Economy and state: The politics of citizenship and universality in Gillian Rose,Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg

As its military offensive reaches an uneasy ceasefire, the ability of the Israeli state to act with impunity throughout its war on Gaza calls into question – for many who remained hopeful – the viability of post-World War II human rights discourse. With devastating consequences for Palestinians, this crisis exposes a contradiction within a rights framework that seems to offer little protection. Mainstream liberal discussions of rights have long been impervious to the criticism that calling on the nation-state to enforce universal human rights legitimises the authority of sovereign power to defend their borders and to ‘keep their register of aliens’ (Benjamin, 2016: 46). This contradiction cuts to the core of the notion of universal rights widespread since the 1940s. The human rights framework instituted post-World War II largely relies on states to enforce those rights. Writing in 1951, at the emergence of the current human rights paradigm, Hannah Arendt could call ‘statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon’ and the ‘ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most sympathetic group in contemporary politics’ (1978: 277). In today's world, nothing could be more different. The stateless are amongst the most politically derided of any group, held more often in contempt than in sympathy. As always, the context is framed by the conjunctures of imperialism, as the current crisis for Palestinians highlights in such a terrible way. The Palestinians are doubly without a state and without human rights. ¹ Without national rights, appeals to human rights seem meek and hopeless. The condemnation of human rights violations from António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, has little impact on the force of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Operation Swords of Iron. The insistence made by Western nation-states for Israel's ‘right to defend itself’ relies on an appeal to the Holocaust and the murder of European Jewry, itself the tragic the impetus for the very rights framework that the U.N. presides over.

The current crisis seems to confirm Arendt's insight that the rights of the nation-state go hand in hand with contemporary notions of human rights. To have rights requires citizenship. The ‘right to have rights’ is one of Arendt's most enduring ideas (DeGooyer et al., 2018; Gündoğdu, 2015). Arendt's notion is often posed within the liberal rights framework (Benhabib, 2018: 111–24), ² but, in my view, Arendt's notion has much broader purchase; I argue that the notion can even be deployed as a salvo against liberal ideas of human rights. What animates, and is compelling, in Arendt's notion is the contradiction between the economy and the state that is captured in its problematic – the idea of ‘the right to have rights’ captures the refusal of universality in the very form of rights as they appear under the law in the modern capitalist state. Gillian Rose's interpretation of Arendt recovers some of this more radicial potenical for an understanding of universality and universal freedom.

In this article, I take up Rose's triadic discussion The Broken Middle. In the fifth chapter, ‘Love and the State: Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt’, she examines the aporia in the ambition for universal ‘rights of man’ and ‘rights of citizen’ and the split between capitalist economy, ‘civil society’, and the capitalist nation-state. Rose draws parallels between Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg and Arendt in a blistering dialogic passage that runs through the middle of the book, spanning almost a hundred pages and deftly surveying social theorists ranging from the Reformation to contemporary sociology. The chapter has three parts, ‘Suspending the Political’, ‘Droits de la femme/Droits de la citoyenne’ and ‘Nation-State and Violence’ (Rose, 1992: 153–246). Remarkably, the chapter simultaneously serves as an appraisal of Arendt's oeuvre, while also offering distinctive interpretations of Varnhagen and Luxemburg in light of Arendt's writing on both women (Arendt, 1968, 2021). Indeed, Rose's greater ambition in The Broken Middle is to go beyond Arendt's concept of political action in The Human Condition, first published in 1958, by returning to Marx's dialectic of political and human emancipation in ‘On the Jewish Question’. Her discussion of the ‘diremption’ of economy and the state follows through on Marx's insight that what separates ‘the rights of man’ from ‘the rights of citizen’ is the ‘relationship of the political state to civil society’ (Marx, 1975: 228–9). For Marx, such a separation underlies a division between human beings, since each sphere of rights posits the formal and abstract right of the individual as either a competitive and self-interested economic actor or as a citizen, equal under the law to others in a particular political community. Rose presses the political diremption of the modern nation-state and the status of violence in economics and politics to generate a critical theory that can challenge the tensions that lie at the heart of modernity.

While Arendt is one of the most discussed figures in social theory today, Rose's critique has been virtually ignored. ³ This absence is surprising despite the tendency within Arendt scholarship to exclude adequate consideration of the accuracy of Arendt's interpretation of her major interlocutors (for instance, Canovan, 1994). If Arendt's construal of foundational thinkers, like Marx, is often accepted without robust interrogation (as I argue in Lazarus, 2025: 37–75), her portrayal of Luxemburg and Varnhagen are seldom criticised (Hermsen, 2022; for an exception in relation to Luxemburg, see Muldoon, 2016). Despite sensitive readings of Arendt's source material, many of her commentators have been surprisingly undiscerning. There is a persistent tendency for Arendt scholars to not only sideline rigorous analysis into the cogency of her interpretations, but to flatten the ambiguities and lines of tension within her assessments of interlocutors. These efforts give the impression that many of Arendt's most steadfast followers are attempting to synthesise a more consistent and coherent ‘Arendtian’ position. While Arendt herself disavowed the ‘isms’ of her time, there is a growing cottage industry of scholars dedicated to what can only be seen as a largely uncritical ‘Arendtianism’. For this reason, perhaps, Rose's The Broken Middle has been too easy to skip over. But considering the range and depth of Rose's discussion of Arendt's oeuvre, it is curious that it has been consistently passed over, especially given The Broken Middle predates the major revival of Arendt scholarship in the 1990s (for example, Benhabib, 1996; Canovan, 1994). Even more curiously, Rose's critique of Arendt suggests a crucial shift in argument between the parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism, an assessment supported by the latest scholarship on Arendt's source material.

To overlook Rose's appraisal of Arendt is to risk missing the philosophical consequences of the shift in Arendt's thought and to misunderstand aspects of the critical promise of her politics of human action. Rose pinpoints a novel distinction in Arendt's thought, between the problematic of diremption between economy and state in Origins and her subsequent move towards an ‘Augustinian’ idealism that becomes explicit in The Human Condition. In effect, this change in Arendt's thinking flattens the idea of political action to judgement and betrays the radical potential of her best insights. Rose's critique of Arendt is also worth highlighting within the context of ongoing debates over universal human rights (Moyn, 2018). As I see it, a return to the detail of Rose's analysis makes clear that political emancipation must confront the relation between the capitalist economy and state and raise the possibility of human emancipation. By identifying the exclusions of citizenship, Rose puts forwards a politics of universal freedom that brings together both Hegel and Marx. For Rose, universalism arises from a struggle against the aporia of modern life. Her classification of Luxemburg as an ‘author’, helps emphasise the role of practical agency and political action in her Marxism. The contrast between Luxemburg's and Arendt's ideas of political action are illustrative since the former holds to the contradiction between economy and state, a view Arendt discards. I suggest that assessing political authorship and citizenship in Rose, Luxemburg and Arendt leads to a position in which the modern economy and state can be criticised from ‘the broken middle’.

