Constitutive Plurality: Constitution as Action in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Phillip Quintero N00121290 Constituent Power Spring 2010

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At its core, On Revolution presents Hannah Arendts inquiry into the standing and potential recovery of political freedom in Western modernity. The reader familiar with her earlier work will have anticipated such a project, as the diagnoses in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism paint a bleak picture of the atrophy of political life in the 20th Century. The worry is that modern democracy is a charade of the ideal, were forces of modernity work against political participation and freedom. The project of On Revolution uses the phenomena of revolutionary politicsa distinctly modern thing by Arendts lightsto address a variety of ideas that can perhaps help to renew political life. We learn, for instance that it is crucial to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.1 It is this relation of freedom and new beginning that I would like to explore. The question of new beginnings for political communities is the question of constitution. I will first draw out the ways in which Arendts concept of constitution and the constituent power are beholden the idea of plurality laid out in The Human Condition. This, a comparison between constitution and Action, will lay the stakes for the important role of constitution in her theory. In the second section I argue that plurality works as an

1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 19

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assumption in her analysis of the American Revolution, and draw out some implications about the applicability of this analysis to other cases of political transition.

I - Arendtian Notions of Constitution When [the founders of an independent America] declared their independence from [the English monarchy], and after they had foresworn their allegiance to the crown, the main question for them certainly was not how to limit power but how to establish it, not how to limit government but how to found a new one.2 Arendt devotes two chapters of On Revolution to the foundation of new political bodies. While not a systematic account of her theory, these sections (which famously compare the American and French Revolutions) are revealing. Arendt considers the transition of America from a conglomerate of royal colonies to a federal republic nothing short of a miracle.3 The American Revolution was not the war for independence. Indeed, revolutionary war is a misnomer, by Arendts thinking, because the taking up of arms against an oppressor can only achieve liberty and not freedom. Liberty is a negative concept; it can be broadly understood to mean liberation from oppression, whether that oppression comes from a tyrannical authority or from the material necessities of biological life. Freedom, on the other hand, is a positive concept. For Arendt, freedom is the ability to take Actionto do something new. This is a uniquely human ability.
2 OR 139 3 OR 133

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The revolutionary moment, for Arendt, cannot be a moment of war, because it must have freedom as its aim.4 This is why revolution is a topic deserving of its own book Arendt defines revolution as something aspiring towards the teleological goal of her own politics. In this sense, then, the American Revolution did not happen until the founding of the new republic, that is, with its constitution. In anticipating misconceptions, Arendt reveals what she takes to be the most important meaning of constitution. She acknowledges a constitution as a foundational legal document, which is one sense of the word, but more importantly as a bond between the founding members of a political community, as the act by which people constitute a government, and as the establishment of an entirely new system of power.5 This is the constituent power, and constitution holds a privileged place, as the activity of freedom par excellence. Freedom, as Arendt means it, is a concept clearly revolutionary in origin.6 One of the features of Arendts concept of constitution is that it is not an act of government. A constitution in the sense of a document created by an already-ruling body lacks power and authority.7 Constitution as Arendt wants it is something democratic. She does not make this association outright, but she precludes anything like a constitutional monarchy in the traditional sense from the category of constitution. She uses as her example of the act of constituting the vetting of the Articles of Confederacy through representative channels. Perhaps, then constitution is more specifically republican than democratic, but this is a debate for another time.
4 OR 19 5 OR 137-8 6 OR 19 7 OR 137

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Arendt also emphasizes that the traditional association between constitution and limited government is a misleading one. In electing to delimit the power of government, a constitution seeks to augment the power of the political community. This is, again, related to the freedom/liberty distinction. The goal of liberty would seek to limit the power of government, whereas seeking to keep power in the hands of the public (and thereby strengthen it) is a project of freedom. This is why the American story is the paragon of constituent power for Arendt. It seeks to do found something newsomething which will galvanize the conditions for freedom. The constituent power is, in the sphere of political communities, Action.

Constitution as Action On the constituting of a new political space, Arendts writing harbors a package of concepts that affirm the privileged place of constitution making in her theory. Specifically, the theoretical implications for the chapters on constitution from On Revolution can be clarified by reading them together with Arendts philosophy of the human condition. Specifically, I try to unpack the significance of the idea that the constituent power in On Revolution is the power of Action. Even without Arendts confirmation of this structural analogy, however, the similarities between Action and constitution are striking. We learn in The Human Condition that Action is the essentially human activity. It is does not, like Labour, take self-preservation and reproduction as its object. It does not, like Work, seek to create an enduring product. Action comes from initiative, has the characteristic of startling unexpectedness, is not

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simply a means to an end, cannot be understood as a substitution for violence, goes on directly between humans without the intermediary of matter or things, transcends mere productive activity, and is capable of doing something new.8 These characteristics will sound familiar to the reader of Arendts chapters on constitution. However, there is more than just a familial diction between Arendts discussions of Action and constitution. Action shares with constitution the characteristic of freedom. As such, Action and constitution share the prerequisite for the actualization, which is plurality. Arendt tells us that it is through Action (which often takes the form of speech) that humans are able to reveal themselves together. In The Human Condition, Arendt writes, this revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against themthat is, in sheer human togetherness.9 In more precise theoretical language, Action (along with speech) reveals its own condition of possibility, which is the plurality of humankind.10 This reaffirms the importance of the constituent power in Arendts thought. If, as I contend, constitution carries with it the notion of human plurality, then a constitution as we have envisioned it thus far is the prerequisite for any freedom in a political community.

