Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy

A People's Utopia

Shmuel Lederman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030116927
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere.

The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and "the right to have rights" will be guaranteed; her conception of "the political" and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world.

© The Author(s) 2019

Shmuel LedermanHannah Arendt and Participatory Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11692-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Shmuel Lederman¹

(1)

The Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Shmuel Lederman

End Abstract

After reading On Revolution, Karl Jaspers writes to Hannah Arendt:

Your comparison and identification of the meaning of the ‘workers’ and ‘soldiers’ councils, the ‘small republics’, the beginnings and the truth of all revolutions since the American one, were familiar to me from your Hungary essay. That essay left me hesitant; but now I am convinced of the parallels of meaning and of the opportunity you see in them, though that opportunity has so far always been lost… ¹

Jaspers points here to the continuity between Arendt’s 1958 essay on the Hungarian Revolution ² and her 1963 book, On Revolution. ³ In both, the vision of a new, participatory form of government based on citizen councils plays a prominent role. Later in the same letter, Jaspers adds: “I sometimes think in reading your book that Greece is there for you: without your homeland among the Greeks you would hardly have been able to find the form, without them you could not have found the perspective that allowed you to perceive the marvelous significance of the American Constitution and its origins.” ⁴ Jaspers makes here an interesting observation: he reads On Revolution, the “revolutionary spirit ” and Arendt’s celebration of the American town-hall meetings, which she treats in On Revolution as a kind of precursor to the councils, as informed by the inspiration of the Greek polis and its conception of “the political,” which Arendt had attempted to recover in The Human Condition.

Revealingly, in her response Arendt fully approves this reading:

I can’t tell you how much your approval of the revolution book pleased me. Not only because I was afraid you mightn’t like it, but because every word you wrote strikes at the very heart of what I meant to say. A tragedy that warms and lightens the heart because such great and simple things were at stake. Heinrich’s experience, of course, and the experience of America. ⁵

“Heinrich’s experience” is Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher’s participation in the workers and soldiers’ councils in Germany in 1918–1919, as a member of the Spartacus League . ⁶ The “tragedy that warms and lightens the heart” is the appearance and demise of the councils and, more broadly, the modern revolutionary spirit . For Arendt too, it seems, the councils and the revolutionary spirit were closely related to the meaning of “the political” she gleaned from the experience of the Greek polis . ⁷

One may wonder whether Arendt is not simply deferring here to her former mentor and then friend, without genuinely approving his reading. However, she herself hints at this connection at the conclusion of On Revolution, right after her most detailed discussion of the councils. Modern accounts of the revolutionary spirit , she tells us (referring specifically to the poet René Char) are “perhaps too ‘modern’, too self-centered to hit in pure precision the center of that ‘inheritance which was left to us by no testament’.” ⁸ Where can we turn to, in order to get a more precise understanding of this inheritance? Arendt refers us to Sophocles, and through him to “the polis , the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendor.” ⁹ It is as if Arendt intimates to her readers that in order to understand the deeper meaning of the revolutionary spirit , and more specifically what kind of human experience the councils could make possible—they have to go back and read The Human Condition.

In her preface to the collection of essays Between Past and Future, Arendt describes the treasure Char found during his participation in the French Résistance—the experience of freedom , action and self-disclosure —and relates it to what she calls “the lost treasure” of modern revolutions , from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and 1789 in Paris to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest. These events revealed for those who participated in them, Arendt tells us, the meaning of public happiness and public freedom —experiences whose meaning was forgotten almost immediately, as no tradition and no testament had theorized and preserved them before or after they occurred. ¹⁰ Arendt does not mention the councils explicitly; nor does she mention them when she writes, in the posthumously published essay “Introduction into Politics,” that “[o]nly in such revolutions , from the American and French in the eighteenth century down to the Hungarian Revolution of the recent past, was there a direct link between the idea of participating in government and the idea of being free. But, at least thus far, these revolutions—and the direct experiences they provided for the possibilities inherent in political action —have proved incapable of establishing a new form of state.” ¹¹ Yet, in other writings what she celebrates most when she describes these events is the appearance of the councils or institutions similar in spirit and form, such as the American town-hall meetings, the revolutionary associations in the French Revolution or the revolutionary councils in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution . It is the memory and vision of radical, participatory democracy , which Arendt laments and celebrates over and over again, even if often implicitly.

Arendt’s advocacy of participatory democracy in the form of a citizen council system appears in various places in her writings, from her political interventions in the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine during the 1940s through her major works in political theory to interviews she gave late in her life. However, it remains a relatively neglected topic in the scholarly literature on Arendt , and this in two main senses: first, in the simple sense that, while it is often mentioned by commentators, there are relatively few studies dedicated to the role of the councils in Arendt’s thought. ¹² This reflects a common tendency among commentators to regard Arendt’s support for the council system as a romantic utopia Arendt herself did not take seriously ¹³ ; presented in her “darkest moments” ¹⁴ ; invoked as a kind of a metaphor to stress the need for moderate democratic reforms and a more vibrant civil society ¹⁵ ; or backed away from after On Revolution. ¹⁶ Indeed, as one commentator noted a few years ago: “When Arendt’s critical appropriation of the council tradition is not ignored altogether by her commentators, it is generally explained away as being a juvenile and utopian tendency within her thought, more an embarrassment than a theme to be grappled with.” ¹⁷

The second sense, in which the council system is a neglected topic in Arendt scholarship, is that even commentators who do take it seriously tend to focus on specific places and historical episodes where Arendt discusses the councils directly. They do not pay sufficient attention to the various ways Arendt’s support for a council democracy relates to her political philosophy as a whole. The exchange between Arendt and Jaspers as well as Arendt’s many references to the councils suggest that something more far-reaching is involved in her support for a new form of government based on the councils. They point to John Sitton’s suggestion, more than twenty years ago, that Arendt “clearly believed that council democracy is the only possible modern embodiment of her political principles. Far from merely revealing a perverse delight in historical rarities, Arendt’s argument for council democracy is the concentrated expression of her political philosophy .” ¹⁸

In this study, I seek to show that the vision of radical, participatory democracy is indeed much more central to Arendt’s political thought than commentators usually re...