In what follows, first, I set up the significance of beginning in Rose's ‘broken middle’. Second, I trace this middle in the ‘aporetic universalism’ of Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt, who all refuse to either simply embrace or dismiss the universality of politics, their exclusion pointing to the ‘equivocation of the middle’. Third, I reconstruct Rose's interpretation of Arendt's Origins, situating her argument in recent research on Arendt's 1950’s work. Unlike most of her commentors, I argue Arendt's idea of ‘the right to have rights’centres the contradiction of citizenship in the capitalist economy and capitalist state. Fourth, taking up Rose's idea of political authorship, I criticise Arendt's construal of Luxemburg's political theory, which insists on the separation of ‘the political’ and ‘the social’. I conclude with a reflection on the stakes of Rose's philosophy as a critical and immanent politics of universality.

Between middle and beginning

The Broken Middle is a book about beginnings. Just as in The Melancholy Science, first published in 1978, and Hegel Contra Sociology, published in 1981, Rose's strategic task is to locate the adequate starting point for a critical theory of modernity and the ‘speculative experience’ necessary to mount such a task (1992: 283). In her work on Adorno, Rose stresses ‘reification’ as the starting point for critique and its difference to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism (Rose, 2014: 35–66; Lazarus, 2020). While sympathetic to ‘reification’ as a theory of culture (Rose, 2024: 32–38, passim), by Hegel Contra Sociology she prosecutes Hegel's claim in the Science of Logic that a ‘method’ of critique cannot be justified at the beginning, but only at the end. This end is immanent to the investigation and makes explicit what was implicit all along. It is worth outlining key features of Hegel's approach, since Rose hinges her idea of ‘beginning’ and ‘diremption’ in the speculative relation between universal, particular and individual, which is not only a question of method, but a normative idea of ‘the good’ political and ethical life.

Following Hegel, Rose argues method must ‘appear in a sequence of experiences’ that make it possible to ‘rediscover the unity of theoretical and moral reason and natural, finite consciousness through the contradictions of the history of philosophy’. For this reason, Hegelian speculative experience ‘culminates in the notion of absolute Sittlichkeit’ in the sections ‘Idea of the True’ and the ‘Idea of the Good’, which lead up to a concluding section on ‘The Absolute Idea’ in the Science of Logic (Rose, 2009: 50). This derivation is Hegel's notion of ‘synthetic cognition’, the determination of universal, particular and individual in which the concept becomes for itself as conceptual knowledge (2010: 706–28). He attempts to make good on the promise made at ‘the beginning of this Book’ (‘The Science of the Subjective Logic or The Doctrine of the Concept’) to lay out the ‘genesis of the concept’ (Hegel, 2010: 729, 508). The subject as determined ‘in and for itself’ must come to realise itself objectively in the world, meaning that the determined concept becomes ‘equal to the concept’ and is actualised as ‘the good’ becoming ‘the value of the universal but also of the absolutely actual’ (Hegel, 2010: 729). Hegel considers the idea of the good to be practical action, subjectivity that can only be realised as actually good objectively (Hegel, 2010: 731–32). The absolute idea is the rational concept that has come to know itself and for such a concept to have ‘the dignity of being absolute’. The realisation of the idea in and for itself unifies theoretical and practical reason:

in this result cognition is restored and united with the practical idea; the previously discovered reality is at the same time determined as the realized absolute purpose, no longer an object of investigation, a merely objective world without the subjectivity of the concept, but as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is rather the concept. This is the absolute idea. (Hegel, 2010: 734)

From Hegel Contra Sociology onwards, Rose maintains that philosophy requires both ‘the true’ (the speculative relation between universal, particular and individual) and ‘the good’ (practical action) and in this Hegelian fashion sets out to challenge the presentation of philosophy and religion in modernity. For Hegel, the ‘essential element’ of speculative thought is the ‘unity of the extremes, the middle term that unites them and the ground that supports them’ (Hegel, 2010: 589).

The central claim for Rose, in The Broken Middle, is that increasingly in modernity, the middle is ‘eroded’. The speculative experience of universal, particular and individual is not actualised in ‘the good’. Rose writes:

Irreducibly singular and potentially universal, but never holy, the individual is the site of the agon between the particularity of civil society, the precarious legitimation or non-legitimate authority of the middle, and the moral allegory of the state. With no ‘reality,’ we have as ‘individuals’ only a perpetually embattled and changing actuality. (1992: 297)

This lament is political. She opens the book by contrasting ‘philosophy's grey on grey’ with the ‘colour on colour of post-modernity’ and although her philosophical opponents are hardly clear from the initial pages, Rose frames her endeavour in the present to reflect on what has just come to pass. She argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall does not mark the death of Marxism, but instead the collapse of ‘post-war state-Socialism’. Its significance is that it opens the space to reanimate crucial questions in social theory arising from ‘the antinomies of modern state and society’ (Rose, 1992: xi). Evidently, Rose is dissatisfied with the discussion of modernity by such luminary sociologists as Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman (1992: 245–6, 294–6). She is concerned not just with ‘modernity’ but its particular aporetic experiences that cut out the ground between unifying individuals and communities in ethical life (Rose, 1992: 297). ‘While arcadian and utopian universalism would reconcile and posit the unity of particular and universal’, Rose writes ‘aporetic universalism explores and experiments with the disunity of singular and universal’ (1992: 164). Her idea of the aporetic brings to bear Hegel's speculative thought to recognise the conflicts in modernity without a spurious appeal to unity that obscures the problems we confront in thought and action.

