kalyvas hannah arendt and the question of decisionism

From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of DecisionismAuthor(s): Andreas KalyvasSource: Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jun., 2004), pp. 320-346Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148157 .Accessed: 27/01/2015 22:36

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FROM THE ACT TO THE DECISION Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism

ANDREAS KALYVAS University of Michigan

There is much disagreement among many commentators ofHannah Arendt's work about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements ofvoluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement concerning the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can befound scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics.

Keywords: Arendt; Schmitt; decision; act; will; freedom

The moment of decision, as such, always remains the finite moment of urgency and pre- cipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical moment, of this reflection or deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must pre- cede it.

--Jacques Derrida1

Hannah Arendt's attitude toward the decision remains a contentious issue among many commentators of her work. There is much disagreement about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a reluctant and

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to thank Ronald Beiner; Jean Cohen, Ira Katznelson, Anne Kornhauser Andrew Norris, Tracy Strong, Nadia Urbinati, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 3, June 2004 320-346 DOI: 10. 1177/0090591704263032 ? 2004 Sage Publications

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Kalyvas / FROM THE ACT TO THE DECISION 321

clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent a deliberate and successful attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Roughly speaking, this debate has taken the following form.

On the one hand, it is argued that Arendt's political existentialism, her views on the groundlessness of politics, the arbitrariness of freedom, and the collapse of transcendental, extrasocial foundations, her revelatory and aes- thetic concept of action, her notion of extraordinary new beginnings, her anti- historicism, her attempt to expel rationality and morality from the public realm of appearances, her belief in the autonomy of the political, and the sharp separation she establishes between vita activa and vita contemplativa, all point to a veiled theory of decisionism.2 Usually, this line of interpretation concludes by stressing the normative deficit in Arendt's political theory and by blaming her for failing to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of action, for endorsing immorality, and, more importantly, for not dis- tancing herself adequately from totalitarianism despite her categorical hostility to it.

On the other hand, those sympathetic to Arendt have responded by reproaching her critics for neglecting her theory of reflective judgment, for underplaying her rejection of the will, sovereignty, and voluntarism, and for overlooking her persistent efforts to articulate a 'politics of the opinion' on the grounds of public dialogue, intersubjective deliberation, and free rea- soned persuasion.3 All of these aspects of her work are invoked to demon- strate her principled opposition to decisionism. Moreover, her critical engagement with the first two revolutions of the modem age was partly informed by her firm objection to the elements of illegality, violence, and discretion she thought inherent in any form of activity that, like a decision, is based on the paradigm of hierarchical command and vertical rulership. Simi- larly, the distinction she draws between absolute and relative new beginnings directly challenge the fictitious possibility of an ex nihilo decision and the sinister prospect of a descent into a natural state of lawlessness. As such, this too, might be construed as a direct denunciation of a decisionistic model of political action.4

Despite the many differences and disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement concerning the decision: it is a threat and a vice that ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-)decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. On that issue there is an underlying accord that the decision is intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature. In what follows I argue,


322 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004

contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, I also argue that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics. It is in this sense that her critics and her followers alike are partly right and partly wrong. Her theory swings, like a pendulum, between the poles of decisionism and antidecisionism. It is this swinging movement and the ambiguity it creates that I will address.

In Part I, I briefly present Carl Schmitt's concept of the decision and com- pare it to Arendt's notion of action as two variations on a single theme: the event as miracle. In Part II, I trace the trajectory of Arendt's thinking about the nature of the will (and the decision) in order to see how her critique of this mental faculty took diverse shapes. In Part III, I focus on several ambiguities and tensions in Arendt's treatment of the will that, I argue, reflect deeper theoretical and political difficulties. By introducing her last reflections on the will I scrutinize their implication for her overall theory. As it has been con- vincingly shown, Arendt's views are ambiguous, to say the least.5 Although she is commended for rejecting the faculty of the will from politics, there is strong evidence to suggest that in her last major work she, suddenly, against all expectations, proposed a different, more positive reading, linking the will with the power to make new beginnings.6 This subtle but important reorienta- tion raises a crucial question that I address in Part IV, namely what conceptual and theoretical reasons account for Arendt's shift and what problems did she think could be solved by such a reevaluation of the will. Finally, I conclude in Part V, by considering what form her political theory may have taken if she had overcome her bias against the will and had explicitly made space for the decision in her theory of action. In a word, by arguing with Arendt against Arendt, I project her last views on the will back into the main body of her work to show that had she allowed a place for the decision in her concepts of action and political freedom, she would have avoided a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in her larger theory.

It is in that sense that Arendt's theory of politics enables to re-think the decision outside the excesses of decisionism. In her writings one can find in embryonic form elements for rethinking the decision outside of the tradition- ally voluntaristic and Promethean determinations of pure decisionism, where the possibility of the decision presupposes a mythical subject, master of itself and of the world that surrounds it. In fact, as my reading of Arendt suggests, it is possible to develop a theory of the decision without necessarily becoming a decisionist, that is, without elevating the decision to the sole and unsurpassable foundation of politics. While, therefore, decisionism reduces all politics to



the master concept of the decision, Arendt's incomplete reflections indicate how a theory of the decision might be compatible with other forms of political activity, such as public deliberation and democratic opinion-formation.

I

It will be useful to start with a minimal definition of decisionism. I have adopted Schmitt's formulation that, I believe, is the most concise and illustra- tive one. According to Schmitt,

It is not the command as command, but the authority or the sovereignty of an ultimate decision given in a command, which constitutes the source of all law, that is, of all the norms and all the orders that follow from it. ... Consequently the sovereign decision can be juridically explained neither from a [i.e. antecedent] norm nor by a concrete order because for decisionism it is the decision that grounds both the norm and the order. The sovereign decision is an absolute beginning, and the beginning (understood as &pXj) is nothing else than a sovereign decision. It springs out of a normative nothingness and from a concrete disorder.7

In this emblematic version of decisionism, norms and rules (and the basic political institutions as well) emanate from a groundless will. A genuine decision always escapes what any rule or norm can aspire to subsume. The decision cannot be traced to anything external or prior to itself. It is self- authorized. For this reason Schmitt portrayed it as contingent and groundless: it "emanates from nothingness" and is "created out of nothingness."8 As a consequence, the decision involves the risks of instability, arbitrariness, and uncertainty. As it lacks ultimate guarantees and secure foundations it opens itself to the unpredictable, the incalculable, and the unexpected, to what cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in 'what there is,' radically disrupt- ing and altering the structural coordinates from within which it emerges.

