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Abstract
In On Revolution and other writings, Arendt expresses her enthusiasm for the council system, a bottom-up political structure based on local councils that are open to all citizens and so allow them to participate in government. This aspect of her thought has been sharply criticized – ‘a curiously unrealistic commitment’ (Margaret Canovan), ‘a naiveté’ (Albrecht Wellmer) – or, more often, simply ignored. How, her readers generally wonder, could Arendt in all seriousness advocate the council system as an alternative to parliamentary democracy? In this paper, I will pursue two distinct but related aims. First, I want to show that Arendt's ideal of council politics is an integral element of her thought. It is connected to – indeed, follows from – some of her most central notions, namely her concept of freedom, her valuation of ‘public happiness’ and her distinction between opinion and interest. Second, I want to defend the ideal in the face of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. I seek to show that it is a cogent and pertinent proposition, not ‘a curiously unrealistic commitment’.
Acknowledgements
I thank Penelope Deutscher, Bonnie Honig, Mary Dietz, Seth Mayer, Dagmara Drążewska, Robert Fine and Rodrigo Cordero for their comments on previous versions of this paper. Without their critique and encouragement, this project would not have come to fruition.
Notes
1. I must note that Arendt never presents her idea of the council system in such a systematic and abstract manner as I have done in the opening paragraphs. The sketch I have offered in these paragraphs is meant to be a distillation of, and extrapolation from, her concrete historical analyses.
2. Or so I contend. Some of her readers would deny that what I have described is what Arendt understands by ‘the council system’, or that she puts it forward as a political ideal. I will address these disagreements in due time.
3. Wellmer, for example, dismisses these views as ‘a naiveté’ (Citation2000, p. 224). Bernstein, in a similar vein, discards Arendt's idea of the council system as ‘not viable’ without giving any argument, as if that were obvious (Citation1986, p. 257).
4. There are three notable exceptions, three commentators who have paid close and favorable attention to Arendt's advocacy of the council system, namely Sitton (Citation1987), Kalyvas (Citation2008, chap. 9) and Muldoon (Citation2011). But they, too, end their discussions on a critical note. I will address their objections along the way, when the opportunity arises.
5. When referring to the different levels of the system, I will speak of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ councils, as suggested by the image of the pyramid. I thereby follow Arendt, who uses this image as well as the expression ‘higher councils' (Citation1965, pp. 267, 278). But unlike Arendt, I will put ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in quotes because these terms suggest a relation of subordination and are therefore potentially misleading. The ‘higher’ councils do not have command over the ‘lower’ councils. Rather, they are constituted by and hence dependent on the latter. Thus, in a sense, the ‘lower’ councils are higher.
6. I will employ the expression ‘council democracy’ as a synonym for what I have so far called ‘the council system’ or ‘council politics’. Arendt does not use this expression, probably because the ancient understanding of the term ‘democracy’ as unconstitutional majority rule – that is, as the tyranny of the majority – was too present on her mind (cf. Citation1965, pp. 30, 164). This does not necessarily mean that she would be opposed to the expression, given that, on one occasion, she does use the word ‘democratic’ with reference to the council system. ‘Under modern conditions’, she says in her ‘Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution’, ‘the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system’ (Citation1958b, p. 30).
7. The phrase in statu nascendi is used by Arendt in the German edition of On Revolution (Arendt, Citation1974, p. 359).
8. On this note, Jacobson's remark that On Revolution constitutes ‘an indispensable Handbook for Revolutionaries’ (Citation1983, p. 139) is at least misleading. Arendt certainly did not mean to devise a handbook. What she meant to offer is a source of inspiration.
9. I thus agree with Muldoon when he remarks, regarding the question of the specifics of Arendt's ideal, that ‘for Arendt the council system is first and foremost the embodiment of her conception of political action, and as human action is unpredictable it is necessary to allow the councils to develop in a manner of their choosing’ (Citation2011, p. 412).
10. ‘The distance between tyranny and constitutional, limited government is as great as, perhaps greater than, the distance between limited government and freedom’ (Arendt, Citation1965, p. 218).
11. The phrase ‘participator in government’ comes from Thomas Jefferson.
12. Discussing Thomas Jefferson's idea of a republic based on neighbourhood wards, Arendt suggests that public happiness is not just a special kind of happiness but the only real happiness:
The basic assumption of the ward system, whether Jefferson knew it or not, was that no one could be called happy without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power. (Citation1965, p. 255)
13. Andreas Kalyvas characterizes Arendt's idea of the council system as the ‘attempt to theorize the institutionalization of the extraordinary’ (Kalyvas, Citation2008, p. 255), which is, I believe, a very fitting description. A council system would provide a permanent space for the extraordinary human capacity to act, to make a new beginning.