Reflecting on what she calls the ‘anxiety of beginning’ throughout The Broken Middle, the aporetic is understood in relation to ‘authorship’, the problematic of making thinking explicit in the world. If post-modernism is dualistic, ‘the broken middle’ operates in the tears between universal, particular and individual. As Rose sees it, the aporetic standpoint of authorship means that even if positioned without a clear direction, the problematic of the author properly understood can help map out ‘the diremption between law and ethics – modernity's ancient predicament’ that is characteristic of Kant's critical philosophy and contemporary critical theory (Rose, 1992: xii). Rose tarries in the ‘the agon of authorship’ to connect the ‘anxiety of beginning’ with the ‘equivocation of the ethical’. This position of anxiety and equivocation recognises the diremption between law and ethics in modern social and political life. The middle, ‘broken but locatable’, is configured ‘in history, in polity, in institutions, in dominium’ (Rose, 1992: 288). Testing the anxiety of beginning on the reader, Rose finishes not with a ‘Conclusion’ but with a ‘Preface’. Here she tells us if the essays in the first part of the book ‘show how beginning falls into and emerges from the middle’, the essays in the second part ‘show the middle repeatedly displaced’ (Rose, 1992: 309). It is this ‘broken conceptuality of the modern state’ that concerns my approach in this article. By staking out the ‘anxiety of beginning’ in relation to ‘the broken middle’, she upholds the Hegelian unity between theoretical and practical reason, and the speculative and ethical. Rose demonstrates that modern politics is defined not just by a contradiction between economy and state, but by its diremption. ⁴

Aporetic universalism

Rose illustrates the political history of this problem through the lives and authorship of three women. As she explains in Mourning Becomes the Law, this was an attempt to

develop the idea and analysis of activity beyond activity, to restate the risks of critical rationality and of political action, in place of this passivity beyond passivity. I do this by presenting the life, thought and politics of three German Jewish women within the political and social crises of their time: for the eighteenth century, Rahel Varnhagen; for the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg; for the mid twentieth century, Hannah Arendt. In her own way, each of these women exposed the inequality and insufficiency of the universal political community of her day, but without retreating to any phantasy of the local or exclusive community: each staked the risks of identity without any security of identity. (Rose, 1996: 38–39)

The authorship of each woman exposed the diremption of economy and state at crucial moments of crisis in Germany. With Varnhagen, it was the transition to capitalism in the eighteenth century and the bourgeois Enlightenment in the West. With Luxemburg, it was the Marxist challenge to capitalism and the defeat of this challenge in the German Revolution 1918–19. With Arendt, it was the emergence of Fascism and the transition from class struggle to ‘totalitarian rule by non-synchronous class elements’ (Rose, 1992: 155). As women, they were doubly excluded from male fraternities and the love of Christian community. As Jews and women, they were denied a place within modern civil society and the abstract universal rights that became the credo of the modern state. Neither the rights of man nor the rights of citizen apply. ‘Without droits de l’homme and without droits de citoyen’, these three authors as Rose observes, ‘reveal how posited university of “rights of man” and “rights of the citizen” deposit customary statuses within the violence of civil society’. Crucially, Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt refuse to ‘abandon political universality’ and in doing so their ‘middlewomanship’ sparks ‘aporetic universalism, restless affirmation and undermining of political form and action, which never loses sight of the continuing mutual corruption of the state and civil society – whether the state is separated from or united with gender, religion, politics’ (Rose, 1992: 155). To be outside the abstract universalism of modernity, but affirm the universalism immanent within the very idea of modern freedom, exposes the aporia within modernity and its political and economic forms.

In Arendt's early writings, before The Origin of Totalitarianism, she explores the way in which Jewish identity has emerged in modernity amongst the throes of antisemitism (Arendt, 2007a). Arendt traces the history of usury and exclusion in the emergence of the modern state and capitalist economy, where Jews were excluded from the former and assigned to the later, reflecting powerlessness and a kind of ‘pariah’ status (Arendt, 2007a: 73–74). Arendt develops the idea of ‘the Jewish pariah’ in the 1940s, especially in the essays ‘We Refugees’ and ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’ (Arendt, 2007b, 2007c). Arendt tracks the lives of authors Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Bernard Lazare, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka, adopting from Lazare the term ‘conscious pariah’ (2007b: 274). These rebels, authors in one way or another, resist assimilation and patriotism to affirm their identity and risk everything to ‘tell the truth’. The danger, Arendt observes, ‘[i]f we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings’ (2007b: 273). She connects this experience in Jewish history with the problem of statelessness in modernity, since the exclusion that was endemic to this history now presented itself as a problem ‘tied up with that of all other nations’ (Arendt, 2007b: 274).

The pariah is outside of society, but in retaining their identity they reflect the aporia between political status and their status as human beings (Arendt, 2007c: 276). The ‘conscious pariah’ takes part in politics and resists the ‘parvenu’ who attempts to make peace with the existing system. ‘As soon as the pariah enters the arena of politics and translates his status into political terms’, Arendt writes, ‘he becomes perforce a rebel’ (2007c: 284). The ‘conscious pariah’ is a figure of resistance to oppression and domination. Arendt's sensitive and carefully layered Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman raises this problem vividly, since Varnhagen's life represented the contradictions within modernity between Enlightenment and faith. Unable to find acceptance into the reformed Christianity of Prussia and male public authorship within the Enlightenment, she remained salon hostess, Jewish and feminine. In a striking passage, Arendt writes

Freedom and equality were not going to be conjured into existence by individuals’ capturing them by fraud as privileges for themselves. Rahel remained a Jewish woman and a pariah. Only because she clung to both identities was she able to find a place in the history of European humanity. (2020: 494)

Rose's ‘aporetic universalism’ upholds the critical thrust of Arendt's idea of a ‘conscious pariah’, but looks to exceed politically the division between ‘pariah’ and ‘parvenu’. Stressing the significance of Varnhagen's authorship, Rose argues that she confronted the emergence of civil society and the modern state, since she was forced to decide her relation to both. Rose affirms Arendt's point that Varnhagen was conscious of her fragile position, but locates this problem not only in her identity but in the feudal privileges afforded to the salon hostess against the ‘bourgeois individuality’ and equality of the nation-state. For Varnhagen, as Rose would have it, the ‘agon of authorship confronts the anxiety of beginning at its birth – the birth of the modern “nation”-state – and yet takes on the equivocation of the middle-to-come’ (1992: 193). For Rose, the problem of this position is that Arendt does not follow through with her own analysis; the paradox within Varnhagen's authorship was not the kind of a ‘beautiful soul’ who poses their internal subjectivity against the external and objective world (Rose, 1992: 195–99). Instead, Varnhagen's ‘agon of authorship’ captures the anxiety of the emergence of civil society and the nation-state, institutions of modern life that stand in contradiction. ⁵

From class politics to the politics of judgement

As Rose would have it, as Arendt's thought changes through the 1950s she ultimately fails to pursue the ‘agon of authorship’ she had earlier recognised in Varnhagen. To more clearly put her criticism into view, I will return to the figure in the middle of Rose's discussion of the authorship of Varnhagen and Arendt: Luxemburg. Rose cashes out the critique by pointing to the central difficulty in Arendt's authorship. Put sharply, Rose argues that Arendt gives up ‘the equivocation of the ethical’ in the diremption of state and civil society for an authorship that ‘judges and separates the ethical into “the social” and “the political” instead of suspending the ethical’ (Rose, 1992: 217).

