Ausgabe 1, Band 7– November 2013 Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership By John LeJeune Junior Teaching Fellow Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College The Year of the Protestor Rather than choose a particular person of the year, Time Magazine called 2011 the “Year of the Protestor.”1 The choice was both obvious and revealing. First the obvious: Be- ginning in Tunisia in December 2010, and fueled by widespread economic frustration and political disaffection felt throughout the authoritarian states of North Africa and the Middle East, by the end of 2011 a colossal wave of revolutionary protests had shaken, in one form of another, virtually every state in the Arab world. And by summer 2011 mass- based resistance movements—typically more radical than revolutionary (traditionally un- derstood), but born of similar socioeconomic frustrations and democratic aspirations— broke out in cities throughout the liberal-industrialized West. From the occupiers of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, to Los Indignados in Madrid, to public sector workers in Madison and the global Occupy movement in North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere, 2011 saw a “global spirit of protest” not witnessed since the spirit of 1968.2 Although the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, Egypt’s Tahrir Square came to symbolize both the spirit and tactics of the revolutionary moment.3 And Tahrir Square’s symbolic importance helped forge an unlikely alliance between the Arab revolutions and the West- ern democratic protests.4 As Time reported, “The stakes are very different in different 1 Kurt Anderson, “The Protestor,” Time Magazine, December 14, 2011. 2 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring,” posted at www.aljazeera.com, November 14, 2011. 3 On tactics and strategy see Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012). The book is said to have been consulted by Egyptian rebels as early as 2005, and Sharp has been touted as “the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government.” Quote from “Gene Sharp: Author of the nonviolent revolution rulebook,” by Ruaridh Arrow, director of the documentary film Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution. On the 2011 tactic of “bodies in alliance” in a struggle to constitute political space, see Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” accessible at http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en. For an alternative to understanding the 2011 protests as a series of moments, but rather as potential beginnings (or continuations) of something new and enduring, see Patchen Markell, “The Moment has Passed: Power After Arendt,” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Essays in Political Theory, forthcoming from University of Kentucky Press, 2013. 4 Michael Scherer writes that Occupy began when “the editors of the Vancouver-based, anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters…called for a Tahrir Square ‘moment’ on Sept. 17, in lower Manhattan[.]” On its website Occupy Wall Street declared itself “using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.” Some months earlier Spain’s Los Indignados had already adopted these tactics, where the BBC reports that in “another echo of the Cairo rallies…the Spanish protestors have set up citizens’ committees to handle communications, food, cleaning, protest actions and legal matters.” In spirit too, sympathy was palpable, as indicated in a famous February 2011 photo of an Egyptian poster reading “Egypt supports Wisconsin workers: One World, One Pain!” Wisconsin workers responded, with one poster reading “Walk like an Egyptian!!!” See Michael Scherer, “Introduction: Taking it to the Streets,” in What is Occupy? New York: Time Books, 2011, pp. 5-12, p. 5-6; “Spanish youth rally in Madrid echoes Egypt protests,” May 18, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk; and Seyla Benhabib, “The Arab Spring: Religion, Revolution and the Public Sphere,” Eurozine, May 10, 2011. 1 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net places…The protestors in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protestors in Madrid, Athens, London, and New York City.”5 But connecting these move- ments was a shared frustration with normal politics that—whether in liberal capitalist or authoritarian contexts—reeked of cronyism, corruption, and gross socio-political inequal- ity.6 Accordingly, on the ground revolutionary sloganeering often resembled that of the 1960s New Left, as protestors challenged existing authority structures using democratic tactics bent specifically “against vertical decision-making and in favor of horizontal de- cision making: participatory and therefore popular.”7 2011 in the process became the year of the so-called “Facebook-” and “Twitter Revolu- tion.” Social media sites and mobile communication devices both catalyzed and facilitated revolutionary movements to unprecedented effect. Protestors used these platforms to publicize local grievances, build information networks, and coordinate decentralized mass action in real time. Indicative of technology’s role was Tawakkol Karman, the Yemini act- ivist for women’s rights and democracy who became the first Arab woman to win the No- bel Peace Prize in 2011, who specifically thanked “the rapid and astonishing development of information technology and the communications revolution” in her Nobel Lecture.8 Here it was ironic that, as one July 2011 commentary observed, “the recent protest igni- tions seem to have occurred without recognizable leaders,” but this was a natural effect of diffuse mobilization. After the rapid success of Tunisia and Egypt, “The rest of the region followed as scenes of demonstrators and fleeing dictators went out over al Jazeera and social-media networks…Activists used Facebook, Twitter, and other sites to communicate plans for civic action, at times playing cat-and-mouse games with officials[.]”9 This diffuse and leaderless mobilization model was remarkably effective at generating spontaneous mass action and, in Tunisia and Egypt at least, helping bring about regime change—after decades of stable authoritarian rule—in a matter of weeks.10 5 Kurt Anderson, “The Protestor.” 