Abstract
Steve Buckler , Hannah Arendt and Political Theory: Challenging the Tradition, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2011; 185 pp.
Steve Buckler’s Hannah Arendt and Political Theory is most revealing in the final chapter, “The Role of the Theorist.” I did not know Buckler, but this final chapter of his last book must stand as his apologia, his attempt—mediated through Arendt—to offer an account of a lifelong pursuit of an engaged politics.
The theorist, Buckler writes, thinks and speaks from “the standpoint of the reflective citizen rather than [the standpoint] Arendt takes to be the traditionally accented voice of the philosopher” (154). He writes political theory as a citizen first, which means that he shows a general concern for “the enactment of the political and the conditions of its sustainability—the common world that provides us with grounds of common sense and terms within which we can interact coherently” (154). Unlike so much political theorizing today that takes critical thinking to demand criticism of everything, Buckler insists that theorists “must now share a common concern with the actor—albeit from a different experiential perspective—a concern with the world and with its unguaranteed active maintenance” (161). The thinker today must think “for the sake of the world,”—he must love the world—and thus must attend to the world and even tend to the worldly in ways that moderate the unlimited criticism of those theorists who do not recognize the precariousness of the modern world.
While Buckler’s theorist does not abandon a critical vocabulary, he does see that criticism cannot become the abstract core of the theoretical enterprise. Tied closely to everyday politics and always thought through examples, Buckler’s approach to theory illuminates Arendt’s insistence that the theorists remain in the world. The political theorist “craves the life of the mind [but] must nevertheless engage with the public realm in the light of the realization … that they can no longer be a bystander” (160). The thinker in the modern world no longer has the luxury of abstract reflections or criticisms, but must responsibly dedicate himself to thinking for the sake of the world.
Following Arendt, Buckler argues that political engagement with the world today requires the theorist embrace public institutions as the only way to resist the threat the modern age poses to freedom. What distinguished the American revolutionaries is that they, as “men of letters,” “studied historical examples not for the sake of whatever ‘eternal wisdom’ they might acquire ‘but almost exclusively in order to learn about political institutions’” (158 [citing Arendt, On Revolution]). In an age infused with the “experience of totalitarianism and the sense of historical rupture that it has introduced,” the theorist confronts an urgency that prevents his withdrawal into a conceptual universe. Political thinkers are necessary because they both withdraw from the social world and equally engage in the imagination of institutional spaces of freedom. The thinker in the modern world must think “for the sake of the world” (159).
To direct our gaze on the importance of public institutions in political life, the essay that follows will focus on Buckler’s discussion of The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution. Buckler pursues his inquiry into the centrality of public institutions for freedom in two of the three substantive chapters of his book that address specific works by Arendt. These central chapters address, in succession, what are considered to be Arendt’s three major published works: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution. Especially in the chapters on Origins and On Revolution, Buckler brings a deserved focus to Arendt’s insistence that we engage and embrace public institutions in political life.
I
In his chapter on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Buckler highlights the often-overlooked importance Arendt attributes to membership in civic institutions as a response to totalitarianism. He identifies two primary features of totalitarianism in Arendt’s analysis: the “vulnerability to the initiation of processes that are beyond our control” (76), and the loneliness that isolates citizens such that they lack the companionship in which “one can interact publicly and exchange opinions” and thus cannot resist those “inexorable social and historical processes” (78). The rise of processes and the emergence of loneliness as mass phenomena together give rise to “the totalitarian creed,” which “dictates that no one can ever make a difference” (76). Deprived of the ability to act and speak in ways that make a difference, modern citizens are increasingly subject to the oppression that has its fulfillment in totalitarian government.