In addition, Schmitt maintained that the decision is instituting, productive, and norm-creating. Besides determining the moment of the exception, he emphasized the positing and founding dimension of the authentic decision that is able to genuinely institute a new legal, constitutional, and political order.9 The sovereign decision signifies the radical beginning of a new regime that cannot be reduced or traced back to any anterior procedure, set of rights, legal structure, or fundamental laws. Hence, Schmitt identified the sovereign decision as a constituent power (die verfassunggebenden Gewalt) and a "founding power" (die begriindende Gewalt).'o The sovereign is the one who creates the constitution and the fundamental laws of a regime, outside all forms of preexisting authority and legality, the one who takes the con-



crete decision about the juridical form and content of the political existence of a collectivity and of its higher regulative and normative principles." In a word, the sovereign is the decisive constituent subject.12 This explains why Schmitt linked together the instituting, founding attributes of the decision with groundlessness. For instance, in one of his most controversial and obscure texts he affirmed that, "Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm" to add several pages later that, "The circum- stance that requires a decision remains an independent determining moment." The sovereign who takes this decision accordingly "is the highest, legally independent, underived power."'3 Hence, the sovereign decision always escapes subsumption under any rule or norm because, in fact, it constitutes their ultimate origin. And as their primal source, it will elude them. Consequently, the instituting sovereign decision cannot be reduced or traced back to anything external or posterior to itself. It signifies a new, absolute legal beginning. In this way, Schmitt understood the sovereign will to be originary, extralegal, and groundless.'4 This aspect of the decision has been further elaborated by Ernesto Laclau:

The moment of the decision, the moment of madness, is thisjump from the experience of undecidability to a creative act .... As we have said, this act cannot be explained in terms of any rational underlying mediation. This moment of decision as something left to itself and unable to provide its grounds through any system of rules transcending itself, is the moment of the subject.

Already there is a telling parallel between Schmitt and Arendt. For one thing, both thinkers invoke the concept of the constituent power to elucidate the moment of radical foundations, of break and interruption, and of new constitutional beginnings. But more interestingly, they use the term "miracle" to describe these instituting potentialities of the decision (Schmitt) and action (Arendt). In that sense, they can both be described as thinkers of the singular event. 6 While Arendt uses the term "miracle" to portray the indeter- minate and spontaneous dimension of the free act, Schmitt deploys the same term to characterize the radical and disruptive effects of the decision. Against the assumptions of legal formalism, he juxtaposed the sovereign decision as the only force able to break away from a dogmatic legal positivism and the suffocating formal proceduralism of pure legality, which he thought had occluded the moment of genuine legal and political creation. 7 The sovereign decision of the constituent power is like a "miracle," he asserted, because "the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition."'" In a similar vein, for Arendt, the free act "seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course



of the world, looks like a miracle."'19 Action resembles miracles because it "break[s] through the commonly accepted and reach[es] into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis." The free act, in other words, signifies a spontaneous "br[eak] with the normal standards for everyday behavior," during which "single instances and single events, interrupt the circular movement of daily life in the same sense that the rectilinear [ifos of the mortals interrupts the circular movement of biological life."20 Like Schmitt's sovereign decision, Arendt's action "has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries." It is "an unconnected, new event breaking into the continuous sequence of historical time." Revolutions, for instance, are such political events because "by definition [they] are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine proce- dures."21 From the perspective of the established structural determinations, Arendt asserts, the free act

is a miracle-that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that the capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties. This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an 'infinite improbability,' and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real.

Much like Schmitt in the case of the decision, Arendt calls attention to the boundlessness and arbitrariness of action, to its abyss and contingency. Action involves tremendous risks and "is the most dangerous of all human abilities and possibilities" because it is a step into the open and the unpredictable. Instead of being grounded in external guarantees and subsumed by instituted norms, action is self-authorized as it "carries its own principle within itself."23 In a powerful analysis that relies on the etymological origins of the ancient Greek word &pXil, Arendt claims that beginnings generate immanently their own authority, which emerges from within the singular act itself. "The manifestation of principles," she asserts, "comes about only through action, they are manifest in the world as long as action lasts, but no longer."24 Principles do not confront the founding actors as external constraints but emanate from within, dictated by the act itself. For this reason, I think, it is misleading to assert, as George Kateb does, that Arendt's notion of a principle "comes to one from outside and inspires 'from without'."25 As I see it, she approaches the notion of principle in terms of an implicit standard that becomes explicit through the performance of the act itself.



H

It is well known that Arendt criticized the will for its solipsistic, silent, violent, antipolitical, arbitrary, and unstable nature. To begin with, this faculty defies speech and intersubjective deliberation, resides exclusively in the realm of the inner self, postulates a mythical, illusory knowing subject that lurks behind an act of the will, and entails a retreat from the world of appearances.26 The objective of this aspect of Arendt's critique, however, is not to fully discredit the will but to confine it to the realm of philosophical freedom, the freedom of the mind. Thus, Arendt recognizes that the will is intrinsically related to inner, philosophical freedom while maintaining that it is irrelevant to political freedom.27 In addition to being politically irrelevant, the will is also dangerous and harmful. This second aspect becomes apparent in her discussion of the concept of sovereignty. In fact, sovereignty emerges, according to Arendt, at the historical moment when the will was introduced into politics in the form of monarchical, national, or popular will, which was identified as the true essence of action and freedom. It is in her discussion of the will-as-sovereignty that she articulates her most vigorous and penetrating critique of the will-a critique with strong ramifications regarding her attitude toward the decision.

For Arendt, sovereignty is one of the determining causes of the tragedies and horrors that have befallen modem politics. In The Human Condition, she had already indicted sovereignty on the ground that, like the will, it conjures up the practices of command and coercion, separating the ruler from the ruled and imposing a vertical and inegalitarian model of government.28 In her previous study on totalitarianism she had pointed out another harmful dimension of sovereignty, namely its drive to destroy the multiperspectival and plural nature of the public sphere by homogenizing and annihilating all differences and distinctions in the name of "One Man of gigantic propor- tions."29 These two elements of her critique are brought together and devel- oped further in her comparative historical examination of the American and French Revolutions. What foremost distinguishes these two revolutionary events is that the Americans rejected the equation of freedom and sovereignty and removed the will from their understanding of political action. By contrast their French peers made the tragic mistake of carrying out their revolutionary project in the form of a transfer of the sovereign will from the King to the People-as-One.30

In On Revolution, Arendt does not simply reiterate her previous objections to the will-as-sovereignty; she introduces new arguments as well. The first is a revision of the origins of the sovereign will. Whereas in The Human Condition she situated the birth of sovereignty in the ancient Greek



patriarchic oikos, she subsequently relocated it in the theological notion of the will dating back to the Judeo-Christian beginnings of Western civiliza- tion.31 In this revised version, which remains unmodified in her subsequent writings, sovereignty is defined as the will, understood both as liberum arbitrium, that is, as an arbitrary, individual choice among pre-given options, and as an absolute, transcendental creative power/decision (the God-Cre- ator). Although the will was "Hebrew in origin," making its appearance for the first time in the Jewish tradition along with the divine lawgiver and His demand for obedience, it was not until Paul that it was elevated to an independent faculty.32 The concept of the will "was discovered" at the very moment humans were confronted with the tantalizing moral question of whether to voluntarily obey a transcendental Law and to freely choose the good instead of evil.33 In Christianity, rather than in the Greek oikos, one finds the real historical birthplace of sovereignty as the absolute power to create ex nihilo and to decide arbitrarily among opposed options without being determined or compelled by external forces. This faculty of the will traveled intact from early Christianity to the organized Church and the Pope to the absolute King to finally reach and contaminate the body politic in the form of national and popular sovereignty as liberum arbitrium.34 This transformation of the carrier of the will culminated, during the French Revolution, in the growth "of a multiheaded monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as though possessed by one will."35 It was not only that the sovereign people pulverized all differences; it was also that the concept of the will, coming from a theological and moral tradition, deified the people, for it was molded according to the attributes of a limitless divine power and located outside and above human laws.

