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’.
Imagine the following form of political organization: All political issues, all matters of public concern, are deliberated and decided upon in and by councils, not by individual officials. The councils are organized in the form of a pyramid. Local councils, serving a particular neighbourhood, constitute the base of the pyramid. These are open to all citizens. Each council then sends a delegate to a council of the next level. The neighbourhood councils send delegates to a city council, the city councils send delegates to a county council, the county councils send delegates to a regional council and so on. At the apex of the pyramid, finally, there is a single federal council. The number of levels needed to arrive at such a ‘supreme’ council obviously depends on the size of the community.
The councils are small enough, and the number of levels accordingly large enough, to afford all participants a voice in the deliberations. Also, all participants have an equal voice. There is no institutional hierarchy between them. There may, to be sure, be a chairperson to preside over the proceedings, but that person will be just a chairperson, not a leader endowed with prerogatives.
A given political issue is deliberated by all the councils concerned and decided by the council that comprehends them. Thus, an issue that concerns a particular neighbourhood only – whether to build a local park, say – is deliberated and decided by the council of that neighbourhood, whereas an issue that concerns the entire political community is deliberated by all the neighbourhood councils and then, through the delegates, by all the ‘higher’ councils until it eventually arrives at the ‘supreme’ council, where it is decided.
This form of political organization is known as the council system. It has never been fully realized. No sizable political community, no country, has ever been organized in this way in its entirety or for a significant period of time. We have, however, seen the germs of it. Or so Arendt argues in On Revolution (1965). The town hall meetings of the American Revolution, the sociétés populaires of the French Revolution, the sections of the Paris Commune of 1871, the soviets of the Russian Revolution, the Räte in Germany in 1918–1919, the workers’ councils of the Hungarian Revolution – Arendt sees in these forms of popular self-organization the rudiments, the never-fully developed seeds, of the political system described.1
Arendt is enthused by what she sees. She speaks of the ‘lost treasure’ of the said revolutions (1965, chap. 6). At the 1972 conference in Toronto dedicated to her thought, she declares a ‘romantic sympathy with the council system’ (1979, p. 327). In a word, this form of organization represents her political ideal.2
This aspect of her thought has been sharply criticized or – more often – simply ignored. As Margaret Canovan bluntly puts it, ‘for most of Arendt's readers her views [on the council system] are something of an embarrassment, a curiously unrealistic commitment’ (Canovan, 1992, p. 237).3 How, her readers generally wonder, could Arendt in all seriousness advocate the council system as an alternative to parliamentary democracy?4
In the present 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. And second, I want to defend the ideal in the face of the criticisms that have been leveled against it. I seek to show that it is a cogent and pertinent proposition, not ‘a curiously unrealistic commitment’.
1. Why council democracy?
Before I set out to pursue these aims, I need to make a note on the scope of my paper. The sketch of a council system that I offered at the beginning was very brief and rough, it left much to be fleshed out. There is a host of questions that comes to mind. Let me list the most obvious.
Will the system of councils have a constitution? If so, how will it be enforced? Who will have the last word when people disagree about how it is to be interpreted and implemented?
Who sets the agenda? Will the ‘higher’ tell the ‘lower’ councils5 which issues to discuss, or the other way around, or both? Also, who determines which councils are concerned by and thus have a say on a particular issue? Will each council decide for itself whether it is to be involved?
What will be the rules of procedure for the councils’ deliberation and decision-making? For instance, in which order and for how long will the participants speak? Which safeguards will be put in place to guarantee inclusiveness and fairness? What, or who, will make sure that the discussion remains focused? When will deliberation on a particular issue be closed and a vote be held? What majority will be required to carry a proposal?
Will there be officials with discretionary powers (e.g. judges, police and administrators)? If so, to whom – that is, to which council – will they be accountable?
Will the councilmen and women at and above a certain level of the pyramid (have to) be full-time politicians? If so, how can such a (need for) professionalization be reconciled with the demand that the system be permeable in both directions, that anyone may at any point be delegated to the next level and also at any point be recalled?
