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Promising and Civil Disobedience A R E N D T ’ S P O L I T I C A L M O D E R N I S M J. m . b e r n s t e i n Since this essay offers a dense sliver of a much longer exposition, let me begin by simply stating my conclusion. Premise: when she wrote The Human Condition , Hannah Arendt did not and could not have truly grasped the meaning of her own basic concepts: beginning, action, founding, principle, promise. Only when, in On Revolution, Arendt relocates her political theory from Greek antiquity into modernity can these emphatically modernist concepts and their corollaries take on their appropriate shapes: principles and promises are articulated through the idea of a founding constitution, and the notion of action as beginning, as bearer of novelty, becomes exemplified in revolution, and hence in acts that found a state. State-founding, however, is rare. And that rarity is the point. As Sheldon Wolin eloquently states the thesis: The loss of the political [which is the orienting experience governing Arendt’s entire project] is a clue to its nature: it is a mode of experience rather than a comprehensive institution such as the state. The thing about experience is that we can lose it, and the thing about political experience is that we are always losing it, and having to recover it. The nature of the political is that it requires renewal. It is renewed not by unique deeds whose excellence sets some beings apart from others [Arendt’s baroque fantasy synthesizing Homeric heroes with Greek democracy], but by rediscovering the common being of human beings.1 Wolin means these words to be a criticism of Arendt, but in fact they state precisely the content of her doctrine of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, I want to argue, reveals that the truth of revolutionary founding is always a re-founding. If action is essentially beginning, and Facing: Page 65 of Hannah Arendt’s heavily annotated copy of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Above the section heading for the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, Arendt lists four notes that are definitions or summaries of primary Kantian terms: “Representation: intuition a form of representation not vice versa!/*The affection itself is not yet representation./**Sensation = affection capable of representation /+Intuition instead of traditional terms (Empfindung) sensation.” She also offers a number of cross references to other pages in the Critique of Pure Reason and to a quote from the Prolegomena: “An intuition is such a representation as immediately depends upon the presence of the object.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 11 Arendt’s Political Modernism beginning is best exemplified by revolutionary founding, and founding finally is completed in the re-founding that is civil disobedience, then civil disobedience is the fulfillment of Arendt’s political doctrine.2 Civil disobedience as refounding is renewing; it is the return of the new in its double conditionality: always dependent on the radical past it exceeds and the repressive present it repudiates; because so conditioned, it reveals the political as always failing (ready to be lost, again). The idea that civil disobedience is a re-founding and renewal depends upon three distinct ideas. First, the form of sociality proper to us as beings who speak and act is promising. Promising, in all its Nietzschean hyperbole— “To breed an animal that is permitted to promise—isn’t this the paradoxical task nature has for itself with regard to man? Isn’t this the true problem of man?”3—forms the absolute center of Arendt’s late political ontology, her account of how it is and what it means for us to be bound together in the mode of speaking and acting. Second, it is the kind of bonding that occurs through collective mutual promising—above all in the constitutional contract —that constitutes what Arendt means by power. Power is the proper name for the kind of social bond realized by a community of promisors. And third, the rational force of the principles, in Arendt’s technical sense of that concept, under which those who commit civil disobedience act is analogous to the kind of force possessed by a modernist work of art. Kant calls it “exemplary validity”; in it the rational force and normative authority of an idea (concept, value, universal) is revealed through a particular act or work. This is what revolutionary action and constitution making share with modernist...

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