If the central aim of totalitarianism is to create conditions under which individuals are absorbed into, and define themselves by reference to, historical processes that transcend any and all capacities for autonomous thought and action, then the right to belong to an organized political community and thus to participate in public institutions is the only true guarantee of freedom in a totalitarian age. That is why Arendt argues the true “calamity of the rightless” in the middle of the 20th century is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.” 1 The rightless are those who are so oppressed that they are deprived of legal status so that no one will even oppress them. To be excluded from legal status is to be rendered powerless and to be deprived of the right to make a difference in the world. It is this total deprivation of rights as a citizen in a polity that makes manifest the one truly human right, what Arendt calls the “right to have rights.” Freedom in a totalitarian age requires that we “live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions”; only when our opinions can impact the world are free and that requires “a right to belong to some kind of organized community.” 2
There is no freedom within the modern age without those public and civic spaces in which human beings can resist the totalitarian creed that dictates that no one can ever make a difference. This totalitarian creed, Buckler writes, reflects a broader theme associated with modernity: “the modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea” (76 [citing Between Past and Future]). Since totalitarian government appeals to law as a product of supra-human forces, it depends upon a “‘scientific’ mode of thinking” that promises true and totalizing explanations for historical phenomena. Such a “complete account, immune to any shocks of experience and to anything unprecedented, creates a hermetically sealed world-view, where we are ‘emancipated from reality’” (67 [citing Origins]). Resistance to the evisceration of freedom found in totalitarianism comes only from meaningful action in public that depends upon institutional spaces where human action can be seen and heard in ways that can change the course of public events. In the face of such totalizing control, only public political institutions, Arendt argues, can provide a bulwark against the overwhelming oppression of totalitarianism.
II
In turning to On Revolution, Buckler again sets public freedom at the center of Arendt’s thinking. Following Arendt, he makes a distinction between liberty and freedom. Liberty is associated with “the escape from oppression.” (106) Freedom, on the contrary, is “the political way of life.” (106 [citing On Revolution]) At the core of Arendt’s understanding of freedom is that beyond the “radical act of liberation,” freedom demands the “conservative act of creating stable and lasting arrangements” (107). Revolutionary acts must not simply overthrow oppressive regimes, but also found new political institutions that provide the “space where freedom can appear” (107 [citing On Revolution]). Totalitarianism threatens freedom by reducing public life and confining humanity to a private, lonely, and meaningless existence. Only when there exist public spaces for free collective action with others towards a common public aim can we still speak of a specifically human idea of freedom.
Buckler’s focus on Arendt’s belief in the institutional need for freedom is important; it is also controversial. Amongst Arendt's many critics is Jacques Rancière. In many regards, Rancière follows Arendt. Both are engaged in the project of articulating and activating a public-spirited political engagement in a global world hostile to politics. They both distinguish politics from philosophy, since philosophy trades in truths that shut down politics, which is about opinions. Rancière, as does Arendt, defines politics as a form of action—politics is an activity of people, in the plural, and not simply of states. Further, Arendt also thinks democracy as a revolutionary expression of freedom. Because politics is so deeply connected revolutionary action, Arendt refuses to call it democracy, because democracy is—like all “cracy's”—derived from the Greek kratein, expressing rule. Democracy, as majority rule, opposes revolutionary action, and is, therefore, “simply another form of rulership”. 3 As does Rancière, Arendt insists that freedom demands that we move beyond democracy as simply a form of government.
In spite of these similarities, however, Rancière argues that Arendt’s embrace of public institutions threatens de-politicize politics. The democratic paradox, he writes, is that democracy understood as freedom and rule by the people always threatens to destabilize and revolutionize democratic government that offers itself as a legitimate order. True democratic politics is on the side of the messy, radically egalitarian, and disruptive aspect of democracy. Rancière's word for this is “dissensus,” and he argues, “democracy implies a practice of dissensus, one that it keeps re-opening and that the practice of ruling relentlessly plugs.” 4 Democracy, in other words, is the practice of disrupting all statist orders, even democratic state orders. Against Arendt, Rancière argues that democracy must oppose all consensual public institutions.