Important as these questions are, they will not be answered in this paper. Arendt herself does not develop how council democracy6 may play out in detail, and we should not feel compelled to do so in her stead. For it is not out of inadvertence or brevity that she holds off on the specifics. Arendt emphasizes that we have observed the council system only in statu nascendi, in the process of emerging.7 We have never seen it fully developed, established as a form of government (1958a, pp. 216–217; 1965, pp. 264–265). Hence we do not possess any historical experience for answering the questions I listed. And in the absence of such experience, we should not try to answer them. For it is not for the theorist to lay down a blueprint of the ideal form of government. To do so would be either futile, insofar as the contingencies of politics – and in particular the differing opinions of others – are likely to foil any such master plan, or baneful, insofar as the proponents of the blueprint may be tempted to enforce it, in the face of these contingencies, by means of violence.8 How the idea of council democracy can be implemented must be determined in practice, in and through the political process.9
It is for the theorist, however, to reflect on the fact that the council form has appeared time and again in revolutionary situations. What are the political principles manifested in this phenomenon? What are its conditions of possibility and what the reasons for failure? These are questions about general ideas rather than their concrete realization, of theory rather than practice – that is, questions of theory reflecting on previous practice. They are the questions that Arendt is occupied with, and thus the questions that will be the focus of this paper.
So what are the principles that Arendt sees manifested in the council system? What does she find in this form of political organization? To put it succinctly: A council system would give everyone the opportunity to experience freedom; it would thereby afford everyone the happiness that comes with the experience of freedom; it would do away with the dichotomy of rulers and ruled; and it would improve the quality of political decisions.
1.1. Freedom
The most important of these claims is the first, the one about freedom. The subsequent claims follow from it. The council system is for Arendt the realization of freedom in her sense, not just for a privileged few but for everyone.
To be free, for Arendt, is to exercise the capacity for action. Freedom is thus the freedom to take part in politics, the freedom to fashion, in concert with your fellow citizens, the world you live in, the freedom to co-determine the very foundation of your existence.
For Arendt, then, freedom is not the mere absence of government interference in certain domains, codified in certain civil rights such as the right to free speech or the right to due process. Arendt does not deny that such rights are very important. The limits they place on government are of great value when compared with life under a dictatorship or tyranny.10 However, to be subjected to limited government is still a form of subjection. We are free only when we participate in government:
1.2. Happiness
But why, you may ask, should we care about freedom in Arendt's sense? Are the traditional civil rights not sufficient? As long as the government of our community is conducted properly by the professionals who choose and are paid to do so – which is what the civil rights are supposed to guarantee – why should we want to participate in it?
Arendt's answer to this question, bluntly put, is that in freedom lies happiness. When you take part in the government of your community, you come to know what the men of the American Revolution called ‘public happiness’ (1962, pp. 10–16; 1965, pp. 119–140; 2006a, pp. 4–6). This happiness – ‘the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed’ (2006b, p. 259) – is difficult to describe to those who have not experienced it. It is akin, I believe, to the happiness involved in other creative pursuits – the happiness of creating an artwork, of making a scientific discovery or of solving a philosophical problem. Arendt does not draw this comparison and would maybe resist it, given her oppositional distinctions between action, art, science and philosophy. Still, what these pursuits have in common is that they afford one the happiness of bringing about something new, of making a difference. In action, in the domain of politics, this happiness takes on a special character since there it is immediately a shared experience, shared with the fellow citizens in concert with whom you are acting. If you have ever participated in a political endeavour, of whichever form or size, you are bound to have experienced at least a glimpse of it. And then, in all likelihood, you no longer want to go without it.12 As Arendt notes, citing René Char, at the very end of On Revolution, it is painful to relinquish such happiness after having once tasted it (1965, pp. 280–281).
That Arendt's views of freedom and happiness speak for the council system, at least prima facie, is easy to see. Such a system would give everyone the opportunity to take part in politics, to experience freedom and to enjoy public happiness. What for most of human history was restricted to the few, and even in contemporary parliamentary democracies is only formally available to all, would in fact be open to everyone.13 A council system would thus abolish the traditional distinction between rulers and ruled and establish isonomy, the condition of ‘no-rule’ that Arendt sees realized for the first time in the ancient Greek polis (1965, pp. 30–31) and then reappear in the colonial settlements in North America (1965, p. 168).
1.3. Deliberation
Arendt's enthusiasm for the council system is not only about the exercise of freedom and the experience of public happiness. It is also about the positive effects of joint deliberation. Such a system would, as it were, increase not only the quantity but also the quality of political action.
