Give and take: Arendt and the nomos of political community

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 7, 2006, Pages 881-901

  Lindahl, Hans ^a  

^a TILBURG UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

citizen foreigner; inside outside; nomos; own strange; reflexivity; representation; space

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846137235     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706066979     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 2003[1993]), p. 122; hereinafter cited as WiP.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), p. 286; hereinafter cited as TOT.
3. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), p. 200.
4. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Another commentator characterizes Arendt's work as a ‘phenomenology of the public sphere’ (emphasis added).
5. See Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 287ff.
6. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. 30, cited by Hannah Arendt in On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin Books, 1990[1963]), pp. 186–7; hereinafter cited as OR.
7. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 30.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 63, n. 62; hereinafter cited as HC, 63–4.
9. Arendt, WiP, pp. 109–22, 114–15.
10. See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Athens and Rome’, in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 165–77.
11. Arendt, WiP, p. 119. See also Arendt, HC, p. 198. The argument that nomos allows human relations to remain surveyable is vintage Aristotelianism. When considering the ideal size of a city-state in Book VII of the Politics, Aristotle asserts that ‘the same thing holds good of the territory that we said about the size of the population — it must be well able to be taken in at one view [eusunoptos]’.
12. See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1944), vol. 23, 1327a. I am grateful to David Janssens for pointing out this connection to me.
13. Arendt, HC, p. 21.
14. See also Arendt, WiP, p. 46.
15. Arendt, OR, p. 275.
16. Arendt, HC, p. 195.
17. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 30.
18. Arendt, HC, p. 183.
19. Arendt, WiP, p. 100.
20. Significantly, Arendt uses this expression only rarely, not least because of her distrust of any form of politics premised on the unity of a political community. But the distinction between democratic and, say, totalitarian politics cannot be posed in terms of a simple and massive opposition between plurality and unity, but rather in the manner in which a polity deals with the inevitable claim to unity which constitutes it as a community. Arendt points in this direction in the final chapter of Life of the Mind, when linking the exercise of freedom to the emergence of a firstperson plural, a We. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind/Willing (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1978), pp. 200–1; hereinafter cited as LOC.
21. It may remain an open question, for the purpose of this article, to what extent Arendt's description of action addresses the issue of collective agency. While her references to power and ‘acting in concert’ no doubt evoke this issue, intersubjectivity and collective subjectivity tend to run through each other in her analyses of action. Whatever the standpoint one may want to take on this general point, it is in any case safe to assert that Arendt does not elucidate nomos in terms of the reflexivity of collective agency. It is noteworthy in this respect that when Arendt takes up the genesis of political community in a reflexive key, she passes over in silence the genesis of spatial unity: ‘The only trait that all these various forms and shapes of human plurality have in common is the simple fact of their genesis, that is, that at some moment in time and for some reason a group of people must have come to think of themselves as a “We”.’ See Arendt, LOC, p. 202.
22. For a powerful analysis of collective agency and political reflexivity, see Bert van Roermund, ‘First-Person Plural Legislature: Political Reflexivity and Representation’, Philosophical Explorations 6(3) (2003): 235–52.
23. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993[1992]), p. 77.
24. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1994[1963]), p. 262.
25. As Waldenfels puts it, the act of separating an inside from an outside brings about a ‘preference in the difference’. See Bernhard Waldenfels, Vielstimmigkeit der Rede: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 4 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 197.
26. Otfried Höffe, Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), p. 303.
27. Similarly, albeit in another context, Habermas, in an article co-authored by Derrida, expresses the hope of an ‘internal world politics’. See Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ‘Nach dem Krieg — Die Wiedergeburt Europas’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003, 33–4.
28. Hannah Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?’, in her Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1993[1955]), p. 81.
29. See also Arendt, HC, p. 257.
30. Arendt, OR, p. 275.
31. For a similar statement, see Arendt, WiP, pp. 40–1.
32. Arendt, TOT, p. 301.
33. See also Arendt, OR, p. 31.
34. This insight would be the point of departure of a critical examination of the attempt to despatialize the notion of a ‘public sphere’. For the one, the rights to freedom of expression and association, which are essential to the functioning of a public sphere, are thoroughly topical; for the other, a public sphere presupposes privileged bearers of these rights — the citizens of the polity. A background question, which requires treatment in a separate paper, is how Arendt's reference to ‘a right to have rights’ (TOT, p. 296) can be interpreted in the light of a reflexive reading of nomos.
35. For contributions to this issue, see Frank Michelman, ‘Parsing “a Right to Have Rights”’, Constellations 3(2) (1996): 200–8;
36. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World: Political Membership in a Global Era’, Social Research 66(3) (1999): 709–44;
37. and Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
38. Arendt, TOT, p. 301.
39. For analyses of foundation in Arendt, see, among others, Bonnie Honig, ‘Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic’, American Political Science Review 85(1) (1991): 97–114
40. and Alan Keenan, ‘Promises, Promises: The Abyss of Freedom and the Loss of Political World in the Work of Hannah Arendt’, Political Theory 22(2) (1994): 297–322.
41. I am indebted here to Bert van Roermund, who has exposed a comparable problem in Jürgen Habermas' discourse principle. See Bert van Roermund, Law, Narrative and Reality: An Essay in Intercepting Politics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997), p. 151.
42. Hannah Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, in her Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 47.
43. This passage effectively deconstructs the sharp opposition Arendt elsewhere sets up between ‘representation’ and ‘action and participation’. See Arendt, OR, p. 273. For, to initiate community, a ‘leader’ must claim to act on behalf of a group. A representational act lies at the heart of action and participation.
44. Arendt, OR, p. 278.
45. ‘Einheit von Ordnung und Ortung.’ See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003[1950]), p. 42 (translation altered).
46. For the record, Arendt does mention Schmitt in TOT, referring, among others, to his ‘ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government’ (TOT, p. 339, n. 65).
47. Schmitt, for his part, mentions Arendt sporadically in his writings, albeit without a specific reference to her analysis of nomos. For a general analysis of the relation between Arendt and Schmitt, see William E. Scheurman, ‘Revolutions and Constitutions: Hannah Arendt's Challenge to Carl Schmitt’, in David Dyzenhaus (ed.) Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 252–80.
48. ‘Nomos-Nahme-Name’, in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), pp. 573–91.
49. See also ‘Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden’, in Carl Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), pp. 489–504.
50. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, p. 78 (translation altered).
51. See my ‘Inside and Outside the EU's “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice”: Reflexive Identity and the Unity of Legal Space’, Archif für Rechtsund Sozialphilosophie 90(4) (2004): 478–97.
52. Arendt, TOT, p. 286.
53. Arendt, HC, p. 199.
54. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 80 (emphasis added).
55. Arendt, OR, p. 223.
56. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, p. 78. Notice that this passage effectively conjoins the two terms the Sophists sought to oppose, namely physis and nomos, nature and convention.