The shift occurs within the very text of Origins, the tension between the three parts that make the book a whole. Rose's discussion in The Broken Middle is pertinent to recent controversies about Arendt's relationship to Cold War political thought. Arendt characterises ‘totalitarianism’ by adopting Montesquieu's assessment of forms of government based on their principles of rule, contrasting monarchy, republic and tyranny (Arendt, 1976: 476; 1994). As Samuel Moyn sees it ‘Arendt canonized herself by volunteering for the Cold War defense of freedom against a new form of rule that went beyond ancient typologies’ (2023: 119). He is right to point to the conservative elements in Arendt's thought that made her ‘unapologetic when it came to imperialist and racist legacies’ (Moyn, 2023: 130; see also Kim, 2024). ⁶ However, as Rose helps us see, these elements should not overshadow the agon in Arendt's own authorship. The analysis of antisemitism and imperialism offered in the first two parts of Origins contrasts with the last part, written significantly after and reflecting different influences. Drawing on Montesquieu, Arendt schematises a typology of the principles of totalitarianism and defines it as a ‘novel form of government’. This analysis appeared in the essay bearing that subtitle, ‘Ideology and Terror’, first published in 1953 and added as a concluding chapter in subsequent editions of the book (Arendt, 1976: 460–79). Close textual analysis of the composition of Origins shows that Arendt's engagement with Marxist theories of imperialism – especially Luxemburg's – animates her thesis about the historical and social basis of antisemitism in part 1, as well as the class politics of the bourgeoisie and the character of the nation-state in part 2. These parts of Origins were written before 1947, with only the third part reflecting a discernible Cold War perspective (Devlin, 2023).

In The Broken Middle, Rose anticipates this analysis. However, her interest lies more in drawing out the implications of Arendt's shift, not just to identify fault lines in her politics, but to demonstrate the depth of the very insights she initially offers but ultimately gives up. As Rose maintains, parts 1 and 2 of Origins should be seen as

the most sustained attempt to develop Marx's account of the split between state and civil society from ‘On the Jewish Question’, and to develop Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital, to provide a political and sociological history of the modern ‘nation’-state, which – contrary to liberal history which judges the aberration of German development against the assumption of the English normality of bloodless revolution, of liberal constitutionalism – demonstrates the impossibility of democratic polity in the modern nation-state, in its birth, development and disintegration, and which is organized around the changing ‘split’ and ‘tension’ between civil society and state as revealed and charted by ‘the Jewish Question’ and by the ‘social question’. (Rose, 1992: 217)

Of course, Rose is telling us that the diremption between civil society and the state she has been talking about all along vindicates Marx's conception of politics in his 1843 essay. By invoking this text, Rose is making clear the throughline between Marx's early critique of politics and the economic analysis laid out by Luxemburg, who constructs her thesis in response to Marx's argument across the volumes of Capital, in part to grasp twentieth-century imperialism (see Luxemburg, 1963: especially 454–67).

The diremption of civil society and the state forms the basis of Marx's analysis of the creation of the ‘rights of man’ and ‘rights of citizen’ in the revolutionary constitutions established to enshrine an idea of freedom in natural liberty and citizenship. Marx's basic point is that the contradiction within such a notion of rights assumes that the abstract freedom of the citizen rests upon the bourgeois individual of civil society. Civil society purges politics, the universal, relegating its operation to individual interest and gain. The freedom of the citizen as part of a political community necessitates the nation-state, which by excluding Jews, for Marx not only demonstrates the need for political emancipation, but puts into question the political form that freedom takes. Since the representation of the figure of the Jew in modernity has been associated with the alienation of civil society, Marx argues that contradiction between the abstract freedom of the market and the abstract freedom of citizenship entails the diremption of civil society and the state. Marx certainly advocates for greater political rights. But he also goes further, to show that the contraction between public and private interest fundamentally limits the extent to which emancipation is possible (Marx, 1975: 221). For this reason, human emancipation must go beyond the freedom of the capitalist state and the capitalist market.

Marx's oft-misunderstood text, ‘On the Jewish Question’ is not antisemitic (see Fine, 2017). Rather, it takes up the question of universalism and human emancipation by examining the status of Jewish identity in modernity. Rose characterises the text as ‘a commentary on the idea of Jews as a “nationality”, which is derived from the commercial role of the Jew on which civil society depends’ (Rose, 1992: 244). Marx addresses the antisemitic personification of ‘money’ in the figure of the Jew, which equates religion and civil society under capitalism (see Postone, 2003: 94; Bonefeld, 2014: 199–212). For Marx, the ‘chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general’ (Marx, 1975: 239). Rose appreciates that Marx identifies the split between civil society and the state to demonstrate the ‘outer particularity’ of ‘power/nation’ that also entails ‘the inner oppositions’ within sovereign states, so that ‘chimerical’ nationality ‘is imagined out of and in the opposition of universal and particular between spheres and individuals and classes’ (Rose, 1992: 245).

