Abstract
In this book, Christopher Holman seeks to develop “a new theoretical model of democracy” that considers democracy to be “a medium for the manifestation of a creative human impulse whose expression brings forth a unique type of human happiness” (p. 4). This new model is necessary, Holman argues, because of “a crisis of contemporary liberal democracy . . . that reveals itself primarily in the expression of popular discontent regarding . . . the incapacity of citizens to meaningfully participate in activities that aim at determining the political direction of communities” (p. 3). The primary goal of Holman’s model is to move away from instrumental models of politics that “look towards an eventual overcoming of the political sphere via the establishment of a terminal condition of existence, be this condition associated with, as in traditional socialist theory, the production of positive communism, or with, as in traditional liberal thought, the preservation of abstract right” (p. 4). Holman develops his new model of democracy through a “critical juxtaposition” of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. The emphasis, however, is on Marcuse: most of the book consists of a careful, systematic, and critical interpretation of many of Marcuse’s texts; the remainder—one-and-a-half of the book’s six chapters—is dedicated to a more limited discussion of Arendt that focuses mostly on the “Action” part of The Human Condition and On Revolution.
The book’s general argument can be summarized as follows. Holman argues that Marcuse’s basic project is “to construct a nonidentitarian Marxism rooted in a nonidentitarian concept of essence” (p. 6) that sees the “ontological condition of human life” as “one of a continual process of self-creation” (p. 30). It follows from this nonidentitarian concept of essence, Holman submits, that liberation from structures that thwart the “becoming-structure of the human being” should not aim for a “perfect harmony that permanently fixes the nature of subject and object,” but for “the construction of an objective world that is no longer a barrier to subjective development, to movement, becoming, and activity” (p. 50). However, Holman argues, there is a contradiction between Marcuse’s nonidentitarian concept of human essence as self-creation and the “one-dimensional and identitarian” conception of politics that often predominates in his work. This conception of politics does not consider politics as a “possible sphere for the manifestation of essence,” but follows those texts by Marx and Engels that consider politics exclusively in instrumental terms, and advocate the ultimate replacement of politics by “rational administration.” According to Holman, Marcuse reproduces this “Marxian antipolitics” in his call for an elitist politics in which an intellectual vanguard takes the lead over the masses that are incapable of understanding their true interests (80), and in his acceptance of the need for government through functional-administrative authority or bureaucracy. Nevertheless, Holman argues, Marcuse’s work also contains a “countertendency” to this instrumentalist and managerialist understanding of politics. This countertendency considers politics as a “performative” practice that facilitates radical creation. To appreciate this countertendency more fully, Holman argues, it is useful to read Marcuse in conjunction with Arendt. According to Holman, Arendt’s concept of “natality” is “quite similar” to Marcuse’s nonidentitarian conception of essence, and for Arendt, politics is the sphere par excellence in which the essential human capacity for new beginnings can be realized. Holman foregrounds Arendt’s emphasis on the “performative” (as opposed to the “functional” and “constitutive”) dimension of political speech and action, in which a person manifests herself to her political community, making new beginnings in the “space of appearance” that hinges on the “incomplete and plural self’s intersubjective relations with other human subjects” (p. 95). Holman also focuses on Arendt’s conception of political foundation of institutional arrangements that allow, paradoxically, for the ongoing creation of the radically new.
The question arises why, if Arendt’s negative conception of human essence as the capacity for radical creation is “quite similar” to Marcuse’s, and if Arendt does a better job than Marcuse in conceptualizing politics as a sphere in which human beings can realize this essence, we need Marcuse to develop a “new theoretical model of democracy.” Holman’s answer to this question is that Arendt’s work contains a “theoretical deficiency”: her distinctions, in The Human Condition, between labor, work, and action and between the political and the social. Whereas Arendt places labor outside the realm of politics, Holman follows Marcuse in considering material production as one of the most important modes for humans to realize their capacity for radical self-creation. Thus, material production cannot be excluded from politics. On the contrary, Holman submits: the capacity for radical self-creation can only be realized in the radical transformation of material existence. Holman argues that “the activity that Arendt refers to as labour is what Marx refers to as alienated labour” (p. 132). According to Holman, both Marx and Marcuse hold that through nonalienated labor, human beings realize their essence, not as what Arendt calls the animal laborans, reproducing biological life as a matter of necessity, but as a social being, and that “social” in this phrase cannot be opposed, as the realm of necessity, to the political realm of freedom, as Arendt does.
So what exactly is the nature of the “critical juxtaposition” of Marcuse and Arendt in this book? At times, Politics as Radical Creation could be interpreted as a Benjaminian attempt to unsettle a dominant, complacent reading of Marcuse as a one-dimensional, instrumental thinker of politics, by letting fragments of Arendt “reveal” or “illuminate” aspects of Marcuse’s work that lie “embedded” in it but remain in the background on a more cursory reading, namely, possibilities for a performative politics. However, the critical juxtaposition primarily seems to aim at a synthesis of Marcuse’s and Arendt’s insights on politics: the “new theoretical model of democracy” announced in the introduction seems to be this synthesis.
The downside of this approach is that in the dialogue that he stages, Holman casts Marcuse and Arendt primarily as systematic, normative political theorists. By reading Marcuse and Arendt primarily as political ontologists, Holman gives little attention to the fact that both Marcuse’s and Arendt’s political thinking is generally grounded in historical thinking, in a specific diagnosis of their present and in highly complex, explicit, or implicit theories of history. (Indeed, Holman barely discusses Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which has been an important source of inspiration for contemporary Marxian thinkers such as Étienne Balibar.) Whereas Holman’s main question is: how can we imagine a model of democratic politics that does justice to the human essence (even if this essence is conceived in “nonidentitarian” terms), both Marcuse and Arendt generally ask: how can we think a model of democratic politics that does justice to the human essence in our current historical moment or in our current world? (in light of late capitalism, the rise of bureaucracy, the decline of the nation-state, etc.)
Holman only addresses the present historical moment in a few paragraphs on a “crisis of contemporary liberal democracy” in the introduction and in a few pages on anti-globalization and global justice movements in the conclusion, but these very brief reflections do not include a critical comparison with the historical moments that Marcuse and Arendt confront in their work. Such a comparison would have seemed relevant in a book that seeks to develop a new theoretical model of democracy by returning to two thinkers who were active between the 1930s and the 1970s. Holman also does not discuss the strong historical similarities between Marcuse and Arendt, who both studied with Heidegger, were both Jewish refugees who fled from Nazi Germany to the United States, and both wrote in-depth theoretical analyses of Nazism and Stalinism. And in light of what Holman describes as the “mutual antipathy” between Arendt and the Frankfurt School, it might have been productive to bring Walter Benjamin more explicitly into the conversation, because Benjamin was a close friend and major source of inspiration not only for Arendt, as Holman mentions in his reading of On Revolution, but also for Marcuse.
Nevertheless, Holman’s staging of a systematic dialogue between Marcuse and Arendt is a welcome attempt to forge connections between critical theory and Arendt’s political thinking. Most of Politics as Radical Creation consists of rigorous interpretations of texts by Marcuse and Arendt, in critical dialogue with interpretations by other (mostly Anglophone) scholars, that bring out the richness of these texts and suggest promising possibilities for further connections between critical theory and Arendt’s political thinking.