Here Arendt's critique goes beyond the problems of the French Revolu- tion. Indeed, she likely also had in mind Schmitt and his famous thesis about the theological origins of modern, secular political concepts.36 In Schmitt's political-theological perspective, the democratic-Jacobin "belief that all power comes from the people takes on a meaning similar to the belief that all authoritative power comes from God."37 This transposition, Arendt critically comments, could not challenge the theological content of absolute monarchical sovereignty and did not break with the metaphysical assumptions associated with a transcendental power that manifests itself through the sovereign decision. "The new experience of power," she remarks regarding the French Revolution was simply "channeled into concepts which had just been vacated."38 This displacement did not at all affect the perception of absolute power. It simply shifted its locus. And, as she had already argued, the modern reversal of traditional concepts, mostly theological and metaphysical, does not threaten their content and as such it does not signify a real conceptual



break or innovation. As she put it, "in the very nature of. famous 'turning upside down' of philosophical systems or currently accepted values, that is, in the nature of operation itself.., the conceptual framework is left more or less intact.""39

Thus, although this conceptual transposition may have been useful to the French revolutionaries in justifying and explaining the revolutionary process of new beginnings, circumventing the problem of infinite regress and vicious circularity, it bequeathed to them a pernicious legacy that contributed to the failure of their radical endeavor. They could explain the genuine institution of a new order by attributing to the sovereign people the absolute will of a demiurgic entity able to create ex nihilo new laws without any reference to pre-established causes and determinations. They confronted the vexing problem of new foundations and the enigma of legal origins with the help of the popular will, which they reformulated as a self-originating and supreme legislator and thus as the ultimate ground of politics. This choice had the advantage of enabling them to theorize and account for revolutionary foundings when causal chains and deterministic explanations were rendered meaningless by juridical breaks:

To the extent that the universe and everything else in it can be traced back to the region of this absolute One-ness, the One-ness is rooted in something that may be beyond the rea- soning of temporal men but still possesses a kind of rationale of its own: it can explain, give a logical account of, the existentially inexplicable. And the need for explanation is nowhere stronger than in the presence of an unconnected new event breaking into the continuum, the sequence of chronological time.40

By reducing revolutionary foundings to a collective sovereign will, the revolutionaries thought that they could solve the problem of beginnings, because "the problem of beginnings is solved through the introduction of a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to question."41 But the costs of covering up the problem of the origins of new foundations by sum- moning the image of an omnipotent creative will were very high. The view that "the human legislator-created in God's own image and therefore able to imitate God-when he lays the foundations of a human community, [and] creates the condition for all future political life and historical development" contained dangerous assumptions and had detrimental effects.42

One of these effects corresponds to the second innovation with respect to Arendt's earlier rejection of sovereignty. Echoing Hegel's critique of the notion of the absolute will as "a freedom of the void," whose actualization amounts to "the fury of destruction," she became convinced that the notion of a sovereign will necessarily entail excessive voluntarism.43 As pure voluntas, the sovereign turns into a fleeting and unstable will, changing constantly



according to its unpredictable moods and random wishes. Of course, this has been an accepted assumption by those jurists who have attempted to capture the singular marks of sovereignty. Hugo Grotius, for instance, in his famous treatise on war and peace, defined the ideal sovereign according to the freedom it has at all times "to change its volition" (cui voluntatem mutare licet).44 Similarly, Spinoza declared that the sovereign "is thus no bound to live according to his own laws, not according to anyone's else, and to recognize no man as a judge, or as a superior in religion."45 For John Austin too, one of the defining characteristics of sovereignty is its ability to "abrogate the law at pleasure." This characteristic, he added, confirms "the position that 'sovereign power is incapable of legal limitation' will hold universally or without exception" and therefore the view of a "Supreme power limited by positive law, is a flat contradiction in terms."46 But the most vivid formulation remains that of "the greatest of all decisionistic thinkers," according to Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes:47

The Soveraign of a Common-wealth, be it an Assembly, or one Man, is not Subject to the Civil Lawes. For having power to make, and repeale Lawes, he may when he pleaseth, free himselfe from that subjection, by repealing those Lawes that trouble him, and making of new; and consequently he was free before. For he is free, that can free when he will: Nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himselfe; because he that can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himselfe onely, is not bound.48

Arendt adopts this definition of the sovereign will to claim that the "sovereign.. [is] bound by no universal law and acknowledg[es] nothing superior to itself."49 Instead however of endorsing this emblematic feature of sovereignty, she subjected it to a fierce, relentless critique. She associated this con- ceptualization of sovereignty to an etiology of the failure of the French Revo- lution to yield a stable, lasting constitutional order, disintegrating into a permanent revolution, that is, into an everlasting prepolitical state of nature and terror. And for Arendt there was no doubt about whom to blame: the sovereign popular will. Its shaky and volatile nature was totally antithetical to order and stability. As the sovereign can never limit itself, similarly it can never establish an enduring constitutional order. Consequently, this version of decisionistic politics was trapped in its own deceptive omnipotence, which in fact, was only a concealed impotence. Unregulated and faced with no limitation, unshaped and boundless, the sovereign decision became vulnerable to its own transient and fluid dispositions to plunge finally into terror. The shift from the republic to the popular will, Arendt observes, "meant that the enduring unity of the future political body was guaranteed not in the worldly institutions which this people had in common, but in the will of the people themselves." By seeking to deduce the origins of power from an unstable



sovereign will the French revolutionaries could do nothing to avoid "the fate- ful frailty and faithlessness of revolutionary governments." She concluded this critical remark by forcefully arguing that, "The so-called will of a multitude (if this is to be more than a legal fiction) is ever-changing by definition, and that a structure built on it as its foundation is built on quicksand.""50

In addition, as the sovereign will banishes plurality and opinions from the political sphere, the only way it can possibly express itself, apart from violence, is through inarticulate noises. Contrary to the Constitutional Conven- tion in Philadelphia, therefore, the French National Assembly manifested itself only through "the hissing or applauding galleries which attended the deliberations .. [and which] were the valid expression of the constituent, or even the consenting, power of the people.""' Here, Arendt could have as well been attacking Schmitt's argument that the constituent sovereign decision can express itself only by acclamation and plebiscites. In her discussion of the genealogy of the will, Arendt claimed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition the concept of free will corresponds to the individual, arbitrary, inward faculty of saying 'no' or 'yes' to a set of predetermined choices. Contrary to the American revolutionaries who "knew that the public realm in a republic was constituted by an exchange of opinion between equals, and that this realm would simply disappear the very moment an exchange became super- fluous because all equals happened to be of the same opinion," their French counterparts were facing constitutional failure after failure. The downfall of the Constitution of 1791 "was followed in quick succession by one constitution after another until, in an avalanche of constitutions lasting deep into our century, the very notion of constitution disintegrated beyond recognition."52

Undeniably, Arendt largely blames the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rous- seau's theory of the sovereign popular will, which confined the formation of political opinions to the private sphere of the isolated individual, eluding public communication and intersubjective argumentation. But, interestingly enough, she also points to Schmitt's decisionist theory. In a suggestive foot- note placed at the end of a sentence on the frailty and instability of the will, she comments on Schmitt's notion of sovereignty with the observation that "Carl Schmitt is the most able defender of the notion of sovereignty. He recognizes clearly that the root of sovereignty is the will: Sovereign is who wills and commands."3