Relevant here is Arendt's distinction between opinion and interest. These, she asserts, are ‘entirely different political phenomena’ (1965, p. 227). Interests are something that one has. They pre-exist any political interaction. Opinions, by contrast, are something that one forms in exchange with other people, by being confronted with other viewpoints. Now, Arendt submits that interests are not a stable basis for a polity. Not only are they idiosyncratic and hence difficult to compare and aggregate, they are also volatile, since they are subject to changing preferences and moods:
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods – moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former – but no opinion. (Arendt, 1965, pp. 268–269)
I believe that what underlies Arendt's position is the conviction that rationality is a matter of deliberation. Interestingly, the double meaning of ‘deliberation’ – discussion and reflection – confirms this claim, namely by making it look like a tautology. It is in debating with others that we are prompted to reflect on our preconceptions, recognize the gaps in our reasoning and transcend our idiosyncratic interests. Of course this does not happen with everyone, or every time. But it is more likely to happen if we exchange our views with others than if we do not.
It is again easy to see that these considerations speak for the council system. This system is based precisely on the exchange of opinions, rather than on the aggregation of interests through voting.
2. Why not parliamentary democracy?
So the main virtues of the council system, in Arendt's view, are that it affords all citizens the opportunity to exercise freedom and that it facilitates the exchange of opinions. But does that make such a system really preferable to parliamentary democracy as we know it? The question arises because it may be argued that parliamentary democracy possesses the said virtues as well. Does parliamentary democracy not give its citizens ample opportunity to engage in politics and thus to experience freedom in Arendt's sense? To join a party, or found a party, and then run for office, or to get involved in a non-governmental organization, or simply to exercise the right to vote and thus co-determine who will govern – all of these avenues for political action are open to every citizen. And does this form of democracy not also provide ample opportunity to form and express opinions? The right to free speech makes for a (more or less) vibrant public discourse, and the right to assembly allows for spaces to voice, discuss and act on your opinions. It may thus seem that the parliamentary system shares the virtues of the council system.
2.1. Top-down parties vs. bottom-up councils
So what, in Arendt's eyes, is so wrong with democracy as currently practised that we should want to replace it with a system of councils?14 Her answer to this question can be summed up in one word: parties. Parliamentary democracy relies on the party as a form of political organization.
So what is wrong with that? Again, the answer can be stated very succinctly: Parties are organized top-down. Decisions are made at the apex, by a small leadership, and then transmitted to the base, the rank and file. To be sure, just like the citizens of the polity at large, the party members are sometimes given the opportunity to vote for or against certain candidates (for instance, the party's chairmanship) or certain proposals (for instance, the party's programme). But these candidates and proposals – that is, the options to choose from – are dictated from above.15 Hence, ‘the parties, because of [this] monopoly of nomination, cannot be regarded as popular organs; [ … ] they are, on the contrary, the very efficient instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled’. A system based on such institutions is in effect not a democracy but an oligarchy: ‘Representative government has in fact become oligarchic [ … ] in the sense that public happiness and public freedom have again become the privilege of the few’ (1965, p. 269).
A council system, by contrast, is organized bottom-up. It is ‘something which builds itself up from the grass roots, so that you really can say potestas in populo, that is, that power comes from below and not from above’ (1979, p. 327).
Now, the problem that in parliamentary democracies the people are not involved in the key decisions, the decisions about which persons and propositions are submitted to popular vote and which are not, is of course well known. In recent decades, a solution to this problem has been developed by a variety of theorists and gained much prominence, namely the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’. Generally speaking, the idea is to enable the people to affect said decisions by devising formal or informal deliberative institutions that are open to all citizens, for example advisory citizen councils, while maintaining the framework of parliamentary democracy.16
From Arendt's perspective, there is a fundamental objection to such proposals. The two systems, the council and the party system, are antithetical. The one is organized bottom-up, the other top-down. They operate in opposite ways, literally. Consequently, they cannot coexist. Only one can prevail in the long run (1958b, pp. 30–31; 1965, pp. 265–267). To put the point less abstractly: If one were to supplement a traditional parliamentary democracy with a system of citizen councils, these councils would inevitably enter into conflict with the established parties. The parties would resist being told what to do from ‘below’, by the grass-roots councils, while the councils would resist being overruled – that is, being reduced to a merely advisory function – from ‘above’, by the established parties. Consequently, any such institutional arrangement would be inherently unstable. In the long run, one of the two sides would carry the day, disempowering and thus effectively abolishing the other side.