Plurality: Immanent Principle of the Constituent Power The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always
8 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: UC Press, 1958) 7, 177-9 9 HC 180 10 HC 176

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present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material pre-requisite for power.11

Plurality is the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.12 It is also the condition of possibility for Action. In a more technical explanation, plurality can be reduced more or less to the two human qualities of equality and distinction.13 As Margaret Canovan summarizes, She means that all human beings are of the same species, and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but yet no two men are ever interchangeable as individuals, nor are the points of view from which they see the common world ever the same. Each is capable of acting in relation to his fellows in ways that are individual and original, and in doing so of contributing to a network of actions and relationships that is infinitely complex and unpredictable.14 As Canovan artfully captures, plurality is an interesting take on the phenomenology of what it is to be an individual. I am more interested, however, in appropriating the concept of plurality as it translates to our context. Positioning plurality as a condition of Action on the level of an individual is not a problematic assumption for Arendt; such an idea is consistent with her own position on what it is to be human. As I have already stated, I contend that plurality on the scale of political communities operates as a similar assumption
11 HC 201 12 HC 7 13 HC 175 14 Margaret Canovan. The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1974), 59

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in her concept of constitution, and I am not sure if it is similarly unproblematic in such cases.

II - The Founding Fathers Reading constitution as a form of Action, it follows that plurality is a condition of possibility for constitution. In one sense this is a simple observation: co-instituting is not something one can undertake alone. I do, however, think there is an assumption of plurality doing more work than this in On Revolution. As is well known, Arendt spends many pages extolling the American Revolution in a conspicuously nostalgic mode, lamenting the loss of its noble political spirit. It is the suggested recovery of this lost treasure that might make it possible to enlist Arendt in the pursuit of a substantive prescription for the realization of political freedom where it is otherwise scarce. Arendt claims that the American revolutionaries understood this goal of freedom, which necessitated the formation of a new or rather rediscovered form of government; it demanded the constitution of a republic.15 Plurality appears in various passages in the chapters on constitution. Arendt uses the American founding as an example where the most impactful political actors and thinkers were aware of the role plurality must play. This, she explains, is why the revolutionary spirit of the time led to the founding of a stable democratic republic, which, it is good to remember, she suggests may have been a miracle.

15 OR 23

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She first refers us to Thomas Paine, who understood the point we made earlier that, A constitution is not the act of government, but of a people constituting a government.16 The evidence that this was the case in America is the fact that the constitutional assembly did not draft a constitution on their own. To do so would not strictly be to constitute in the Arendtian sense. Rather, the process involved various assemblies and conventions, and the articles of confederation were subject to the debate of provincial and local governing organizations. This avoided the problems of legitimacy that faced the constituent assemblies in the French Revolution. Here we see that several of the required characteristics of Arendtian constitution are achieved through structures of participatory democracy On the level of practice and the erection of institutions, Arendt tells us later on, we may best turn to Madisons argument.17 She is of course referring to the notion of Federalism. The thoughtcontentious at the timeis that the state governments stand to gain power, rather than relinquish it by forming a national government. The fear of adopting such a system was that the new territory was simply to large for republican government. Arendt laments that this fear has been realized in the 20th century due to the founders failure to institutionalize stronger local government, probably on the level of the county as Jefferson suggests with his proposal of ward republics. Nonetheless, in this case the constitution of greater power is linked to the consolidation of authorities. In distinction, the French Revolution is said to have failed at Arendtian constitution because the revolutionaries did not use a model that incorporated multiple sources of authority.18
16 OR 136. Arendt is quoting Paine from The Rights of Man 17 OR 144 18 OR 156

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The federal model, then, is the expression of the constituent power: the action of organizing a political body to engage the plurality of the human species is the only way to institute a structural foundation for the safeguarding of freedom, which is to say, political participation.

Excluded Scenarios Arendt acknowledges that the American story is a unique one. She attributes the success of the American Revolution to the promise outlined in the Mayflower Compact, to Madisons discovery of the model of federalism, and to the colonists experience with self-government in general. This seems to limit the usefulness of the Arendtian notion of constitution. The conditions that made the American case so receptive to establishing a republic are more problematic than the presence of a few radical thinkers. The conditions in America were, in a very concrete way, irreproducible. There was an abundance of material prosperity something that would have drastically altered French history. Geo-national conflict was, on the whole, a non-issue, as the Native Americans were a minor threat to the colonizing civilization. Perhaps most interestingly, however, is the colonies unprecedented autonomy. The success of commercial endeavors, the abundance of new land to occupy, and the relative isolation from the colonial powers all lead to ideal conditions for the establishment of republicanism. These material structures were in place well before the revolutionary spirit found expression through the founding fathers.19

19 Fascinating histories of localism in the self-government of the colonies can be found in Patricia Bonomi, A Factious People, and Brian Janiskee, Local Government in Early America

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It seems that the American modelin its Arendtian modeis indeed irreproducible. That is to say that the conditions Arendt cites as paving the way for what was perhaps the greatest foundation of political freedom in modern history are decidedly not the conditions enjoyed by people struggling for political transition today. The American Revolution was in a sense, not a transition at all. Certainly, independence from the colonial power would have been necessary in any case, but the foundation of a federal republic was planted with the first settlers. The depoliticizing forces of modernity, such as capitalism, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism, operate by destroying, hiding or muting the plural character of people. Totalitarianism, for instance, works by separating a population into the stateless exiles and the docile masses. Neither is able to act politically because plurality has been systematically destroyed. This is what Arendt refers to as radical evil, and it is a dehumanizing force that extends well beyond the subject matter of The Origins of Totalitarianism. It seems to me that the actual cases in most need of revolution today are precluded from her revolutionary model.