Finally, Arendt formulates an additional critique of the definition of sovereign will as the one who decides on the friend/enemy distinction. For Arendt, this aspect of sovereignty becomes particularly dreadful during revolutionary moments.54 In her discussion of Robespierre she not only castigates his moral purism; she also points to the exclusionary consequences of the transformation of revolutionary politics into a war. This militarization of the



political, which is inherently inscribed in the very flesh of the sovereign popular will, becomes a predominant trend in decisionistic politics. One reason, of course, has to do with the exclusionary effects of sovereignty as such, which arise out of its relations of command and obedience. Sovereignty can only have inegalitarian consequences because of the hierarchical and asym- metrical relation between rulers and ruled. The twin concepts of sovereignty and the decision, she argues, much like Michel Foucault, presuppose a zero- sum game and a quantitative notion of power. They are based on the either/or logic: either one possesses power, is sovereign, and decides or one remains a powerless subject in a situation of subordination and dependency. This formulation, Arendt adds, is based on "the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e., the sovereignty, of all others."" This binary, oppositional logic is worri- some in moments of revolutionary change, transforming the constituting politics of foundings from a cooperative activity to institute and organize a new structure of power into a military conflict for the annihilation of one's enemies. The example of the French Revolution is again exemplary. It "disintegrated into war, into civil war within ... and with it the newly won but never duly constituted power of the people disintegrated into chaos and violence." Politics became a "battlefield" and "it was violence and not power, that was to turn the scale."56

Even more important, however, is how Arendt associates this exclusionary dimension of sovereignty with decisionistic politics. Only by postulating an 'Other,' an enemy, can the idea of sovereignty as one and indi- visible be consolidated.57 The quest for homogeneity logically leads to the penalization and incrimination of plurality and differences so that, on the one hand, they are perceived as real, concrete threats that fragment and weaken the supreme sovereign, and on the other, they are rationalized as necessary symbolic referents that could be deployed to solidify the unity of the body politic by steering it away from any form of dissent and disagreement when- ever there is a potential threat of dissolution. As during wars, the French Rev- olution could not tolerate dissension and criticisms. It had to assume perfect uniformity of beliefs as the necessary condition for its prevalence and suc- cess. This invocation of an enemy can explain why the French Revolution experienced such a high intensity of violence and terror. In an effort to ground popular sovereignty on a stable and secure footing the revolutionaries postulated a real or imaginary enemy that they had to annihilate. What is even more troubling is that they did not limit themselves to the inquisitive search for external enemies but, by extending this oppositional logic to its ultimate consequences, they discovered that the enemy could well be within each



apparently virtuous citizen. Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction became internalized."

By way of concluding this presentation of Arendt's critique of the will-as- sovereignty, it can be said that, from her own singular perspective, the gram- mar of decisionism is command and violence while its syntax is discretion and arbitrariness. Her objections provide powerful insights into the mystifi- cation and reification of the sovereign decision and constitute a unique warning against its naive glorification.

III

Notwithstanding the merit and originality of her criticisms, Arendt's views on the will are entangled in some noticeable and rather disturbing ambiguities. For one thing, already in her treatment of totalitarianism, she asserted that this novel structure of domination and terror "has introduced an entirely new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action altogether" by replacing it with the law of permanent movement.59 What is surprising in this claim is that the will is not defined as unstable and volatile as it is in her last writings. Such conceptual and terminological ambiguities with respect to the faculty of the will continue to haunt Arendt in her subsequent texts as well. In fact, they become more apparent and troubling. For example, in The Human Condition, she associates agonistic action with "a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one's self into the world and begin a story of one's own."60 It is precisely this will to act that informs her notions of courage and heroism that correspond to her peculiar understanding of citizenship. To be a citizen entails a willingness to suffer the consequences of such a decision to leave one's private hiding place and disclose or expose one's self in front of one's peer. Because action demands "enormous risks" from the actor, political participation presupposes a conscious choice and imposes on the actor concrete responsibilities and obligations. The decision to act, therefore, seems to arise "directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking."6" This same implicit association between the will and action resurfaces in her discussion of civil disobedience. These allusions to the faculty of the will as a precondition of agency and conscious political action are reiterated in her warning that "When an association is no longer capable or willing to unite " 'into one channel the efforts of divergent minds' (Tocqueville), it has lost its gift for action."62 Individuals have the choice of getting politically involved. This is a decision that flows directly from the will and the inner self. This reluctant acknowledgment of



the political relevance of the will is also apparent in another text, where Arendt discusses the youth movements of the 1960s. She seems struck but appreciative of the fact that they were "characterized by sheer courage, an astounding will to action and by a no less astounding confidence in the possibility of change."63

One likely objection to the significance of these allusions to the political importance of the will would be to downgrade them to minor, trivial compositional slips with no theoretical consequences whatsoever for Arendt's overall republican theory of politics. Independently of whether this is a credible interpretative strategy, there is a place in her argumentation where the theoretical implications are indubitable. In one of her first discus- sions of the frailty and unpredictability of action, Arendt introduces the faculty of making promises as a main factor of "the power of stabilization."64 Interestingly enough, she traces this faculty to Nietzsche's notion of the "memory of the will" and she approvingly comments on the benefits result- ing from the power to make promises. The superiority of this faculty/power, she asserts, "derives from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective."65 It is not sheer coinci- dence that this positive reference to "the memory of the will" is accompanied by a parallel appreciation of sovereignty. The only time Arendt says anything positive about sovereignty is when she considers that it might be inherently attached to the "memory of the will."66

Arendt's puzzling ambivalence toward the faculty of the will takes a final turn in her last writings. She seems over the years to have considerably changed her views concerning the relationship between freedom and the will. In her final major work, she makes an important and unexpected move that not only affects, even if only indirectly, the validity and coherence of her criticism of sovereignty and her attitude toward the decision; it also brings her back to a laconic but suggestive, though problematic, passage from The Ori- gins of Totalitarianism in which she distinguished between freedom as an inner capacity of man and as a political reality. She defined the former as "the capacity to begin" and the latter as a "space of movement between men."67 This double definition is intriguing for several reasons, the most notable of which is that it pushes her toward a plain contradiction, from which, despite all her efforts and theoretical experimentations, she was never able to free herself. While on the one hand, she argued that the capacity to begin something new defines "inner freedom," she nonetheless affirmed, and this only a few pages later, that "Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom"!68



Thus, the faculty of making new beginnings appears as the defining attribute of both inner (the will) and political freedom (the act). Of course, in her ensu- ing writings, she will change the terms of the relationship between inner and political freedom by transferring the power to initiate new unpredictable and unexpected beginnings to the second-but only to return back to her original distinction at a later moment.69