This incompatibility, this ‘deadly conflict’ between the party and the council form, has shown itself time and again.17 It has been parties or party-like organizations – the parties that formed in the course of the American Revolution, the Jacobins in the case of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks in the case of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet party-state in the case of the Hungarian Revolution – that suppressed or abolished the revolutionary councils (1965, p. 273). Also, whenever in parliamentary democracies grass-roots politics re-emerged – as it sporadically did, for example in the civil rights movement in the USA in the 1960s – it developed in opposition to the established parties, and it has never survived very long.18
2.2. The question of representation
Kalyvas (2008, pp. 272–282) has highlighted that, in On Revolution, Arendt employs the term ‘representation’ with respect to the relation between the ‘lower’ and the ‘higher’ levels of a council system (1965, p. 267; see also 1958b, p. 30), despite her critique of the notion and practice of representation earlier in the book (1965, pp. 236–241). He concludes that Arendt was ‘deeply ambivalent and uncertain’ about the value of representation as a political mechanism (Kalyvas, 2008, p. 282). I believe that Kalyvas here misses a crucial aspect of Arendt's idea, namely that a council system would institute representation of a different sort, very unlike the representation involved in parliamentary democracy. The relationship between the delegate and the delegating council is at the same time closer and freer than the relationship between the member of parliament and her constituents. It is freer in the sense that the delegate must be allowed to change her opinion – the opinion with which she was sent to the ‘higher’ council – in the light of the deliberations in that council. And it is at the same time closer in the sense that the delegate will have to give an account of and justify her actions as a delegate – for example any change of opinion – in front of the delegating council at the next meeting thereof, subject to immediate recall. Thus, the members of the ‘lower’ councils are not merely represented in the ‘higher’ council but indeed participate in it. They take part in developing the standpoint that the delegate will put forward in the ‘higher’ council. And the deliberations in that council will, through the delegate, in turn be submitted to their consideration. Thus, the council system circles the square, so to speak, of the two traditional models of representation; it involves both mandate and independence.
3. Objections and replies
I have laid out what, on Arendt's view, speaks for the council system and what speaks against the party system to which it is set in opposition. The reader may still be unconvinced, though, just as so many of Arendt's readers have been unconvinced. There are weighty objections – ‘exasperatingly obvious’ objections, Canovan finds (1978, p. 19) – that can be and have been levelled against the idea of council democracy. It is these objections that I would now like to address. I should note that, from here on, my remarks are largely a supplement to – rather than a reconstruction of – Arendt's argument for the council system. Arendt does not, or not explicitly, address the objections I will discuss.
We find two main kinds of objections in the literature. Some of the critics contend that the idea, while appealing, is grossly unrealistic, while others argue that, even if realizable, it is not as appealing as it may seem at first glance.
I would like to begin with the former, with the charge that the idea is unrealistic. There are two problems pertaining to the conditions of modernity that seem to rule out council democracy, namely the problem of scale and the problem of complexity. Arendt, it is suggested by her critics, could champion such a system only because she overlooked these problems. I want to argue that, in fact, the council system can solve the first problem and is not significantly affected by the second.
3.1. The problem of scale
The problem of scale is that present-day polities appear to be way too large to allow general participation in government. Rawls, for example, expresses this problem when he declares that, ‘given the size of a modern state, the exercise of the political liberties is bound to have a lesser place in the conception of the good of most citizens than the exercise of the other basic liberties’ (Rawls, 1996, p. 330).
The council system provides a solution to the problem of scale, namely the pyramid form. This form allows all citizens of the community, be it as large as it may, to participate in the decision-making process while at the same time comprising an institution – the federal council – that can make decisions on behalf of the community as a whole. That the council system holds – or, rather, constitutes – a solution to the problem of scale, that it makes general participation in the conduct of public affairs possible in an arbitrarily large polity, is in fact its principal virtue, its very purpose and the main reason why Arendt advocates it.
There is, however, a follow-up objection to consider. True, the objector may respond, the pyramid form makes face-to-face deliberation across a large population conceivable. Consider, though, the time it would take for a decision affecting the entire community to be made, the time, that is, that it would take for the issue to be deliberated on and passed through all the levels of the pyramid. It may take a year, even several years. Many political issues in modern societies do not allow such delay but need to be decided at short notice, which is why parliamentary democracies have officials with executive powers (presidents, chancellors, ministers and so on).
The answer to be given to this follow-up objection, which reformulates the problem of scale as a problem of time, is two-fold. There is no reason why, in a council system, issues that are indeed to be settled quickly shall not be allowed to be settled quickly, namely by the appropriate council. That is, every council can be given the right to decide an issue without waiting for input from the ‘lower’ councils, if need be. What needs to be emphasized is that the members of a council exercising this right will have to justify their haste after the fact in front of the councils whose delegates they are. In other words, they will have to convince their constituents, at the risk of immediate recall, that in the given case there was no time to consult them. This fact should alleviate the worry that such a right may come to be regularly abused.