It is precisely this explanation of modern politics that Arendt relies upon in Origins. Arendt considers antisemitism within the ‘general framework of the development of the nation-state’ and the ‘aspects of Jewish history and specifically Jewish functions during the last centuries’ during the emergence of ‘private capitalistic enterprise’ (1976: 9, 12). The birth of modern antisemitism is examined in terms of the tensions between the European aristocracy and the bourgeoise as the nation-state changes shape. ⁷ Although the aristocracy first advanced an antisemitic ‘ideology’, their declining class power meant it became harder for them to sway public opinion. It was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that many liberal bourgeois reformers identified Jews with feudal privilege to produce a highly effective ‘antisemitic movement’ (Arendt, 1976: 20, 34–36). Arendt dissects the relation between different class elements and their relation to industrial capitalism to convey the rise of antisemitism as an ideological movement. The Jews were attacked as those without nation, as ‘inter-European’ in a Europe of nation-states (Arendt, 1976: 40). The political history in Origins tells of Jewish identity, exclusion and assimilation as the categories of ‘pariah’ and ‘parvenu’ are embedded in the social relations of the nation-state and capitalist economy (Arendt, 1976: 54–68). Arendt explicitly follows Walter Benjamin in calling Paris, the ‘Capital of the nineteenth-century’. ‘Full of promise’, Arendt obverses, ‘the nineteenth century had started with the French Revolution, for more than one hundred years witnessed the vain struggle against the degeneration of the citoyen into the bourgeois’ before hitting its lowest point in the Dreyfus Affair (Arendt, 1976: 79). As Arendt recalls it, the Dreyfus Affair became the political battleground of the class forces that not only came to define modern antisemitism, but also Zionism (1976: 120).

Arendt's discussion of the Dreyfus Affair leads straight into part 2 of Origins, ‘Imperialism’. Her analysis teases apart the dynamic between the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie and the existing state structure. She traces the ‘political emancipation of the bourgeoisie’ through expansion and empire, with particular focus on British and French colonialisation (Arendt, 1976: 123–36). Arendt's account of imperialism ties the expansion of state violence with ‘the unlimited accumulation of capital’. She is explicit that the state's use of violence included foreign investments and capital exports that started as an ‘emergency measure’ and became a ‘permanent feature’ of capitalist economies (Arendt, 1976: 137). With the class politics of the bourgeoise shown to embrace violence for political and economic ends, Arendt moves on to assess the social character of ‘the mob’, which she argues rose out of capitalist expansion (1976: 155). The source material for this discussion rests heavily on Marxist accounts (for details, see Devlin, 2023). The significance does not lie in the economic detail of Arendt's analysis, which is notably scant, but that her recourse to Marxist theorisations of imperialism lends her argument a socio-historical dynamism discarded in her later writing.

In Origins the historical treatment of the nation-state serves not just to demonstrate its violence, but to point out that the crisis of statelessness precipitated a fission in the nation-state's legitimacy. Accordingly, ‘the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down’ (Arendt, 1976: 290). For Arendt, the ‘rights of man’ heralded a modern maturity, since it was now law and not religion or status that upheld equality. All law was supposed to be based upon such rights, and as a consequence, no specific law protecting those inalienable rights was proposed. This new abstract idea of human rights tied the rights of human beings with the rights of European nation-states, presupposing actual human beings would require those nation-states to protect the very rights essential to that law (Arendt, 1976: 291). As Arendt came to see it, universal rights ‘proved to be unenforceable’, as even nation-states with established bills of rights were incapable of addressing the crisis of statelessness, since it was unclear whether the rights in jeopardy were those of specific national ‘citizens’ or the rights of ‘man’. The only thing that was clear, however, was that the stateless had lost their human rights. Arendt ties this loss with two main socio-historical factors. First, the stateless lost the space of their political communities. Second, they lost the protection of a government, which resulted in a double loss. In losing the protection of their nation-state, they lost the safeguards that rights agreements between nations secure. Hence without the protection of one state, the stateless are without the protection of any nation-state (Arendt, 1976, 293–94). Arendt's salient point is that for the stateless, what is lost is not equality before the law according to the norms of liberty as known and valued in a political community, but inclusion in a political community itself.

Thus, ‘the right to have rights’ is just as much a call for human rights as it is for the right to belong in a political community (Arendt, 1976: 296–97). Arendt's argument is stronger than the kind of human rights discourse normally attributed to such a position, but instead she insists it is a right to ‘action’, to the kind of reasoned speech that Aristotle argues is embedded in the political community. Our humanity is defined not by abstract rights, but by our action as ‘political animals’ in the polis (Aristotle, 2017: 1278b18–28). Against dispossession, Arendt imagines political self-determination. Human rights are based on a paradox since the very idea of ‘inalienable’, rights accorded by nature, assumes rights can ‘remain valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community’ (Arendt, 1976: 297). Arendt's entire argument hinges on the historical dimension of the emergence of human rights and its essential link with the modern nation-state. ⁸ In this argumentive context, Arendt's idea of ‘the right to have rights’ provides a much sharper edge than what is often proposed. Leading interpreters have typically stressed the idea as ultimately affirming the universality of human rights frameworks (Benhabib, 2018: 101–124). Such an interpretation concentrates on strengthening the norms of international law and the functioning of global institutions, rather than a critique of the central contradiction within such a rights scheme. Conversely, Rose calls this interpretation into question by drawing attention to the framing of the entire problematic.

As Rose helps us see, the relation between human rights as the rights of the human being qua human being and the normative foundation for such rights in institutional form, requires another axis. Arendt's idea suggests recognising universalism not as a kind of liberal cosmopolitism, but in investigating universal citizenship in terms of the diremption of the state and the economy. This diremption challenges any idea of universalism that does not address the domination of the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. I will not argue that Arendt should be understood as some kind of Marxist. Rather, following Rose, what is significant about Origins is that the diremption of civil society and the state animates a social theory of politics as an emancipatory project. Arendt is alive to the contradictions and tensions within the politics of the modern state and the changing class dynamics that not only gave birth to imperialism, but modern racism. The ‘right to have rights’ puts into view the resemblance between modern human rights and the limitations of political rights on the terms Marx offered over a hundred years before.

However, according to Rose's crucial argument, Arendt is unable to live up to her own analysis. The Human Condition is marked by an entirely different problematic to Origins. Cast in this light, when Arendt separates ‘the social’ from ‘the political’ in The Human Condition she is not reviving political action from the pernicious ‘rise of the social’ (1998: 38–49). As Rose points out, Arendt ‘devises a genealogy from that separation, and judges that “separation”’ thereby undercutting her earlier analysis. The ‘acting together’ of the public realm and the natality of the political splits the ethical between ‘the political’ and ‘the social’ rather than ‘suspending the ethical’ (Rose, 1992: 216–17). The consequence of this shift is that the historical determinations of modern politics are entirely lost from view. ⁹ Modern politics becomes the story of the breakdown in the Western tradition of political thought and a dualistic conflict between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ realms, rather than the triadic relation between universal, particular and individual.