6 Hardt and Negri link the 2011 protests in a “common global struggle.” See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration. Hardt and Negri, 2012, e.g. pg. 4: “Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those in Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance, the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think they were just deluded and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local battles with the common global struggle.” 7 Wallerstein, “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring,” only highlights Tunisia and Egypt in this regard and says “To be sure, there was not much of a true ‘1968 current’ in Libya.” But see also Hardt and Negri, Declarations. 8 Tawakkol Karmen, “Noble Lecture,” Oslo, December 10, 2011; posted at http://www.nobelprize.org. Cited in R.L. Soto, “Barack Obama’s Arendtian Arab Spring,” posted at http://www.scribd.com/doc/94146549/R-L-Sotos-Obama-s- Arendtian-Arab-Spring. 9 Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, “The Role of Digital Media,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 22, No. 3, July 2011, p. 35-48, p. 43, emphasis added. 10 While most attention has focused on the moment of mass mobilization, social media and communications technologies may also be important for the long-term sustainability of movements that are initially suppressed. In Egypt, for example, the 2011 Revolution was preceded by almost three years of Internet activism by the April 6 Movement. In this sense the Revolution represented both a new beginning mobilized online, and the continuation of something that had long been sustained through decentralized networks. On the long-term “sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase,” see Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of 2 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net Throughout the Arab Spring, but especially prominent in the case of Egypt, the leader- less model was not only tactically effective, but normatively touted amongst protestors, theorists, and many in the media. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that “These movements are powerful not despite their lack of leaders but because of it. They are or- ganized horizontally as multitudes, and their insistence on democracy at all levels is more than a virtue but a key to their power.”11 Concerning Egypt, a Huffington Post editorial published the day of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation rebuked those who, in broaching the topic of post-revolutionary leadership, “revealed the same type of inter-generational mis- understandings that cost Hosni Mubarak his presidency.” The writers affirmed that in fact “The revolution was successful because it had no leaders, only coordinators of bottom up energy,” and that “One of the first celebrities to emerge from the uprising, Wael Ghonim, made this point as emphatically as he could to CNN in the midst of the celebrations. ‘I am not a leader. The leaders are in Tahrir Square.’”12 Some months later “leaderlessness” again took global center stage, this time in the Occupy movement that adopted the “revolutionary Arab Spring tactic” and defined itself as a “leaderless resistance movement.” As if to hammer the point, various local Occupy groups applied the principle ad absurdum in spite of what some members deemed a lack of common sense.13 Thus Time’s choice of “Year of the Protestor” also reflected, albeit subtly, the anti-lead- ership ethic of the year’s most influential resistance movements. In the Arab world in par- ticular, “The lack of individual leaders made it hard for authorities to know whom to ar- rest,”14 and the combined technical savvy of youth protestors and efficiency of diffuse mo- bilization and coordination techniques via social media accomplished, in mere weeks, what might otherwise have taken more traditional, protracted models of grassroots resist- ance years. At the same time, “leaderlessness” in all cases spoke to a radically democratic ideal born of political frustration, and a profound enthusiasm for genuine political free- dom and social and political equality. In this approach there was much that inspired and much to wonder about, not the least being the extent to which the ideal of “leaderless” resistance, or revolution, constituted a viable model of political action and freedom in the long term. Reasonable concern stems not only from the challenge this model poses to traditional understanding of revolution and political organization, but also given how the ideal of “leaderlessness” has interacted with technology, in a manner that on one hand suggests an altogether new form of public sphere,15 and on another a form of mass resistance that is at once spontaneous and de- aggregation,” American Ethnologist. Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 259-79. 11 Hardt and Negri, Declaration, p. 107. 12 Michael Hais and Morley Winograd, “Victory for Egypt’s Leaderless Revolution,” Huffington Post, February 11, 2011. 