This is the first part of the answer, concerning issues that are indeed of urgency. The second part is that many, probably most, and at any rate all fundamental issues do allow the delay and so can be deliberated by all the councils concerned. Besides, when it comes to fundamental issues, for instance constitutional matters, things do not move fast in parliamentary systems either. Consider how long it has taken and is still taking to establish racial and gender equality in such systems.
In sum, the problem of scale is for the council system not a problem but a raison d’être, insofar as this system constitutes its solution.
3.2. The problem of complexity
The problem of complexity is that many situations in today's world that require political intervention are, so it is claimed, too complicated for laypeople to understand, let alone resolve. A council system would therefore inevitably fail at the task of managing the public affairs of a contemporary society. The idea of ‘a society made up entirely of horizontal networks of associations’, Habermas for instance contends, ‘was always utopian; today it is still less workable, given the regulatory and organizational needs of modern societies’ (1997, p. 52; cf. 1996, pp. 315–328).
Why is the modern world considered to be overly complex? What the people who hold this view usually have in mind is the complexity of contemporary legal codes, regulatory policies or financial instruments. And indeed, these things are today too convoluted for non-experts to penetrate. We should ask, though, why this complexity is assumed to be incontrovertible, something that we must live with. Why should it not be possible, if it were seriously undertaken, to simplify the laws and policies and financial instruments? Is it not plausible that at least part of the reason for all the complexity is that it gives certain groups of people – to wit, the experts – privileged or even exclusive control over the respective domains?
But let me grant, for the sake of argument, that modern societies indeed possess certain inherent and incontrovertible complexities that need to be dealt with by professionals. The idea of council democracy is not threatened by such an assumption. When confronted with an issue that is too complex for laypeople, the councils can call on experts, just as parliamentarians do in the democracies we live in. Or they can set up institutions, staffed by professionals, to take care of certain administrative tasks, just as there are such institutions in parliamentary democracies.19 They will insist, of course, that these experts and bureaucrats are subordinated to their political control, just as they are (supposed to be) subordinated to political control in parliamentary systems. There is hence no reason to believe that council democracy is less equipped to deal with complexities than parliamentary democracy. If an issue is too complicated to be resolved by a system of councils, it will also be too complicated for a parliament.
3.3. The problem of transition
So council democracy is not strictly impossible. The size and the complexity of modern societies do not preclude such a system. It is still, the critic may reply, very unlikely ever to be realized, which is enough of an objection. Canovan, for instance, wonders whether Arendt intended the council system as ‘a serious suggestion for political reform’, implying that to propose a reform to such a system would be unlikely to find the requisite support (1978, p. 18).
Canovan here overlooks the fact that, for Arendt, councils are the offspring of revolutions, not the product of reforms. To believe that a council system could be established from within a parliamentary democracy would indeed be unrealistic. The constitution of a council system would mean the end of the party system, and we can be quite certain that no party would agree to a proposal that would render it obsolete.
The point that the council system is a revolutionary form of political organization provides the answer to the objection that its coming about is very unlikely. The objection must be admitted. Yes, it is very unlikely that we will see a council system any time soon, as unlikely as that there will be a revolution any time soon, and in fact much more unlikely still, given that previous revolutions have failed to bring about such a system. Arendt is perfectly aware of the odds, as she makes clear in an interview with Adelbert Reif. After having expressed her enthusiasm for the council system, she adds, at the very end of the interview:
But if you ask me now what prospects it has of being realized, then I must say to you: Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all – in the wake of the next revolution. (Arendt, 1972, p. 233)
3.4. The charge of naiveté
I hope to have shown that the idea of council democracy is not unrealistic – not in a bad sense, at any rate. There is, I announced, a second kind of objection, which calls into question not so much its realizability but its appeal. Basically, the objection is that Arendt paints too rosy a picture of how a system of councils would play out once established. Let me quote Elster:
Neither the Greek nor the American assemblies were the paradigms of discursive reason that [Arendt] makes them out to be. The Greeks were well aware that they might be tempted by demagogues, and in fact took extensive precautions against this tendency. The American town surely has not always been the incarnation of collective freedom, since on occasion it could also serve as the springboard for witch hunts. (1997, p. 16)
Canovan puts forward the same worry in more general terms:
[I]t is hard to imagine that, had the various revolutionary councils [Arendt] extols lasted a little longer, there would have been no similar growth of cabals intriguing against one another, sects trying to put one another down, and self-seeking individuals aiming at dominance. (1974, pp. 123–124)
I believe that such objections miss the target. They impute a position to Arendt that is not hers. Arendt never suggested that council democracy – the historical revolutionary councils or a possible full-blown council system, respectively – would constitute a world governed solely by amicable debate and consensual arbitration, devoid of strife and rancour, and immune to irrationality. Of course there would be cabals in the councils, and power struggles, and breakdowns of communication for various reasons, and all the rest of it. What inspires Arendt's enthusiasm for council democracy is simply the belief – which also inspires Habermas's philosophy and the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’ more generally – that face-to-face communication is better suited to deal with such cabals, struggles and breakdowns than other institutional settings. In other words, it is in a setting of small-group deliberations that the chances are best for cabals to be eventually exposed, power struggles to be peacefully fought out and communication to be restored after breakdowns.20
4. Epilogue
I would like to conclude with a note on what my paper means for our understanding of On Revolution as a book. I believe that this book has often been underestimated and misconceived. Let me explain.