14. Isaac (Citation1994) has argued that Arendt saw in councils not an alternative but a supplement to parliamentary democracy. He has thus likened her thought to the contemporary proponents of ‘deliberative democracy’, who, inspired by Habermas's philosophy, have theorized and advocated strategies to augment the current Euro-American framework of parliamentary democracy with (additional) venues for public deliberation. Now, it is of course fair to appropriate Arendt's reflections on the council system for such an approach. That is, it is fair to argue that the lesson to be taken away from these reflections is that the democracies we live in need to be made more deliberative. Arendt herself, however, considered parliamentary democracy to be fundamentally flawed and therefore saw the council system as a replacement for it. Isaac can make his case only because he downplays Arendt's critical stance towards parliamentary democracy, suggesting that this stance is a mere product of her experiences with the Weimar Republic (Citation1994, p. 160). The implied but not explicitly stated upshot of his remarks seems to be that Arendt's critique only applies to that Republic, not to parliamentary democracy in general. Arendt does not qualify her critique in this way, however. She develops the critique most extensively in On Revolution, which was written long after her experiences with the Weimar Republic, when she had already become a citizen of the USA. It may be that her misgivings were first occasioned by certain events of her life, but this does not diminish the fact that until the end, and for good reasons, she was a severe critic of parliamentary democracy.
15. This picture does not fit the system of primary elections in the USA. Yet even though in this case the candidates are not selected by the leadership of the party, they are still largely determined by something outside the electoral process, namely campaign contributions by individuals and corporations.
16. Prominent exponents of the idea are Barber (1984/Citation2003), Bohman (Citation1996), Elster (Citation1997, Citation1998) and Habermas (Citation1996, Citation1997).
17. The phrase ‘deadly conflict’ (‘tödlicher Konflikt’) is used by Arendt in the German edition of On Revolution (Citation1974, p. 342).
18. Another case in point are the ‘green’ parties that were founded in Germany and Austria in the 1980s. These parties have attempted, in the first years and decades of their existence, to do things differently, to give the rank and file more of a say in the direction of the party. In other words, they have tried to combine the party and the council form. (The idea is known as ‘Basisdemokratie’.) But these attempts have failed and been abandoned. Today, the said parties operate much like the other parties in their countries, an outcome which confirms Arendt's position that the two forms of political organization are incompatible with each other.
19. That Arendt indeed believed that a council system should rely on experts in administrative matters can be seen in that she considered it to be the ‘fatal mistake’ of the councils of the twentieth-century revolutions that they ‘did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest’. The workers' councils of these revolutions, she says, ‘have again and again tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure’ (Citation1965, pp. 273–274). These remarks have provoked harsh criticism from some of her readers, and in particular from two who are otherwise sympathetic to her enthusiasm for the council system, namely John Sitton and James Muldoon. Sitton contends that Arendt's argument for council democracy is ‘seriously weakened’ by her distinction between politics and administration – which is related to her infamous distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the social’ – and that it thus ‘reveals the [ … ] limitations of her political philosophy’ (Citation1987, pp. 94–100; see also Muldoon, Citation2011, pp. 415–416). I find that Arendt's distinction between politics and administration is a marginal issue and that the criticism of Sitton and Muldoon hence misses the point. I have to say that, unlike Sitton and Muldoon, I do not consider this distinction to be completely mistaken. Once the principles and rules of economic production and exchange have been agreed upon (that is, established politically), the management of a factory or of the economy at large is, I think, indeed a matter of administration to be handled by experts. But let me suppose, for the sake of argument, that Arendt's distinction is unfounded and needs to be abandoned. Her argument for the council system is not affected by such a supposition because it is independent of her views about the content of politics. The councils are supposed to deliberate and decide all political issues, all matters of public concern, and they, and we, may well disagree with Arendt as to what these issues are.
20. It is interesting on this note that Arendt first proposed the idea of community councils in the 1940s as a solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine. A federation of the two peoples based on bipartisan community councils, she argued, ‘would mean that the Jewish-Arab conflict would be resolved on the lowest and most promising level of proximity and neighborliness' (Arendt, Citation2007, p. 400; see also pp. 195, 409). For a discussion of the historical context and the merits of this proposal, see Bernstein, Citation1996, chap. 6.
21. That this is indeed the aim of the book is proven by the essay ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’ (Citation1962) which Arendt published in a Festschrift for Eric Voegelin, which she co-edited. This essay can be seen as a preview of On Revolution. It is devoted to the idea and experience of ‘public happiness' as it appeared in the American and French Revolutions – a topic to be developed in the book. And at the end of the essay, Arendt indicates ‘two directions’ for ‘further considerations’ and thus in effect announces the book she will write. What I would like to highlight is that these directions which she intends to pursue and which will issue in the book are precisely the revolutionary phenomenon of councils as well as the related observation that ‘revolutions have been the time-space where action with all its implications was discovered, or, rather, re-discovered for the modern age’ (pp. 15–16).
22. I thus agree with Marchart when he claims that On Revolution ‘is to be understood as a political manifesto that seeks to reactivate the revolutionary founding moment of the American republic’ (Citation2005, p. 131, my translation). I would merely add that what Arendt seeks to reactivate is not solely the founding moment of the USA but the experiences and aspirations of the grand modern revolutions in general.