Monday, January 17, 2022

The Origins of Hannah Arendt's Council System

2015, History of Political Thought
42 Pages
This article reconsiders Arendt’s frequently ignored proposal of a federal council system. While Arendt’s references to a council system are usually dismissed as utopian, I re-examine Arendt’s political writings in order to demonstrate the centrality of the councils to her thought. The development of the council system is traced back to two primary sources: a council communist tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, and Arendt’s Jewish writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The analysis reveals that Arendt’s republicanism undertakes an anarcho-communist inflection, which has not yet been fully appreciated.



The Centrality of the Council System in Arendt's Political Thought.docx

2019, Arendt on Freedom, Liberation and Revolution

22 Pages

In this chapter, I seek to show that the vision of radical, participatory democracy plays a much more important role in Arendt’s political thought than commentators usually allow. I begin by discussing the way federalist arrangements Arendt advocated in different contexts were meant to be complemented by a citizen council system, and reinterpret her call for new political structures that would guarantee human dignity in this light. I then turn to demonstrate the close links between Arendt’s conception of “the political” and her support for the council system. Finally, I suggest that Arendt’s discussions on the relations between philosophy, politics and judgment reflect her urgent sense of the need for participatory democracy. Arendt, I conclude, provides powerful normative foundations for the theory of participatory democracy.

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