Although Arendt more often is remembered for her explicit repudiation of the will and its identification as philosophical freedom and contrary to her previous definitions of the will as liberum arbitrium voluntatis, in The Life of the Mind she lessens the relationship between free will and a mute command to mainly associate it with her own conception of political freedom, that is, with the spontaneous power of starting something new and with the faculty of new beginnings. By tying her notion of freedom to the faculty of the will, she now claims that "every I-will arises out of the natural inclination toward freedom, that is, out of the natural revulsion of free men toward being at someone's bidding" and that "The freedom of spontaneity is part and parcel of the human condition. Its mental organ is the Will."70 Without dropping her previous appraisal, she formulates a more complex argument that focuses on the will's dual nature. The free will is still seen as an arbitrary choice among predetermined options. However, she traces in the works of St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, and Immanuel Kant another dimension that relates it to the source of action and freedom. These three philosophers, Arendt argues, disassociated the will from free choice and reconceptualized it in terms of natality and the power to unpredictably start something new, although they retreated from drawing the appropriate conclusions.7' She even goes so far as to castigate the Western philosophical tradition for not paying enough attention to the dual nature of the will and for failing to realize that "the Will as an organ for the future [is] identical with the power of beginning something new." Thus, whereas the will as arbitrary choice was always acknowledged and cele- brated in this tradition, it was nonetheless ignored and forgotten as "a power to begin something really new."72 Without mentioning that in the past she herself fell into this category of thinkers that had shied away from this dual aspect of the will and that up to her last writings, and almost for her entire intellectual career she exclusively understood it as being foreign and inimical to political freedom, she suddenly came to endorse an almost reverse position. In this later view,

The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion. ... In other words, it is impossible to deal with the willing activity without touching on the problem of freedom.73



IV

Two questions are relevant in this context. How can Arendt's shift regarding her redefinition and reevaluation of the will be explained? And what are the ramifications of this shift for her overall political thought? Concerning the first question, I would like briefly to suggest three reasons that may have caused this change of orientation.

First, Arendt must have become aware of some striking similarities between the will and political freedom. Both, for instance, defy established structural determinations and causal relations. They are self-determined. They operate in a similar spontaneous fashion and both unsettle ordinary life and everyday norms. In fact, the reluctance of Occidental philosophy to come to grips with the dual nature of the will was partly due to this disruptive and restless dimension, which resists any subjection to abstract categories, such as natural laws, laws of history, of causality and determinacy, universal reason, and teleological accounts of progress.74 For Arendt, the will is a defiant and insurgent force, a disturbing anomaly within the Western tradition that abhors whatever appears as accidental or contingent. It is this rebellious and 'miraculous' aspect of the will that explains its relative neglect in dominant currents of thought: "What aroused the philosophers' distrust of this faculty," Arendt claims, "was its inevitable connection with Freedom." Much like freedom, therefore, the will "in its sheer contingent factuality cannot be explained in terms of causality."'75 It is the faculty of the unexpected and the singular and the source of extraordinary events. Like, action and political freedom, and here Arendt comes extremely close to Schmitt, the will has the qualities of a miracle.

Second, if humans are endowed with the power of making new beginnings it is precisely because of the faculty of the will and its capacity to project itself into the future by changing and shaping it.76 The will is the creative power that distinguishes the human from the animal world. It is, in Arendt's words, "our mental organ for the future" because it can conceive new projects and enact new undertakings that are not predetermined by anything other than itself.77 It is this ability of the will to transcend the limits of temporality that fascinates her. The will is able to break with the constraints of time by per- ceiving/imagining what might never come into being. In other words, and here Arendt's appears to return back to Nietzsche's notion of "the memory of the will," it is the faculty of the enormous future potentialities and perspective possibilities of the person, that is, the faculty that undermines the closure imposed by time and necessity. Alongside action and speech, she now adds as a constitutive element of human existence another uniquely human faculty: free volition as the source of radical alterity and historical contingency.



Third, and most importantly, the will can account for reflective agency and therefore for responsibility and personal accountability.78 The willing subject is a free subject insofar as it can deliberately and willingly decide whether to start something new or not and thus to take responsibility for the chains of consequences that its actions may unleash. It cannot be a coinci- dence that Arendt revisits the will and amends her initial arguments in those writings that were intended to reexamine the problem of evil.79 Although most commentators have focused on the normative role of judgment, they have overlooked the crucial part willing plays in her later work. Arendt, however, does address the question of the will in relation to the problem of adjudi- cating between right and wrong. Although the judging faculty provides the possibility for moral evaluations, it is the will that permits us to pinpoint the moral agent who chooses and who is thus responsible for one's actions, because of "the peculiar reflexive nature of the will."80

The connection that she draws between the will and reflective moral agency becomes evident in two ways. On the one hand, the will is the power of individualization. It is what makes individuals different and distinct from all the others. "Willing," she argues, "fashions it [i.e. the self] into an 'enduring I' that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self's character and therefore was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person's specific identity."8 From this perspective, the decision might be reconceptualized as that which brings and propels the subject into history and politics. In that case, Arendt's last reflections on the will cer- tainly anticipate Derrida's much commented claim that "the subject does not exist prior to the decision but when I decide I invent the subject. Every time I decide, if a decision is possible, I invent the who, and I decide who decides what."82 On the other hand, the will is the faculty by virtue of which individuals can act, which means, they can become lucid and reflective agents, determining who they want to be and how they want to disclose themselves.83 This elective affinity between the will and lucid volition is better formulated in Cornelius Castoriadis's questions: "Can I reflect without willing to reflect? Can I deliberate without willing to deliberate? Can I try to be free if I do not will to be autonomous?"84 Similarly for Arendt, the "touchstone of a free act is always our awareness that we could also have left undone what we actually did." Hence, she now admits that "Action in the sense of how men want to appear needs a deliberate planning ahead ... choice becomes the starting- point of the actions themselves."85

Here Arendt revisits her notion of freedom as self-disclosure by inserting an element of volition that was lacking from the original formulation. One does not disclose one's self in front of an audience without willing to do so. One must will to publicly reveal one's self in order to decide to participate in



joint political activities. In a word, one must will the agon. It is part of one's freedom to affirm or negate entering into the public realm as an equal and to partake in a common project. Volition, Arendt now argues, "is the inner capacity by which men decide about 'whom' they are going to be, in what shape they wish to show themselves in the world of appearances."86 Although, as I have already said, Arendt anticipated her later turn toward the will in The Human Condition, she did so without directly addressing the implications of this inner capacity, thus leaving a large and unaccountable lacuna in her theoretical account of action, namely, the problem of motivation and its preconditions. The decision to participate in public affairs and to act-in-concert is, after all, based on the will of the actors to do so; it is in other words, derived from a "decision of the will" as Arendt came to recognize.87 Even her agonistic theory that emphasizes the individual element of courage presupposes the will and becomes unintelligible without it. Were individuals to lack such a will, her notion of political freedom would have taken an unpleasant naturalistic existential twist, which she did not always avoid.

