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CHAPTER 12 Hannah Arendt's Argument for Council Democracy JOHN F. SITTON One of the most puzzling aspects of the political thought of Hannah Arendt is her support for some kind ofcouncil democracy. It is one of the few topics in her work that is not taken seriously by critics. Evaluations of her specific proposals in this regard invariably contain the word utopian: "utopian populist," "utopian in the pejorative sense," "anti-Platonic state utopia," and even "utopian irresponsibility."! These critics can immediately point out that Arendt herself referred to her proposals, with qualifications , as a "people's utopia."2 Especially because of the latter, some critics have accused Arendt of acting in bad faith in arguing for council democracy, or suggested that this was an example of Arendt's unfortunate predilection for "historical rarities."3 They have therefore usually confined themselves to puncturing a few easy holes in Arendt's proposed structure for council democracy, leaving the puzzle of why such a keen and original thinker would consistently support such an obviously impractical alternative. Consequently Arendt's discussion of council democracy has remained in an ill-deserved obscurity. Arendt actually answers in advance the charge that she did not sufficiently specify the structures of council democracy: "But we can't talk about that now. And it is not necessary, since Reprinted from Polity, vol. 20, no. 1 (1987), pp. 80-100. 307 308 John F. Sitton important studies on this subject have been published in recent years in France and Germany, and anyone seriously interested can inform himself."4 Arendt refrains from creating a detailed blueprint of council democracy for good reasons: others were doing so. Her purpose instead is simply to sketch a political structure to illustrate the possibility of realizing alternative political principles: direct democracy, the experience of public freedom and public happiness in the modern world, an arena for proper opinion formation, and a polity not based on the notion of sovereignty. It is necessary to re-examine Arendt's argument for council democracy in order to dispel some of the ambiguity surrounding an issue that was clearly very important to her. To this end I will (1) briefly summarize the important problems of representative democracy that Arendt believed council democracy could avoid, (2) explicate her conception of council democracy and the principles it embodies, (3) outline the objections of her critics, and (4) demonstrate how certain of Arendt's conceptions obstructed her comprehension of the actual historical experiences of council democracy, i.e. the conceptions which kept her from thinking what council democrats were doing. Problems of Representative Democracy In what has become a commonplace of partisans of political participation, Arendt, like Jefferson, argues that "no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power."5 In her opinion, the American Constitution impoverished the political experience ofthe American people. In the representative democracy established by the Constitution, only political representatives experience politics properly so called: "those activities of 'expressing, discussing, and deciding' which in a positive sense are the activities offreedom."6 Representative politics restricts the broad mass of the citizenry to private concerns; consequently, the "pursuit ofhappiness" lost the public dimension that that phrase had for Jefferson and became defined as the pursuit of a purely private happiness. In a like manner, Arendt argues that the meaning offreedom was reduced to the essentially private and nonpolitical concern with civil liberties. Arendt does not deny that civil liberties are important but believes that they have less to do with political Argument for Council Democracy 309 participation than with the idea oflimited government, however constituted. These private liberties must not cause us to "mistake civil rights for political freedom, or to equate these preliminaries of civilized government with the very substance of a free republic. For political freedom, generally speaking, means the right 'to be a participator in government' or it means nothing."7 The American Constitution destroyed this positive sense of freedom, at least for the mass of the citizenry. In the place of public freedom, public happiness, and public spirit were civil liberties, the happiness of the greatest number (an aggregate of private happinesses), and the rule of a privatistic, uneducated public opinion.8 The American system can be called democratic insofar as the popular welfare and private happiness of the citizens are secured, but must be called oligarchic in that "public happiness and public freedom have again become the privilege of a few."9 Besides this...

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