In On Revolution, Arendt applies the dichotomy of the political and the social, which she first put forward in The Human Condition, to the American and French Revolutions, characterizing the former as the successful constitution of a new polity and the latter as failing because of ‘the social question’, that is, as foundering on the rock of poverty. The bulk of her readers have focused on this aspect of the book. On the one hand, they have criticized the dichotomy of the political and the social in general (Benhabib, 2003, pp. 140–146; Bernstein, 1986; Habermas, 1983; Honig, 1993, pp. 119–124; Kateb, 1984, pp. 116–123; Pitkin, 1998; Wellmer, 2000, pp. 234–235). And on the other hand, they have taken issue with how Arendt employs this dichotomy to contrast the two revolutions, pointing out that social issues played a significant role in the American Revolution (Nisbet, 1977, pp. 65–68; Wolin, 1983, pp. 10–14) and that the French Revolution had its share of political achievements (Disch, 2011, pp. 360–366). By focusing on this particular aspect, her readers neglect or ignore the conclusion of the book, which is also its very aim and purpose, namely her observation that in all the grand revolutions of the modern age we see the emergence of political institutions of a certain kind – councils. The aim and purpose of On Revolution is to call attention to this phenomenon, to argue that it contains the seeds of a new form of political organization and to commend this political form as the realization of freedom for all.21 In short, Arendt seeks to save the experience and idea of council democracy from oblivion.22 Her readers, because they fix their attention on theoretical issues such as the dichotomy of the political and the social or her accounts of the two revolutions, tend to overlook this eminent political thrust and upshot of the book.
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
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.
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.
There are three notable exceptions, three commentators who have paid close and favorable attention to Arendt's advocacy of the council system, namely Sitton (1987), Kalyvas (2008, chap. 9) and Muldoon (2011). But they, too, end their discussions on a critical note. I will address their objections along the way, when the opportunity arises.
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’ (1965, 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.
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. 1965, 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’ (1958b, p. 30).
The phrase in statu nascendi is used by Arendt in the German edition of On Revolution (Arendt, 1974, p. 359).
On this note, Jacobson's remark that On Revolution constitutes ‘an indispensable Handbook for Revolutionaries’ (1983, 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.
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’ (2011, p. 412).
‘The distance between tyranny and constitutional, limited government is as great as, perhaps greater than, the distance between limited government and freedom’ (Arendt, 1965, p. 218).
The phrase ‘participator in government’ comes from Thomas Jefferson.
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. (1965, p. 255)
Andreas Kalyvas characterizes Arendt's idea of the council system as the ‘attempt to theorize the institutionalization of the extraordinary’ (Kalyvas, 2008, 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.
Isaac (1994) 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 (1994, 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.
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.
The phrase ‘deadly conflict’ (‘tödlicher Konflikt’) is used by Arendt in the German edition of On Revolution (1974, p. 342).
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.
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’ (1965, 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’ (1987, pp. 94–100; see also Muldoon, 2011, 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.
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, 2007, p. 400; see also pp. 195, 409). For a discussion of the historical context and the merits of this proposal, see Bernstein, 1996, chap. 6.
That this is indeed the aim of the book is proven by the essay ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’ (1962) 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).
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’ (2005, 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.