The most important consequence of this formulation is that now Arendt is able to declare that "it is the will, whose subject matter is projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the person that can be blamed or praised and anyhow held responsible not merely for its actions but for its whole 'Being,' its character."88 The will is the faculty that allows us to associate consequences with actors, effects with agency, and transgressions with responsibilities. As actions lean on the will, judgment is interwoven with decisions because as she claimed in an earlier essay:

It is not knowledge and truth which is at stake, but ratherjudgment and decision, the judi- cious exchange of opinion about the sphere of sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it.89

This argument represents a significant modification of her earlier formulation that individuals are not responsible for their actions because behind a deed there is no doer, but also because action does not derive its meaning from intentions, motives, and goals and therefore cannot be judged by its consequences. Interestingly, with this modification, Arendt virtually anticipated recent attempts to explore the link between the decision and the notions of responsibility and accountability. For instance, her last ruminations on the will and moral agency echo in Derrida's notion of "a responsible decision" and his corresponding claim that without the decision "there would be neither responsibility nor ethics, neither rights nor politics."90



Arendt's final reflections on the will, however insightful they may be, are profoundly obscure. One reason is that she concludes her study on the will by arguing, as she did most of the time, that this faculty belongs exclusively to the inner self with no significance for the realm of appearances. Arendt, however, remains silent to the will's power to make new beginnings. For example, she does not say that the will as the power of new beginnings pertains solely to the realm of philosophical liberty. Instead she says that the will in its entirety concerns only the inner, philosophical life of the mind. In other words, she fails to give a reason for why the power to make new beginnings is confined to the inner self since it is also an attribute of political freedom. In fact, this capacity for novelty suddenly vanishes as an attribute of the will to become, once again, an exclusive attribute of action. By performing this rhetorical trick (suddenly returning to a monistic conception of the will, after having painstakingly established its dual nature) she abstains from drawing the logical and political conclusions she reached in her reconstructive history of the will. Indeed, after this long and tortuous conceptual narrative she concludes by partaking in what she had so strongly and trenchantly criticized all along: the fear and bias of philosophers toward the will. Thus, her last reflections on the will are puzzling. Although she seeks to pick up from where St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, and Kant had left off, she fails to pursue their original insights and to link her own penetrating observations on the will to action and political freedom and to place them within a coherent and systematic framework. In the case of philosophical liberty, for example, she goes back to her old definition of the will as command and choice (ignoring the second aspect of the will as spontaneous beginnings) and confines it to a restricted and apolitical notion of inner freedom. In the case of political liberty, she excludes the will entirely from politics without providing any reason, which seems odd given the proximity of freedom and the will. As a result, the will as the mental organ of the future and as the faculty of new beginnings remains suspended and nonlocalizable. It is neither private nor public. What therefore is its relevance? Why write more than two hundred pages on a mental faculty that is ultimately estranged from both philosophical and political freedom and irrelevant for our understanding of action?

V

Arendt's shift from one aspect of the will to the other is at best confusing and at worst self-defeating. And yet, there is nothing in her last writings to justify the exclusion of the will and the decision from the political.91 On the



contrary, now there are even some potential benefits that can be extracted from such an inclusion. The concept of the will can help overcome some limitations inherent in her work while pointing at a singular theory of the decision, which, in Antonio Negri's words, is for a theory of politics "the last of the problems and the most complex as well."92

For example, the concept of a reflexive and politically relevant will could serve not only to further clarify the issue of agency and motivation, but also the question of political responsibility. As Arendt asserted, "reflexivity is nowhere stronger than in the willing ago."93 In addition, she recognized that "the Will prepares the ground on which action can take place" and for this reason it "could indeed be understood as 'the spring of action.' "94 Besides, by introducing the will, a mental faculty, into politics, one could allude to various ways of overcoming her essentialist distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa, between acting and judging, which, she herself acknowledges, could become senseless if not reconciled in some way.95 She timidly gestures in such a direction when she asks, "how this faculty [i.e. of the will] of being able to bring about something new and hence to 'change the world' can function in the world of appearances."96 Unfortunately, she never pur- sued this question further to establish the link between will and politics, thereby bridging the divide separating mental from practical faculties.

In addition, if the will had a place in her political theory, the vexing relationship between "liberation" and "freedom" could have been better addressed. Despite her rhetorical claims about the fundamental difference between "liberation" and "freedom," she nonetheless acknowledged that after all, freedom presupposes liberation.97 The faculty of the will, to which she attached the notion of liberation, could have assisted her, as a mediating concept, to better articulate the various links between these two notions. If action is partly dependent on a previous decision of the will, the quest for liberation from domination, tyranny, and poverty, that is the quest for justice, becomes directly relevant for her republican politics, as the condition of possibility for such politics. A will that is incapacitated because of certain social, cultural, and economic obstacles becomes an inherent impediment to political action and public participation. In other words, only a will that is rela- tively liberated from the necessities and deprivations of life can decide to act. As Arendt argued, "only those could begin something new who were already rulers ... and had thus liberated themselves from the necessities of life."98 She even went so far as to claim that "every I-will arises out of a natural inclination toward freedom, that is, out of the natural revulsion of free men toward being at someone's bidding."99 Unfortunately, Arendt's recognition that in the case of the will one can see a relationship between new beginnings and



liberation, and particularly "liberation from oppression," which points to the emancipatory dimension of the decision, is so closely tied with her older binary definition of public freedom as new beginnings and the will as hierarchical command as to remain unthematized and unexploited.

This relationship, however, could be elaborated in a more consistent and convincing manner, if applied to the will defined as the faculty of new spontaneous beginnings and the political decision as nothing else than the decision of the multitude.'l0 Although she never explored the implications of her final dual description of the will, her concepts and arguments point to the possibility of such an application. Once action and the will are both identified as the power to start something new, to initiate a new chain of events, and to bring about new realities, liberation turns into an indispensable, inherent element of politics. The "freedom that comes from being liberated" and "the freedom that arises out of the spontaneity of beginning something new" require rather than exclude each other and ultimately merge into a broader, more complex and coherent notion of political freedom.'0' The liberation of the will from oppression and deprivation, that is, from those obstacles that impede its capacities for novelty becomes an indispensable and unavoidable component of the political freedom to establish new forms of government and to participate in the sharing of public affairs.

Such a revision of the relationship between political freedom and the will solves another of the paradoxes of Arendt's political theory. It is well known that she professed a rather unpleasant exclusionary republican elitism that restricted political participation to those who, as she said, "have a taste for public freedom." All others are excluded on the ground of their own choice. They are "self-excluded" as they prefer freedom from politics to the joys and pleasures of political participation. 02 Thus, although Arendt sought to remove voluntarism from politics, she appealed to free volition to justify and embellish her elitism. By contrast, if one builds on her last analysis on the will, this appeal to the choice of self-exclusion is exposed as merely ideologi- cal. How are the "self-excluded" genuinely able to choose when they have not liberated themselves from oppression and relations of domination, when, in other words, they remain subjugated? By placing the will back into Arendt's concept of the political even Jtirgen Habermas's complaint that she neglected how deceptions and illusions affect action could be addressed from within her own conceptual framework.'03 A political theory of the will rather than pointing to an abstract, credulous, and empty voluntarism, helps expos- ing, assessing, and judging the very validity of the actors' choices and deeds. The decision of the will to make a new beginning cannot be seen as detached from and unrelated to the fact of liberation that endows such a decision with its needed validity.



This brings me to my final point. Arendt's objections against sovereignty were partly informed by its intimate association with the will. If, however, we take seriously her re-definition of the will as the reflexive capacity to initiate and to begin that she had previously relegated exclusively to the jurisdiction of political freedom, would it not be legitimate to suggest that the genuine political decision, which in Arendt's words presupposes liberation from oppression, could also be re-conceptualized as a faculty to collectively make new beginnings, and, therefore, as collective freedom? After all, both action (freedom) and the will (liberation) are now inherently related. Arendt, regret- tably, avoids taking this path. She reverts to the distinction between philosophical and political liberty found in her previous writings, excluding any possibility for the political appropriation of the will. The first form of freedom belongs to the realm of the will and of "man" while the second to that of power and the "citizen."104 And while "man" can be liberated, the "citizen" can only be free.