With Arendt's position put in such a way, it becomes easier to make sense of Rose's point of contention. As Rose sees it, the entire analysis of the nation-state hinges on the historical dynamic that Arendt herself forgoes. Modern politics is no longer understood in relation to the individualisation of human beings as bearers of abstract rights and their exclusion from their communities. Instead, in The Human Condition, the collapse of ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ realms into ‘the social’ is given without historical comparison (Arendt, 1998: 69). Problematically, the ‘idealized politics attributed to Augustine’ results in insisting dogmatically that ‘the public’ should be separated from ‘the private’ and in so doing, the very process of individualisation is removed from the picture (Rose, 1992: 223). As such, ‘[t]his fictional “public realm” amounts to a celebration of the birth and potential emergence of each individual into its light’. Augustine's ‘City of God’ takes precedence over the already lost ‘City of Man’: ‘the social’ (Rose, 1992: 229). Therefore, as Rose contends, the question of beginning for Arendt articulates an Augustinian distinction between the birth of man (‘first birth’) and the birth of the world (‘second birth’) (1992: 231). In Arendt's formulation, political action opens the space for human beings to make ourselves known through our words and deeds, it is the unique ability to ‘insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth’ (1998: 176–77).

In what might disrupt typical interpretations of The Broken Middle as political theology, Rose makes her case by prosecuting Arendt's politics for its theological content. Rose argues that Arendt constructs her idea of the Athenian polis on Augustine's Romanisation of Greek concepts (1992: 231). Since the birth of man is seen as natural and the birth of the world unique, Arendt's authorship becomes a form of judgement in which the ‘modern age’ is ‘held up against the ageless world’ and ‘makes sense only as the sociality of saints’ (Rose, 1992: 232–33). The problems of modern politics in its liberal guise are judged by the ‘ought’ of the public realm (Rose, 1992: 224). Rose's criticism of Arendt weighs heaviest when it puts pressure on the way in which her concept of human action is constructed deliberately by eschewing both the historical and social dynamic of human emancipation. This interpretation cannot be reduced to simply a preference for Marx's historicism over Arendt's phenomenological approach. Rather, Rose rejects Arendt's much exulted idea of action because the problem of human emancipation has now become ‘ambivalent’ (Rose, 1992: 231). While I think there are resources within Arendt's concept of action that help sustain the politics of emancipation (Lazarus, 2025: 38–40, 66–75), Rose is right to suggest that Arendt elides her most radical insights by making ‘the social’ bear responsibility for the loss of political action.

Luxemburg's political authorship

Luxemburg is the figure who bridges Rose's discussion of Varnhagen and Arendt. The authorship and marginality of both Varnhagen and Luxemburg can further be put in relation through the importance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His influence on Varnhagen was profound: not only did she set up her salon as a kind of ‘Goethe cult’, but he ‘provided her with the language she could speak’ (Arendt, 2021: 476, 406). Luxemburg shared this sentiment, feeling ‘such close kinship with [Goethe's] view of the world’ (2011a: 198). In a much later letter, Luxemburg still affirmed Goethe's ability to keep his cool amongst the struggles of revolution as a kind of model of authorship. Even when ‘the world must have seemed like a madhouse turned loose’ during the French Revolution, ‘how calmly, with such equanimity, he pursued his studies about the metamorphosis of plants, the theory of colors, and a thousand other things’. Luxemburg appeals, writing:

I don’t ask that you be a poet like Goethe, but everyone can adopt for themselves his outlook on life – the universalism of interests, the inner harmony – or at least strive toward that. And if you say something like: but Goethe was not a political fighter, my opinion is this: a fighter is precisely a person who must strive to rise above things, otherwise one's nose will get stuck in every bit of nonsense. (2011b: 367)

Luxemburg sees in Goethe the universalism of authorship that makes possible a critical perspective. Through this appreciation, we get a sense of the universalism she aspired to. But Luxemburg's affirmation comes directly from the aporetic middle, she strives for a new kind of universalism. This analysis supports Rose's view, where Goethe's influence on Varnhagen and Luxemburg is not as a kind of romantic ideal, but instead as a figure of the agon of authorship that does not succumb to resignation. She teases out the point in her interpretation of the politics of his bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister, suggesting it represents the political process in which ‘the truth of the new state and new society’ was evident. For Rose, Goethe demonstrated love as political: ‘agapic and erotic’. Accordingly, the political dynamic revolves around the presentation of ‘individual and collective development or distortion as political precondition already congealed into the character and fate of the protagonists, who, in their attempts to acknowledge or to deny the world, explore the transition from the aristocratic to the bourgeois world’. (Rose, 1992: 188). The significance of this point is that Rose argues, contra Arendt, that it was not that Varnhagen ‘saw either too little, or too much’ (Arendt, 2021: 407; Rose, 1992: 195–96) in this dynamic. Rather, Goethe's writing brings her into the middle and enables her to see her own place in the world as ‘poised on a double-danger: exclusion and emancipation; authority and authorship’ (Rose, 1992: 196). Rose appreciates Varnhagen and Luxemburg as sustaining in the ‘agon of authorship’ the space between ‘the corruption of bourgeois morality’ and the political culture of ‘revisionism’, ‘centralism’ and ‘nationalism’ (1992: 199).

At this point, there is no mistaking the continuing role of New Left Marxism in Rose's philosophy. Like in her earlier work, Rose draws closely on Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (2014; 2009; 2024). ¹⁰ She situates Luxemburg's political thought in the debate over reform and revolution, contrasting the philosophical Leninism of Lukács to the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein not to prove Luxemburg correct or incorrect, but to show the way she attests ‘consistently to the equivocation of the ethical’ (Rose, 1992: 198–99). In her trenchant criticisms of Bernstein, Luxemburg accuses revisionism of refusing to acknowledge the contradictions of capitalism, further adding that ‘it wants to lessen, to attenuate’ the antagonism between both ‘capital and labour’ and ‘the class state and society’ (2004a: 142–43).