Rancière builds his approach to dissensus in opposition to Arendt's work. In “Does Democracy Mean Something?,” Rancière makes clear his view that “democracy cannot consist in a set of institutions.” 5 Political institutions unjustly occupy the field of politics with a claim to legitimacy and thus delimit and shrink “the political stage.” By establishing what is constitutional and legal, by deciding what a peaceful protest is and who can protest, and by policing the question of who is even a citizen, the institutions of politics limit politics in “a biased way.” They police the boundaries and access to politics “in the name of the purity of the political.” Political institutions are anti-political in the ways that they establish and thus regulate politics.
In his suspicion of institutions, Rancière does indeed depart from Arendt in a meaningful way. For Arendt, modern politics, as revolutionary politics, means a new founding of freedom. What distinguishes revolutions from rebellions is that while rebellions merely liberate one from rule, revolutions found new institutions that nurture freedom. At the core of Arendt's political thinking is her insistence that freedom cannot exist outside of institutions. As had Montesquieu before her, Arendt saw that power, freedom, and collective action belong together. 6
The genius of the American Revolution in Arendt's telling is that it discovered what she calls a new experience of power. This American experience of power “was embodied in all institutions of self-government throughout the country.” 7 It goes back to the Mayflower Compact drawn up on the ship and signed by the first settlers upon landing, an act that displays their “obvious confidence that they had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a ‘civil Body Politik'.” 8 From out of the basic experience of power through mutual action with others, the American colonists developed their institutions of town halls, constitutional conventions, and local government in townships, counties, and states.
The experience of American power meant that there could not be and could never be in the United States a single highest and irresistible power that could rule over others. The states would limit the federal government; the federal government would contest state power; legislative power limits executive power; judicial power bridles the legislature; and new forms of power in voluntary organizations, political clubs, and advocacy groups all limit the power of professional politicians. Since written laws cannot control power, but “only power arrests power,” freedom depends upon institutions that can continually give birth to new centers and sources of power. 9 This diffusion of power in the United States meant the “consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic.” 10
Arendt argues that constitutional republics are the most human form of government. This is not simply because constitutions establish inviolable civil and human rights that democratic majorities cannot breach. For Arendt, part of what it means to be human is to act in public. Constitutions refer not simply to written documents, but to the act of constituting a people. Constitutions, therefore, entail the power to act, since “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” 11 There is, for Arendt, a human right not simply to act and speak as an individual, but to also be part of a group in which one can, as an individual, act in concert with others.
What Arendt saw, following Montesquieu, is that the human life entails the capacity to act in concert. As opposed to the human rights idea that all men possessed rights by virtue of being born human, or the anarchist idea, the human rights precluded living under government, Arendt insists upon the “necessity of civilized government for all mankind.” 12 What distinguished the American Constitutional Republican form of government in Arendt's telling was its declaration that “all men [as human beings] should live under constitutional, ‘limited' government.” 13 Arendt sees the institutions of self-government as the common world within which citizens congregate, talk, and act. Without such institutions, there would be no public space, no commons. Politics needs not only revolution and dissensus, but also some prior consensus—an acknowledgement of the facts of the political world we are born into.
If Rancière sees all consensus, all that is common, as exclusionary, violent, and apolitical, Arendt insists that politics must strive to inaugurate a plural consensus and thus plural powers and plural freedoms. One example of such a consensus is citizenship, which is why Rancière opposes Arendt's claim that the only human right, the “Right to have Rights,” is the right to belong to an organized community. In other words, Arendt insists that humanity requires a consensus, some form of political organization in which one can speak and act and be judged by others. We, as persons, must belong to a public world.
Consensus, as Arendt understands it, is not a closed or complete foundational system that provides answers to the fundamental questions of political strife. On the contrary, consensus is that agreement on facts—“the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” 14 —that enables and girds the institutions of political life in which and through which citizens can act together, freely, in unexpected ways, to collectively make their common future. There is in Arendt’s political thinking the demand for courage. The courage to leave behind one’s private life and engage in politics. And also, as Buckler writes in his final paragraph, the courage “to think for oneself in the light of the condition of plurality” (170). Such courage requires a public faith in and engagement in the institutions of politics.