13 Gitlin tells how in November 2011 Occupy Denver elected a border collie dog as its leader. He also tells how “when a committee in Occupy Philadelphia proposed formation of a negotiating committee made up of rotating members of a working group,” one frustrated member expressed that “‘a sizeable portion of the [General Assembly] sniffs vanguardism, and proposes instead that the city [government leaders] come down to the GA—an amendment so insane that I begin to doubt the capacity of my fellow assemblymen and women to govern themselves.’” Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. New York: Harper Collins, 2012, p. 100-101. 14 Howard and Hussain (2011), p. 43. 15 As one illustration of this problem, see Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance”: “Although some may wager that the exercise of rights now takes place quite at the expense of bodies in the street, that twitter and other virtual technologies have led to a disembodiment of the public sphere, I disagree. The media requires those bodies on the street to have an event, even as the street requires the media to exist in a global arena…Not only must someone’s hand tap and send, but somebody’s body is on the line if that tapping and sending gets traced.” 3 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net centralized, but nonetheless coordinated—emerging in some instances like a flash mob,16 while hardly being one. To pursue the point, if coordinated mobs come and go quite quickly, and are hardly able (or compelled) to generate an enduring political space, then participants in recent political movements have stuck around to “occupy” public spaces and generate what Han- nah Arendt called a public “space of appearances” in which citizens act and make public claims about justice, injustice, and what ought to be done, that they expect others to re- cognize. Space itself is utilized as a political symbol, a physical location of public gather- ing and expression, and a shared venue for face-to-face action in concert.17 To borrow Ju- dith Butler’s language, the linking of bodies through social networks, and the gathering of bodies in space, has in turn effected expansive forms of what Hannah Arendt called polit- ical “power” derived from “action in concert”—acting as a form of participatory freedom. As one observer wrote, “Arendt's significance as the preeminent theorist of participatory freedom…becomes clearer…as her political phenomenology, written over 50 years ago, preternaturally anticipates the revolutionary implications of contemporary social media. A half century before anyone was ‘friended’ or sent a ‘tweet,’ Arendt explains the ‘bound- less’ dynamics of popular power manifest in virtual reality, the intangible ‘web’ of human relations, ‘the space of appearances.’”18 But despite these conclusions, it may be misleading to wrap Arendt so snugly around emerging norms of “leaderlessness” and “people power,” and dangerous to depict social networking as simply a quantitative advance in our efficient pursuit of given political ends, rather than also as a potentially qualitative shift in the technological relation of means and end. Arendt herself offers provocative insights on this point. In The Human Condition Arendt says with respect to fabrication that the question of technology today “is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.”19 Arendt’s concern with the determining (and potentially destructive) capacities of technology might also be applied to political phenomena: To what extend do new technologies “rule” and determine not only the products of our work, but the substance and character of our action? What are the unanticipated, qualitative effects of technology on the grassroots exercise of political freedom and political organization? Scholars have rejected the notion that communications technologies have meaningfully shaped the preferences of protestors or the character of their resistance, positing for ex- ample that “In each country, people have used digital media to build a political response to a local experience of unjust rule. They were not inspired by Facebook; they were in- 16 Josh Halliday, “London riots: how Blackberry Messenger played a key role,” at www.theguardian.com, August 8, 2011. 17 On the symbolic, tactical, and political importance of “space” in the Arab Spring protests, see Jillian Schwedler, “Spatial Dynamics of the Arab Uprisings,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 230-234. 18 R.L. Soto, “Barack Obama’s Arendtian Arab Spring”; citing phrases from various pages of Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, Ch. V. Action. 19 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 151. Recent anxieties over the fate of the old-fashioned “book” and book culture in an era of electronic text represent a case in point. See e.g. Sven Birkert, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Winchester, MA: Faher and Faher, 2006 [1994]; Christine Rosen, “People of the Screen,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, No. 22, Fall 2008, pp. 20-32; Jonathan Brent, “Daydreamings and the Book,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1 (April 2012), pp. 209-212. 