graduate student at Monash University, Australia and is currently writing a thesis on the concept of the drives in Hegel. His research interests include post-structuralism, post-Marxism and contemporary feminist theory.

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Documents

Muldoon, The Lost Treasure of Arendt's Council System