Based on Rose's criticism of Arendt, I argue that the portrayal of Luxemburg in Men in Dark Times, first published 1968, ignores this diremption and can only partially grasp the significance of political action. In her essay, Arendt praises in Luxemburg's ‘most important contribution to political theory’, the politics of the revolutionary worker's councils. Arendt highlights that for Luxemburg, action comes before and informs organisation, which is a product of the revolution and educates the political agents who make the revolution. Fundamentally, the revolution must come ‘from below’ (Arendt, 1968: 52). Despite Arendt's high regard for Luxemburg's political theory of the council movement, she is highly dismissive of Luxemburg's Marxism. In Origins, Luxemburg is featured within a tradition of Marxism as the key theorist of imperialism, understood as the political and historical process of the accumulation of capital (Arendt, 1976: 148). But in Men in Dark Times, Arendt declares that Luxemburg's hostility to orthodoxy raises doubts ‘that she was a Marxist at all’ (1968: 38). Arendt gives significance to Luxemburg's letters, which she describes as ‘entirely personal and of a simple, touchingly humane, and often – poetic beauty’ (Arendt, 1968: 36–37). She appropriately dismisses typical contrasts between Luxemburg's personal life (seen as vulnerable, delicate, caring, etc.) and her political life (hard, relentless, extreme, etc.), to emphasise the singularity of her thinking. This approach has much to recommend it. As Gillian's sister, Jacqueline Rose observes, Luxemburg's letters evince ‘the ceaseless traffic between the personal and political’, a consequence of her conviction that ‘it was a radical failure of politics not to be in touch with the deepest parts of the self’ (2011).

But what Arendt has now come to elide is the diremption between economy and the state, which motivates so many of Luxemburg's most important arguments. As a participant in the 1905 Russian revolution, ¹¹ her intervention is to demonstrate that the traditional conflict between economic organising and action by political parties is overcome by the practical agency expressed in the mass strike. The mass strike brings together strike action (ranging from small towns to general strikes across major industries) with coordinated political action. In the streets, political and economic strategies differing in kind ‘run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another’ (Luxemburg, 2004b: 191). The mass strike articulates not just an individual grievance spurred by a particular concern, but is ‘the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades’ (Luxemburg, 2004b: 199). Speaking of a ‘rallying idea’ imparts Luxemburg's idea of the mass strike as a universal moment, made possible by the practical agency of the working class. Luxemburg recognises the distinction between economic and political life under capitalism, but goes on to show that not only is each sphere inseparable, but the mass strike is the form of action that breaks down this opposition and marks the beginning of self-conscious action. She writes,

the movement on the whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, not even the reverse. Every great political mass, action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes. And that applies not merely to each of the great mass strikes, but also to the revolution as a whole. With the spreading, clarifying and involution of the political struggle the economic struggle not merely does not recede, but extends, organizes and becomes involved in equal measure. Between the two there is the most complete reciprocal action. (Luxemburg, 2004b: 194–95)

Luxemburg maintains that it is the universalism of the mass strike that poses its relation to a greater process of transformation. Accordingly, the reciprocal interaction between economic and political struggle becomes a conductor for revolutionary action. This crucial point is expanded in her agitational speeches and writings from 1918–19. Luxemburg comes to argue that the nexus of economic and political control is in the council movement, which itself marks a revolutionary ‘beginning’ (2004c: 343–45). This act of founding, to use Arendt's language, holds together the economic and political and installs democratic political power in the self-conscious action of the working class. Luxemburg holds that ‘the construction of the economy on a completely new basis’ is part of the politicisation of the economy from the ground up (2004c: 346). For Luxemburg, the significance of the council movement is that it politicises the economic realm and brings it under self-conscious and democratic control. This universal movement marks the beginning of a form of power that negates the diremption of economy and state.

However, despite taking vital inspiration from her political theory of the councils, in Arendt's interpretation of Luxemburg, this entire conception of politics is cast aside. As she would have it, the councils that emerged out of the revolutionary movements in Germany and Russia need to be separated entirely between those based primarily on political or economic functions. Arendt asserts the revolutionary and workers’ councils are ‘better kept apart’, introducing a distinction between their operation based not on any detailed analysis, but arbitrarily (2018a: 136). Holding that economic and political action cannot meet, Arendt superimposes her own categories, judging each based on the criteria of their principle, rather than by assessing the interaction between human beings acting together in, and between, those spaces. ‘As a matter of fact’, Arendt declares, ‘it is quite doubtful whether the political principles of equality and self-rule can readily be applied to the economic sphere’ (Arendt, 2018a: 135). Most famously, Arendt argues in The Human Condition that ‘the social’ engulfs the political’ and directs it towards economic ends (1998: 45). Arendt's insistence on this thesis exposes problems within her own concept of action. Her efforts to expunge Marxism from a political theory of the council movement has the consequence of missing the throughline between the concept of action in Marx and Luxemburg. For Arendt, politics is about new beginnings. Luxemburg's authorship shares something important with Arendt's idea of founding, the making a new ‘body politics’ in the formation and articulation of public action, the words and deeds that arise when people meet together to discuss politics and create something new in the constitutions and decrees of politics (1963: 145, 213, 223; 1998: 199–201). However, through her Marxism, Luxemburg recognises the diremption of economy and state and rather than looking to sidestep the issue as Arendt seeks to do, derives an idea of action from this dynamic.

In a speech delivered at the founding of the German Communist Party on 31 December, 1918, Luxemburg begins by relating the aims of the new party to the ‘threads spun’ by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (2004c: 357). Luxemburg challenges the orthodoxy of German Social Democracy, which she argues became a doctrine of ‘parliamentarism-only’. This politics imposed the separation of working-class struggles from the realisation of socialism and in doing so, that Marxism became ‘a cloak for all the hesitations, for all the turnings-away from the actual revolutionary class struggle’ (2004c: 363). Her position is that a new political program must be created to allow for the political and economic aims of the council movement. In her view, what is more crucial than what is written ‘is the way in which that program is interpreted in action’. Luxemburg assesses the difference between the 1848 and 1872 editions of the Communist Manifesto to tie together ‘that beginning’ with the tasks of furthering the council movement to a position of state power (2004c: 359). She argues that the political situation in 1848 and 1918 are analogous in that the immediate task facing the movement is the realisation of socialism. For Luxemburg, the situation had risen to a class contradiction that required a political solution. As she put it, ‘[t]oday matters have reached a point at which mankind is faced with the dilemma: either collapse into anarchy, or salvation through socialism’. Her argument is that the council movement has established working-class organs of power and its early slogan ‘Form Worker's and Solder's Councils’ bears the ‘stamp of a proletarian socialist revolution’ (2004c: 364, 366).