4 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net spired by the real tragedies documented on Facebook.”20 About Egypt in particular, ob- servers have rejected the notion that an absence of leadership entails a lack of revolution- ary organization, boldly comparing Egypt’s 2011 revolution to an institutionalized elector- al process: “In the same way that the 2008 Obama campaign used a social media site to provide a way for millions of its American millennial generation supporters to organize the on-the-ground voter interactions that propelled it to victory, these young Egyptians knew both the value and the limitations of social networking technology to effect huge so- cial change.”21 But the question of leadership in a context of decentralized mass mobilization and re- volution cannot be dismissed so hastily—and not the least, of course, in Egypt. If “leader- lessness” has become a normative principle and a matter of popular practice, what have been its implications on the ground? To what extent, if any, have the absence of leader- ship and of legitimate political representation during revolutionary situations contributed to the more problematic revolutionary legacies of 2011? If at the heart of the “leaderless” movement of 2011 stood Egypt, which since February 2011 has been witness to constitu- tional instability, a failed democracy, and disturbing episodes of political violence,22 then to what extent, we should ask, has the absence of revolutionary leadership and representation contributed to the instability of Egyptian democracy and the perpetuation of military rule in the years immediately following the February revolution? Hannah Arendt, Revolution, and Representation In thinking through these problems, we would do well to revisit the political theory of Hannah Arendt. The suggestion is not novel—from the beginning of the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, probably no political theorist has been more widely (among scholars 20 Howard and Hussain (2011), p. 48. 21 Michael Hais and Morley Winograd (2011). 22 In early 2011 after Mubarak’s ouster, the fallout left unclear to most observers what authority would fill the vacuum left in the dictator’s wake and unite a suddenly fragmented country. The revolution itself was determined by force of arms— a military coup that, despite the initial support of the people, lacked a clear basis of long-term legitimacy. Outcries against military rule arose almost immediately, and by the revolution’s second anniversary the process of assembling a legitimate constitutional committee, let alone drafting and ratifying a new and legitimate constitution, had proven to be illusive amongst a divided civil society, continued mass demonstrations, and a perpetually scrambling and blurry concatenation of executive-judicial-military government. The political situation bordered on chaos, including clashes between protestors and security forces at the entrance of the Presidential palace on February 1, 2013. At the time a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations offered the following diagnosis: “The continued attacks suggest a real breakdown in central power, we're coming close to that...None of the political forces have control over the people in the streets.” In late June, mass protests called for the ouster of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, and on July 3, 2013 the military responded to these demands via a military coup. This was followed, in turn, my mass protests among Morsi supporters, a significant portion being members or supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a military crackdown on August 14 in which over 800 people were killed and thousands wounded. The quoted passage is from Ben Wedeman, “Protestors attack presidential palace in Cairo, one person dies in clashes,” February 2, 2013, cnn.com. 5 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net and actors) and enthusiastically (and critically) evoked to help understand these events,23 and this was especially notable in real time responses to proceedings on the ground. On February 3, 2011, for example, eight days prior to Mubarak’s resignation, Jonathan Schell in The Nation cited passages from Arendt’s On Violence to depict the imminent collapse of authoritarian power in Egypt, writing that when “A people long overawed by state violence throws off fear, and in a flash begins to act courageously…In Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘The situation changes abruptly. Not only is the rebellion not put down but the arms themselves change hands—sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution, with- in a few hours…The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolution re- veals in a flash how civil disobedience—to laws, to rulers, to institutions—is but the out- ward manifestation of support and consent.’… By January, Egypt had clearly arrived at this moment.” On the future of Egyptian politics, Schell used distinctly Arendtian lan- guage: “Power is disintegrating. It is in the streets. Someone will pick it up.”24 A month later, with the military in power (Did they pick it up?) and uncertainty hover- ing about its next move, Andrew Arato highlighted Arendt’s distinction between “libera- tion or the removal of authorities, and constitution, or the construction of a new, free re- gime,” saying that “In line with what we are seeing in Egypt, [Arendt] thought that lib- eration proceeds often, but constitution very seldom. There is however a constituent pro- cess in Egypt and it is instructive to see why as it is currently organized it falls under Arendt’s strictures.”25 And more recently in April 2012 Chad Kautzer, a philosophy professor and member of Occupy Denver's Education Committee and Foreclosure Resistance Coalition, gave a talk using Hannah Arendt to “make explicit principles that I see operating in Occupy,” particularly “her notion of the sociality of action and speech and also her notion of an as- sociative form of power or democratic power.” In his talk Kautzer explains Occupy’s expli- cit “principle of non- representation” in favor of “horizontalism,” and ends by comparing Occupy’s modern “polis” or “space of appearances” to Arendt’s lauded but ephemeral council system, citing her famous remark that “if you ask me now what prospect [a coun- cil state] has of being realized, then I must say to you: Very slight, if at all. And yet per- haps, after all—in the wake of the next revolution.”26 23 See Patchen Markell, “Power, Arrest, Dispersal,” HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Volume I (2013), pp. 171-3, and Patchen Markell, “The Moment has Passed”; Jonathan Schell, “The Revolutionary Moment,” The Nation. February 3, 2011; Andrew Arato, “The Return of Revolutions,” March 7, 2011, posted at www.deliberatelyconsidered.com; R.L. Soto, “Barack Obama’s Arendtian Arab Spring,” posted at http://www.scribd.com/doc/94146549/R-L-Sotos-Obama-s-Arendtian-Arab-Spring; Hamid Dabashi, “Revolution: The pursuit of public happiness-Can using Hannah Arendt’s prism of viewing the American Revolution help us understand the Arab spring?” http://www.aljazeera.com, June 18, 2012; Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London and New York: Zed Books, 2012; and Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance.” See also the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard’s “Quote of the Week” catalog found at www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter, where many scholars have discussed Arendt’s political theory in relation to Occupy and the Arab Spring. 24 Schell, “The Revolutionary Moment.” 25 Arato, “The Return of Revolutions.” To consider both Schell’s and Arato’s comments with hindsight, see the detailed revolutionary timeline posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Egyptian_revolution. Was June 3, 2013 the end of this constituent process? a temporary halt? the beginning of a new constituent process? 26 Final quote from Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crises of the Republic, pp. 199-233, p. 233. The talk was posted on YouTube on April 7, 2012 under the title “Arendt, Occupy and the Challenge to Political Liberalism”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLuZYM3r6hI. Let me thank Professor Kautzer for making this presentation available and my engagement with it possible. 6 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net Power, political foundation, and democratic freedom, as manifest in revolutionary protests, public occupations, and “horizontal” assemblies, have defined popular Arend- tian discourse in the 2011 revolutionary context. Here I want to challenge two appropri- ations of Arendt that have emerged—namely, the normative appropriation of Arendt’s political theory to unequivocally endorse willful revolutionary campaigns grounded in “people power,” and the use of Arendt to validate the idea of “leaderless revolution” in the revolutions of 2011. Arendt does not believe that revolutions can be “made” even by people power, for “Revolutions, as a rule, are not made but happen[.]” 27 And when a “re- volutionary situation” does emerge, Arendt explains why leadership is necessary to begin the process of institutionalizing power and laying the foundations of constitutional au- thority. Hardly glorifying leaderlessness, Arendt exposes it as politically irresponsible. The suggestion that Arendtian-style democratic power is inconsistent with leadership and representation is a debilitating misreading of her thought that, among other things, con- flates her ideas of the space of appearances and the polis, and embraces the very pathologies of Greek politics that Arendt, in her turn to Rome, sought to avoid.28 In On Revolution Arendt writes that “The role the professional revolutionists played in all modern revolutions…did not consist in the preparation of revolutions. They watched and analysed the progressing disintegration in state and society; they hardly did, or were in a position to do, much to advance and direct it." Citing the ultimate test case, “Not even Lenin’s party of professional revolutionists would ever have been able to ‘make’ a revolu- tion; the best they could do was to be around, or to hurry home, at the right moment, that is, at the moment of collapse.”29 Revolutions are thus “not the result of conspiracies or the propaganda of revolutionary parties but the almost automatic outcome of processes of disintegration in the powers-that-be, of their loss of authority[.]”30 Arendt repeats this point on several occasions, and it is arguably her most consistent statement on the char- acter of modern revolution.31 On the surface, however, these remarks seem to contradict Arendt’s otherwise highly voluntarist account of “political power” and the manner in which people power might challenge existing political authorities. In the essay On Violence, for example, Arendt writes famously that “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’ we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment a group, from which the power originated to begin with…dis- 27 Hannah Arendt, “Comment by Hannah Arendt on ‘The Uses of Revolution’ by Adam Ulam,” in Richard Pipes, ed. Revolutionary Russia. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969, pp.440-449, p. 441. 28 My discussion of Arendt’s turn to Rome draws much from Jacques Taminiaux, “Athens and Rome,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. Dana Villa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 165-177, esp. p. 171- 177. 29 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 251-2. 30 Hannah Arendt, “Comment on Ulam,” p. 443. 31 See e.g. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Inc., 1972, pp. 103-198, p. 147: “Textbook instructions on ‘how to make a revolution’ in a step-by-step progression from dissent to conspiracy, from resistance to armed uprising, are all based on a mistaken notion that revolutions are ‘made.’”; and p. 114: Quoting Engels that “revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but…were always and everywhere the necessary result of circumstances entirely independent of the will and guidance of particular parties and whole classes.” Similar language is found at Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” p. 206; and Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg,” in Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 33-56, p. 53. 7 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net appears, ‘his power’ also vanishes.”32 Understandably, radical democrats and revolution- ary enthusiasts have grasped onto this language, often to give normative force and de- scriptive clarity to grassroots democratic movements. A recent presentation by Occupy Denver’s Chad Kautzer is indicative of this move. Us- ing Arendt’s words to describe Occupy’s modus operandi, Kautzer says: “The polis,” writes Arendt, “is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” The physical and spatial components of the polis are essential. The polis is not abstract. It “can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere…(but) it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being,” says Arendt. The polis dissipates when people disperse or when they’re no longer acting and speaking in common cause… Arendt’s idea here is that the polis emerges when people congregate and speak and act together, towards some common cause. And it disperses when those people disperse…so there is no building, there is no law, there is no container to somehow hold the power or practices of the polis. It is fully in the moment of participation, it is only actualized then; and when people disperse, so does the polis…Arendt has a very, I would say very beautiful understanding of power that’s connected to this idea of the polis. The kind of power produced by the polis, which I’m saying here obviously is what Occupy is, cannot be stored up or saved or alienated in order to transfer.33 Here Kautzer suggests that Arendt’s unique notion of power applies strictly to the “physical” (or “not abstract”) space of appearances that exists between face-to-face acting and speaking persons. But close reading belies this characterization. Consider the opening sentence of the above-quoted passage: In his citing of Arendt, Kautzer conspicuously omits Arendt’s words that contradict his ensuing statement that “The physical and spatial components of the polis are essential. The polis is not abstract.” Placing only the omitted words in italics, Arendt’s complete sentence says the following: “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” Arendt further elaborates: “‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’: these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere.”34 Thus, contrary to Kautzer’s representation, Arendt’s Greek polis is conceptually distinct from the physical space of appearances. For if the latter naturally “disappears with the dispersal of men,”35 the polis developed precisely in response to this problem of transi- 32 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Violence,” p. 143. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Section 28: “Power and the Space of Appearances,” pp. 199-207. 33 Chad Kautzer, “Arendt, Occupy and the Challenge to Political Liberalism,” citing from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198-9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLuZYM3r6hI; specifically from 16:00 to 19:00. 34 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198. 35 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199. 8 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net ence. Its purpose, Arendt says, was to “make permanent the space of action”36 in a twofold manner: to “multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’”—that is, “to enable men to do permanently…what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households”; and “to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten[.]”37 When Kautzer says that for Arendt “there is no building, there is no law, there is no container to somehow hold the power or practices of the polis,” he implicitly conflates the polis, public realm, and space of appearances, terms that Arendt differentiates with in- tent. This is important for Kautzer, because it helps establish his subsequent claim that Arendt’s political theory adds normative and theoretical weight to Occupy’s principle of non-representation: Thus he says, “The kind of power produced by the polis, which I’m saying here obviously is what Occupy is, cannot be stored up or saved or alienated in or- der to transfer.” But this conclusion cannot hold. Arendt does not write that power exists only at the moment of gathering in the physical space of appearances; nor does she dissociate power from parliamentary representation. To the contrary, the meaningful existence of a public realm requires that power be reified into legitimate laws and political institutions: Yes, “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert,” Arendt writes in On Violence, “but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together.” Legitimacy then “bases itself on an appeal to the past,”38 and legitimate laws and institutions are “mani- festations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”39 Power manifests not only when people gather; it is also “what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.”40 A viable public realm, in turn, requires a viable polis or constitution—i.e. laws—that of- fer it security and give meaning to action by embedding it a political history linking the present to the past and extending it into the future. 