If this binary distinction was convincing in the context of her monistic, negative definition of the will as arbitrary choice, sheer command, and rulership through violence, it loses much of its persuasiveness once looked at from the perspective of her new dual definition. If the decision is not solely defined as command and as a choice but also as the faculty to make spontaneous and unpredictable new beginnings, on what grounds should not it be articulated in the form of political autonomy? If, in other words, the will is not exclusively a repressive force or a hierarchical command between rulers and ruled but also an instituting capacity for starting something new that "experiences itself as a causative agent ... productive of acts," why could not it be selectively and cautiously seized for developing an emancipatory politics of the radical democratic decision along the lines of collective self-determina- tion?'05 Such modification approaches the genuine decision as emerging at the point of intersection between (political) freedom and (social) liberation. This point of join names the site of emancipation.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundations of Authority'," Decons- truction and the Possibility ofJustice, ed. by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 26.

2. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt. Politics, Conscience, and Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 28-33, 36, 39, 55, 88; Martin Jay, "The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt," Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 237-256; Jerome John, "Thinking/Acting," Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990):105; Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political



Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University, 1990), 35-40, 191; and Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 95-96, 98, 104-108.

3. Jiirgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power," Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 173-190; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation ofHer Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 156-164, 169-200; Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 116; and Seyla Benhabib, The Reluc- tant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), 166.

4. For this point, see William E. Scheuerman, "Revolutions and Constitutions: Hannah Arendt's Challenge to Carl Schmitt," Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique ofLiberalism, ed. by David Dyzenhaus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 252-280; and Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 129-138, 145-147, 167-183, 229-256.

5. For a recognition of this abrupt shift, see Peter Stern and Jean Yarbrough, "Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Political Thought in The Life of the Mind," The Review of Politics 43, no. 3 (July 1981): 323-354; Ronald Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Chicago Uni- versity Press, 1982), 89-156; Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 195-196; Suzanne Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988):53-54; and Hauke Brukhorst, "Equality and Elitism in Arendt," The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. by Dana Villa (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178-198. By contrast, Bonnie Honig has argued that there is no significant shift between Arendt's earlier and later work regarding the will. Although Honig acknowledges that in Arendt's last writings the character of the will is dual and not monistic as in the earlier versions, she does not take this modification to represent a substantial change of orientation. Honig's argument seems to me to be unconvincing for the following reasons: (1) She overlooks Arendt's clear identification of the will and freedom in The Life of the Mind (hereafter, LOM). (2) Although Honig begins her exposition by claiming that Arendt's concept of the will does not undergo significant changes, she mainly confirms that her notion of action does not change. But is this the point? There is no doubt that action remains more or less consistent in Arendt. Her concept of the will, however, does not. Whereas Arendt's definition of action as spontaneous new beginnings is constant, her definition of the will as the faculty of novelty, alterity, and natality represents an important departure from previous versions. (3) Honig does not discuss the implications of Arendt's equation of the will with the organ of the future that evokes the concept of "the memory of the will." (4) Finally, Honig's argument is internally divided between showing that Arendt's concept of the will is "internally coherent and importantly consistent with her earlier accounts of action and identity" and acknowledging that "the will in LOM is not consistent with her earlier account" and that "one important change has been made." Bonnie Honing, "Arendt, Identity, and Difference," Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988):77- 98.

6. For example, see Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 76, 62. Similarly, Michael Denneny has contended that for Arendt the will cannot but lead to totalitarianism. Michael Denneny, "The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment," Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Pub- lic World, ed. by Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 259. Hannah Arendt, "Willing," LOM (New York: A Harvest Book, 1978), 32.

7. Carl Schmitt, OUber die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1993), 21, 23-24 (emphasis added). For a discussion of Schmitt's theory of the constituent decision, see my "Carl Schmitt and the Three Moments of Democracy," Cardozo Law Review 21 (2000):5-6.



8. Carl Schmitt, Die Dictatur (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1994), 23; and Carl Schmitt, Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 32, 66.

9. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), 75-76. 10. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 224, 36, 90, 94-95; and Schmitt, Die Dictatur, 134. 11. Schmitt, Political Theology, 51; and Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 88. 12. For a helpful historical presentation, conceptual analysis, and comparative discussion of

the concept of the constituent power, see Georges Burdeau, Traite' de science politique: le statut du pouvoir dans l'etat, vol. 4 (Paris: Librairie g6ndrale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1983); Ernst Wolfgang Bdckenforde, "Die verfassungsggebende Gewalt des Volkes-Ein Grenzbegriff des Verfassungsrechts," Staat, Verfassung, Democratie. Studien zur Verfassungstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht (Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1991), 90-114; Olivier Beaud, La puissance de l'etat (Paris: PUF, 1995); Claude Klein, Theorie et Pratique dupouvoir constituant (Paris: PUF, 1996); and Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

13. Schmitt, Political Theology, 10, 30 (emphasis added), and 17 (emphasis added). 14. Ulrich Preuss, Constitutional Revolution. The Link between Constitutionalism and

Progress, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Press, 1995), 2-5. 15. Ernesto Laclau, "Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony," Deconstruction and Prag-

matism, ed. by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1996), 54-55. 16. For the most systematic treatment of the event, see Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'dvdnement

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988). 17. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36-38; and Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the

International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. Gary Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 82.

18. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15, 49-51. 19. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (hereafter, HC) (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 246, 247. 20. Arendt, HC, 205, 206; and Hannah Arendt, "The Concept of History," Between Past and

Future (hereafter, BPF) (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 43. 21. Arendt, HC, 190; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (hereafter, OR (New York: Penguin

Books, 1963), 205, 27, 172-173; and Hannah Arendt, "On Violence," Crisis of the Republic (hereafter, CR) (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1972), 109, 27.

22. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" BPF, 169, 170-171; and Arendt, "Preface," BPF, 5. Marga- ret Canovan has proposed a different reading of miracles in Arendt by disassociating them from new foundings. Her interpretation focuses on the Christian and theological origins of the concept of miracle, while placing political foundations and forms of constitutional making in the Roman political legacy. Notwithstanding its merits, this interpretation eludes the miraculous dimension of revolutions and new collective beginnings. In Canovan's reading, miracles are performed only by individuals. According to my reading, Arendt thought that revolutionary foundings were also miracles because they defied the preordered structure of normal politics. See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 146-147.

23. Arendt, HC, 190-191; "Willing," 195-217; Arendt "The Concept of History," 63; Arendt OR, 212.

24. Arendt, OR, 198-199, 202, 204; Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 152. 25. Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 12. 26. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 145-147, 151-152; Arendt, OR, 76, 225. 27. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 164, 155. 28. Arendt, HC, 234-236.



29. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (hereafter, TOT) (New York: A Harvest Book, 1973), 466.

30. Arendt, OR, 24, 153, 156-158, 163, 185. On the concept of the People-as-One that builds on Arendt's writings, see Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 297-304.

31. Arendt, OR, 165, 194; and Arendt, "On Violence," 138. 32. Arendt, "Willing," 208, 63, 66; and Arendt, OR, 188-190, 194, 206. 33. Hannah Arendt, "Postscriptum to Thinking"' LOM, 215; Arendt, "Willing," 68. 34. Arendt, "Willing," 69, 207-208; Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 161. Interesting enough,

Arendt comes extremely close to Hans Kelsen's discussion of the will. Like Arendt, Kelsen attributed this demiurgic power of the will in the Judeo-Christian theological tradition. And like Arendt, he condemned this formulation in a polemic that is highly reminiscent of her own critique of the will. See Hans Kelsen, "Foundations of Democracy," Ethics, 66, no. 1 (1955): 19-20.

