Democracy and Cultural Renewal: Arendt and Jaspers on Democratic Institutions

• In Event: Democracy beyond Politics in Late Modern Thought

Abstract

In recent years, Hannah Arendt’s proposal of council democracies has been an object of increasing interest among democratic theorists. Although previously dismissed as a marginal element within Arendt’s thought, numerous studies have persuasively reestablished the centrality of “council democracies” within her work. Part of this reinterpretation (or reclamation) has been motivated by the loss of faith in liberal representative democracy: critics of representative democracy (or those who are concerned with a purported “crisis of democracy”) have seen in Arendt’s theorizing a promising vision of how democracy might otherwise be constituted. Nonetheless, while reclaiming the centrality of council democracies for Hannah Arendt, recent commentators have also sought to make sense of the normative and historical basis for Arendt’s claims. Thus, contemporary theorists of democracy frequently argue that Arendt adopts council democracy as a means of popular emancipation or as a field for popular action insofar as she takes inspiration from the ‘plebeian’ or socialist politics of Rosa Luxemburg.

In this paper, I argue that this understanding of Arendt places an undue emphasis on the importance of the ‘people’ (a term which has no single overarching meaning in her work) in interpreting the significance of council democracy. Instead, Arendt’s embrace of council democracy was far less concerned with popular emancipation than with the recovery of spaces in which humanity might regain a sense of cultural meaning that had been gradually erased in the modern age. Indeed, Arendt’s institutional proposal was merely one of several democratic theories to emerge from Weimar Germany in response to various perceived threats: bureaucratization, rationalization, and the massification of Western society. Although now associated largely with Max Weber, this crisis mentality predated Weber and pervaded the German intellectual class on both the Right and the Left. However, far from leading to an unqualified despair (as Judith Shklar once argued), the consciousness of cultural crisis resulted in an outpouring of imaginative (and sometimes troubling) political theorizing. Thus, instead of seeing Arendt’s ‘council democracies’ as standing within a tradition of ‘plebeian’ politics or emancipatory socialism, I propose that we view it as part of a Weimar-era dialogue regarding various political alternatives for reviving the culture of the Western world.

Arendt’s unique contribution to this dialogue is more clearly seen when juxtaposed with that of her professor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Indeed, by reading Arendt in the context of her contemporary cultural critics, we can more clearly see the novelty in her own solution to a commonly perceived crisis. Jaspers, apart from being a close friend and admirer of Max Weber, had been one of the primary theorists of mass society during the Weimar Era and continued to write extensively on the political implications of mass society after the Second World War. However, unlike Arendt, Jaspers followed Weber in believing that the threats of mass society and bureaucratization could be contained within a liberal representative democracy. Nonetheless, Jaspers adds various other requirements in order for liberal democracy to function as a safeguard against cultural crisis: a comprehensive liberal education of the citizenry, opportunities for political participation at the local level, a shared ethos of communal life, and the creation of an aristocratic stratum of representatives.

Jaspers’s ideal liberal democracy sounds remarkably similar to Arendt’s (also idealized) description of the United States. Yet Arendt was far more hostile to liberal representative democracy, seeing the United States as a limit-case where the institutions had managed to perpetuate a stable form of government. Indeed, whereas Jaspers saw political parties as essential in identifying potential worthy ‘elites’ to present for election, Arendt adopts wholeheartedly the critique of party-based representative democracy articulated by many right-wing Weimar thinkers (such as Carl Schmitt). Consequently, for Arendt, new sources of cultural meaning could only arise from the grassroots rather than in the already existing institutions of liberal democracy. Council democracy, by allowing for direct participation and dialogue among actors, was the only means by which an “oasis” could appear in the “desert” of modern mass society. Moreover, like Jaspers, Arendt sees this process of cultural regeneration as driven by exemplary elites who she imagines will dominate the council democracies. Thus, far from seeing the council democracies as institutionalized mechanisms of popular mobilization, Arendt envisages them as spaces for elite-driven meaning creation. Consequently, democratic theorists who seek to maximize popular participation and action should be cautious in looking to Arendt as a model for institutional design.

Author

• Benjamin Sehnert, University of Delaware