41 And while the polis may have been fit for this task in ancient times, having been “physically secured by the wall around the 36 “It is as though the wall of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198. 37 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 197; and pg. 198: “Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads.” 38 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” p. 151. 39 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” p. 140. 40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200, emphasis added. 41 Roy Tsao compares the English and German editions of The Human Condition and finds a key addition to the latter that sheds light on Arendt’s understanding of the important difference between Greek and Roman political attitudes towards time. Tsao translates the following from the German version of Section 27: The Greek Solution: “The organization of the polis, founded and secured in its physical condition by means of the city wall, and in its spiritual character by means of the law…is in essence a kind of organized remembrance, in which, however—unlike in what we, following the Romans, understand as memory—the past is not to be remembered through the continuity of time as the past, with the awareness of temporal distance, but instead is to be directly maintained in a perpetual present, in a temporally unchanged form.” The resemblance here between the Greek conception of time, and Occupy’s narrow focus on power in the present, is uncanny. Roy T. Tsao, “Arendt Against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,” Political Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 97-123, p. 114, Tsao’s italics. 9 John LeJeune | Hannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Leadership | http://www.hannaharendt.net city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws,”42 Arendt is skeptical that Greek thought can ground such a project today, for “the Greeks,” she says, “in distinction from all later developments, did not count legislating among the political activities…To them, the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making.”43 It was the Romans, Arendt says, and not the Greeks, who were “perhaps the most political people we have known”44—for it was Rome whose “political genius” was “legislation and foundation.”45 Where the Greek word for law, nomos, combined “law and hedge,” the Roman word for law, lex, “has an entirely different meaning; it indicates a formal relationship between people[.]”46 Roman law embraced a spirit of alliance and the use of promises and covenants to create durable relationships and a common world. Not only covenant, but the law itself related men to one another. In Rome one no longer encountered only a polis of remembrance in which law served only to secure action’s requisite space, but rather a res publica—a public thing—manifest in the law itself, that stood between men, relating and separated them at the same time. Law was a public thing for which all citizens were responsible—to judge, protect, and augment. In light of Arendt’s turn to Rome, at stake in the freedom exercised in the public realm is not simply the continuous being together of bodies in a public space. It is, rather, the securing of a public realm within which the words and deeds of political actors achieve real meaning and permanence, and in which, if this is to be possible in modern time, political actors must both embrace and assume responsibility for a public thing and a common world. This move, in turn, requires the courageous—call it revolutionary—trans- ition from power’s initial getting together to either (a) a project of founding or constitu- tion; or (b) a project of entering into (or “augmenting”) an existing body politic. (Notably, Occupy elects to do neither.) We can now see how Arendt’s normative and voluntarist theory of power—the demo- cratic power of bodies “acting in concert”—involves not only the materialization of power in public laws and institutions, but also the representation of power in democratic parlia- mentary bodies. Arendt is clear in her recognition that power can be represented, for “When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’ we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.” And she settles the question of her own thoughts when she describes her beloved council state as a pyramidal structure which “begins from below, continues upward, and finally leads to a parliament.”47 Repres- entation allows the public realm to extend beyond a single, physical space of appearances. It is precisely what makes new alliances and the genuine sharing of a world (which entails a sharing of responsibility for that world) between plural sources of power possible. Recognizing power’s embedded-ness (or lack thereof) in political institutions is sub- sequently critical for understanding when revolutions are possible, and when not. Arendt argues repeatedly that no group (what we might call a people power movement) can 42 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198, emphasis added. See also p. 194, “Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law.” 43 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 194. 44 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 7. 45 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 195. 46 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 63, nt. 62. See also Taminiaux, “Athens and Rome,” p. 172. 47 Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” p. 232. 10