35. Arendt, OR, 94. 36. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36-52. 37. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cam-

bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 31. 38. Arendt, "Willing," 78; Arendt, OR, 155. 39. Arendt, HC, 17. 40. Arendt, "Willing," 208. 41. Arendt, OR, 206. 42. Arendt, "Willing," 208; Arendt, OR, 186. 43. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 38-39. 44. Hugo Grotius, Le droit de la guerre et de la paix (Paris: PUF, 1999), bk. I, chap. 3, para-

graph 7, 98. 45. Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York:

Dover Publications, 1951), 211. 46. John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and the Uses of the Study of

Jurisprudence (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 255, 254. 47. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 177. 48. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pt. II,

chap. 26, 184. 49. Arendt, TOT, 230. 50. Arendt, OR, 77, 163. 51. Arendt, OR, 125. 52. Arendt, "Willing," 83; Arendt, OR, 93, 144, 159, 125. 53. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 296, fn. 21. Arendt fails to see the significant differences

between Rousseau's and Schmitt's notions of sovereignty, particularly the instituting dimension of the latter. Schmitt's version fuses the legislator and the people instead of keeping them sepa- rate as Rousseau did.

54. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 39. Jeremy Waldron misses this aspect of Arendt's theory, gratuitously claiming that she relied on a Schmittian understanding of enmity. Jeremy Waldron, "Arendt's Constitutional Politics," Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 206. By contrast, for an illuminating discussion of Arendt's rejection of the friend/enemy distinction, see Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 81, 109, 123.

55. Arendt, HC, 200; Arendt, OR, 164.



56. Arendt, OR, 91. 57. Arendt, OR, 77. 58. Arendt, OR, 78. 59. Arendt, TOT, 468 (emphasis added). 60. Arendt, HC, 186 (emphasis added). 61. Arendt, HC, 246 (emphasis added), 245, 186-187. 62. Hannah Arendt, "Civil Disobedience," CR, 98 (emphasis added). 63. Arendt, "On Violence," 118 (emphasis added). 64. Arendt, HC, 243. 65. Arendt, HC, 245. 66. Arendt, HC, 245. For an enlightening discussion of Arendt's shifting views on sover-

eignty, see Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob. Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 199-200.

67. Arendt, TOT, 473. 68. Arendt, TOT, 479. 69. In a seminal 1953 essay, Arendt transposes the power to make new beginnings solely to

political freedom. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 320-321.

70. Arendt, "Willing," 110. 71. Arendt, "Willing," 6-7, 109-110, 130-131. 72. Arendt, "Willing," 29. 73. Arendt, "Willing," 214. For Arendt's silence, see Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the

Will," 54. 74. Arendt, "Willing," 3. 75. Arendt, "Willing," 5, 89. For a discussion of the relationship between freedom and will

in Arendt, see J. Glenn Gray, "The Abyss of Freedom-and Hannah Arendt," Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 227-228. It should be noted, however, that Gray remains unaware of the shift in Arendt's thought discussed here. By contrast, Pitkin has argued that Arendt's notion of political freedom cannot be completely separated from the idea of free will. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 245.

76. On this point, see Jacobitti's incisive discussion in "Hannah Arendt and the Will," 59, 62-70.

77. Arendt, "Willing," 13, 14, 155, 196. 78. In her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann Arendt has complained about a "reluctance

evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility," because of the tendency to think that

no one has the right to judge somebody else. What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people-the larger the better-in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer named.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 297, 296.

79. Hannah Arendt, "Introduction," LOM. 80. Arendt, "Thinking," LOM, 97. Similarly, Castoriadis has argued that "If reflection does

not will something, it is not reflection." Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 393.

81. Arendt, "Willing," 195-196. 82. Jacques Derrida, "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism," Deconstruction and

Pragmatism, 84. In a similar vein, Laclau speaks of the subject of the decision as a "partial sub-



ject." Ernesto Laclau, "Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics," Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, ed. by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 83.

83. Arendt, "Thinking," 214. 84. Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, 393. 85. Arendt, "Willing," 5, 60. 86. Arendt, "Postscriptum to Thinking," 215. 87. Arendt, "Thinking," 213. 88. Arendt, "Willing," 215. 89. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis of Culture: Its Social and Political Significance," BPF, 223

(emphasis added). 90. Jacques Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," French Theory in America, ed.

by Sylvbre Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 27; and Jacques Derrida, The Gift ofDeath, trans. Davil Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5-7, 25-26.

91. A possible answer to these questions can be extracted from Bernard Flynn's argument that the will cannot be of any political relevance for Arendt because it is mute and solitary, thus opposed to the dialogical, plural, and public character of politics. Flynn is right to claim that some properties of the will do not fit naturally in Arendt's understanding of the political. His claim cannot be accepted, however, if the question is not whether to replace the faculty of speech with the will, but to selectively introduce elements of the will in Arendt's theory of politics. Once we break with Flynn's either/or dilemmatic approach to the relationship between the will and politics, it becomes possible to adopt a more dialectical and selective approach. See Bernard Flynn, "Arendt: The Return of the Political," Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Press, 1992), 116-118.

92. Antonio Negri, Du retour Abecedaire biopolitique (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2002), 94. 93. Arendt, "Willing," 69. 94. Arendt, "Willing," 101. 95. Hannah Arendt, "Tradition in the Modern Age," BPF, 25. 96. Arendt, "Willing," 7. By doing so, she becomes Schmitt's inverted mirror image: his

monistic 'politics of the will' is replaced by her equally monistic 'will-less politics of opinion.' 97. Hannah Arendt, "Revolution and Freedom/A Lecture," In Zwei Welten. Siegfried Moses

zumfiinfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag (Tel-Aviv, Israel: Verlag Bitaon, 1982), 589-590, 597-598. 98. Arendt, "What is Freedom?" 166. 99. Arendt, "Willing," 69.

100. For such an attempt, see Antonio Negri, Kair)s, Alma Venus, multitude (Paris: Calmann- Levy, 2002), 172.

101. Arendt, "The Abyss of Freedom and the novus ordo seclorum," LOM, 203. In such a case, even Arendt's unattainable distinction between the social and the political can be overcome from within her own theoretical framework.

102. Arendt, OR, 279, 280. 103. Habermas, "Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power," 186. 104. Arendt, "Willing," 199-200. 105. Arendt, "Willing," 140; and Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," 54, 56.

Andreas Kalyvas is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michi- gan.


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Issue Table of ContentsPolitical Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jun., 2004), pp. 291-431Front MatterRawls on International Justice: A Defense [pp. 291-319]From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism [pp. 320-346]Special Section: Theory and the NonhumanThe Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter [pp. 347-372]I My Dog [pp. 373-395]

Review EssaysReview: Human Rights and Social Criticism in Contemporary Chinese Political Theory [pp. 396-408]Review: Beyond the Fury of Destruction: Hegel on Freedom [pp. 409-418]Review: Collectivities and Cruelty [pp. 419-426]

Books in ReviewReview: untitled [pp. 427-431]

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