The workers councils are not sufficient just in their form, as Arendt's ahistorical account implies (2018a). The ‘spaces of freedom’, Arendt identifies are indeed ‘organs of government’, however this form of power is praised for enabling the direct political participation of citizens, in total disconnection from its link to the political content of the Marxist movement (1963: 268). For Luxemburg, the councils are an initial step towards socialism as a historically specific development of collective agency and working-class self-consciousness. Throughout this speech, she implores the working-class audience to strengthen the organisation of the councils by deepening their economic control over productive means. Luxemburg insists that the revolution until then has been ‘exclusively political’ and without direction:

Its steps were as naive and unconscious as those of a child groping its way without knowing where it is going; for at this stage, I repeat, the revolution had a purely political character. Only in the last two or three weeks have strikes broken out quite spontaneously. Let us be clear: it is the very essence of this revolution that strikes will become more and more extensive, that they must become more and more the central focus, the key aspect of the revolution. It then becomes an economic revolution, and at the same time a socialist revolution. The struggle for socialism has to be fought out by the masses, by the masses alone, breast to breast against capitalism, in every factory, by every proletarian against his employer. Only then will it be a socialist revolution. (2004c: 368)

Following Marx, Luxemburg advances a concept of politics that takes it be essential to politicise the economic realm. The councils are not an abstract form, as Arendt would have it, but their success lies in becoming ‘the sole public power’. Luxemburg puts squarely into view the demand for the councils to bring both ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ under democratic rule. The councils deepen politically as they incorporate under their orbit the collective association of the economic realm. In this sense, for Luxemburg, the revolution is a ‘school of action’ that expands politics beyond the limited participation of representative models and overcomes economics as the mere reproduction of life. ¹² Luxemburg expresses her idea of power as ‘[o]ur motto is: In the beginning was the act’ (2004c: 372).

Rose's critique of Arendt's ahistorical position is sustained by this analysis, since Luxemburg's can only express this idea of beginning with the diremption of the capitalist economy and capitalist state in view. Luxemburg's 1918 speech puts considerable pressure on Arendt's fundamental claim that political action must be separate from the economic realm (2004c). For Luxemburg, the political realm must expand to encompass the economic and order the economic politically. It is only because she recognises the diremption of the economy and the state that she is able to prosecute this position. Rose's criticism of Arendt's movement away from the diremption picture of Origins helps frame the substantial issues that arise from a politics that discards universality.

Conclusion: Universality beyond the diremption

By focusing on Rose's critique of Arendt and then, with that perspective in mind, contrasting Arendt with Luxemburg, my interpretative aim has been to affirm the contours of her idea of ‘aporetic universalism’. Rose's emphasis on the experience of exclusion relates closely to recent discussions of the politics of universality. However, as I conclude, her synthesis of Hegel and Marx is more compelling than other radical attempts to capture the relation between universality and citizenship. For example, in what he calls ‘insurgent universality’, Massimiliano Tomba sets out an important alternative to judicial rights discourse, based on the moments of collective action in which the contradiction between citizenship and those excluded on the basis of gender, race and class contest their exclusion. For Tomba, this action demonstrates a politics surpassing mere inclusion; instead, those groups become ‘true citizens’ who call into doubt ‘the political and social order beyond the formal recognition of legal citizenship’ (2019: 41). As he sees it, this action transcends the citizenship of the nation-state and gives the lie to the idea of the ‘rights of man’.

By reappraising the formation of rights documents in the context of revolutionary situations in which those at the margins claimed universality, Tomba offers a valuable contrast to Arendt's model of constitution-making in the American Revolution (Arendt, 1963: 141–54). For Arendt, the Declaration of Independence represented an authentic connection between happiness and action, a connection that would return in the council movement, but fundamentally differed from events, like the French Revolution, compelled by ‘the social’ question (2018b). But, for Tomba, the constitutions of the revolutionary period – most of all in the French context – can only be properly grasped in relation to the politics of gender demonstrated by the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, as well as the anti-colonial politics posed by the uprising of slaves in the Haitian Revolution and the collectivist, proto-socialist politics of the urban poor in Paris. These movements challenged the ‘rights of man’ on their own terms and took the universalism of abstract rights ‘from a political and legal level to a social level’ (2019: 20).

Tomba is right to remind us that revolutionary moments present ruptures in which the prospects for different democratic practices, notions of citizenship and property relations could be possible. However, despite the promise of interpreting history against a progressivist model, unfortunately Tomba's alternative history veers into a kind of ‘what if’ and pivots too heavily on suggesting what ought to have happened if only things had gone differently (2019: 125). The stress on ‘possibility’ in Tomba's model limits his ability to capture the immanent universality within the history he recalls. As Hegel observes, conjecture about the ‘ought’ risks abstraction from actuality, since in hoping to transcend its restriction by positing what ought to have happened, the thought loses connection to the universal (2010: 104–08).

For Rose, the politics of universality remains essential to any vision of human emancipation. But she is able to set forth such a position not from an ‘ought,’ but from the broken middle, her investigation of ‘the breaks between universal, particular and singular, in individuals and in institutions’ (Rose, 1992: xii). But even her claim for universality seems to be undercut by the Hegelian standpoint from which it is advanced. Many recent critics have been cautious of attempts to validate Hegel's idea of universal history (Tomba, 2019: 14, 79; Getachew & Mantena, 2021: 368–69). However, as Rocío Zambrana suggests in her ‘critical-interruptive reading’, the universalism of Hegel's philosophy can envision a horizon well beyond the confines of his Eurocentrism. To redeem the perspectives made possible by his thought and its potential for universal freedom, the marginalised must be brought into the centre of the analysis (2017: 357–58). Rose encourages this kind of reading in her discussion of aporetic universalism in the agon of authorship in Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt. In doing so, Rose positions each woman – doubly excluded by gender and race – within history. This idea of history is not a linear narrative of progress, but as an expression of rupture, to be located within ‘the broken middle’.

Rose sets out a politics that confronts the exclusion and derision of the modern state. By posing the aporia of modern life, she brings into focus the conflict, and simultaneous unity, of the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. It is Rose's awareness of this point that makes her account of modern politics so compelling. To argue for human emancipation requires asking what universalism would be worthy of its name. With an analysis of antisemitism, drawing especially on Marx's ‘On the Jewish Question’ and tracing the authorship of Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt, Rose presents aporetic universalism as recognising and pressing against what is broken in modern life. This claim for universality, for ethical community, rings a profound political note in our present moment of state violence and economic turmoil. Worldwide, protesters against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have chanted ‘in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinian’. In doing so, we raise the question of universal freedom. It is this question that Rose's thought always endeavoured to work through.