Abstract
Hannah Arendt has never held a significant place in anthropology. Perhaps her focus on mid-twentieth-century Europe and the USA, where she misunderstood Black struggles, outdates her for a twenty-first-century global discipline. However, this article argues that core aspects of Arendt's oeuvre can advance debates on relational subjectivity and political action because her efforts to think past the scourge of totalitarianism in Europe parallel the discipline's own efforts to think past colonialism everywhere else in the world. These two intertwined phenomena require the same undoing of “modern” Western political discourse, particularly its emphasis on bounded entities like individuals, nations, and states. The article synthesizes Arendt's work on subjectivity and action to unite the anthropology of personhood, existential-phenomenological anthropology, and political anthropology for the sake of an ontology of subjectivity supporting progressive politics. It, firstly, presents Arendt's tripartite division of human existence—labor, work, and action—to convey her unique understanding of political life. Secondly, it presents the relational subject as composed of an inner plurality but appearing as a singularity requiring recognition from a plurality of other such subjects. Thirdly, it argues that Arendt's view of council-style politics exemplifies a generic polity allowing relational subjects to simultaneously reconstitute themselves and their polity through joint action. Fourthly, it examines her argument that racism marks the end of humanity so we can align her work with decolonial anthropology. This tricky task requires us to unpack Arendt's Conradian representations of the colonized to understand how imperialism abroad pre-conditioned the destruction of political life in Europe through totalitarianism.
The shared political struggles of Arendt and anthropology
Anthropology has not engaged with the work of Hannah Arendt to nearly the same extent as other major writers such as Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, or Bruno Latour. Few anthropologists would identify themselves as “Arendtians,” while it is common to hear them identify as Foucauldians or Marxists, for example. Each of these labels conveys the anthropologist's basic intellectual-cum-political orientation. However, one senses a certain awkwardness when Arendt's name comes up. Perhaps her reference points are too rooted in mid-twentieth-century Western problems for a contemporary, decolonial anthropology and parts of her work are credibly charged as racist. Focusing on the originality of a single theorist has recently gone out of fashion, to boot. This article argues, nevertheless, that a synthetic view of some core features of Arendt's work advances key anthropological debates and political concerns. 1 Foremost among these is the effort to think past the bounded liberal subject as the archetypical figure underpinning global liberal order so that we can think past the limits of bounded states representing individualized and homogenized national citizens. This intellectual-cum-political project allows us to imagine new forms of political life and give names to those already among us but unrecognized by the mainstream.
Arendt's relevance to contemporary anthropology, including decolonial anthropology, stems from the counterintuitive point that its struggles today closely match those that Arendt undertook in the mid-twentieth century, even if each corresponds to different, but intertwined, political arenas. The shared struggle is nothing less than pushing past the limits of Western political thought and practice in the aftermath of colonialism, on the one hand, and of totalitarianism and the Holocaust, on the other. These scourges of modern history have clear and definite links as spotlighted by major critical writers of the time ranging from Arendt herself ([1951] 1994: part II) to Aimé Césaire ([1955] 2000: 36) to Frantz Fanon ([1961] 2004: 6) to Albert Memmi ([1957] 1965: 62). However, few scholars today appreciate their deep historical connections, let alone find promise in placing Arendt in dialogue with decolonial critiques and the political alternatives that spring forth (see Sasnal, 2019 as a counter-example). This situation limits anthropology's ability to challenge these scourges’ legacies in the forms of the far-right resurgence in the North and of the persistent barriers to the decolonial cause in the South, to express it schematically (Today's Totalitarianism, 2022).
On the one hand, anthropologists seek to overcome the violence of colonization by identifying new forms of political subjectivity presented in the plurality of decolonial movements. These movements insist that eroding the legacies of colonization cannot occur in an epistemic register originating in “modern” Europe. As such, anthropology must interpret human experience through frameworks of meaning emanating from peoples’ resistance to and creative engagement with modernity. A window then opens into human subjectivity that looks past both the ego-centric liberal model and the socio-centric Marxist one, revealing that the subject is neither a bounded, coherent, and self-asserting entity nor a mere effect of the social relations in which it is embedded (Feldman, 2024: 8; Linkenbach and Mulsow, 2019; Smith, 2012; Zahavi, 2022).
On the other hand, by the late 1920s, Arendt started searching for an alternative genealogy of modernity when she wrote the biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an Enlightenment-era Jewish woman who organized salons that were more fluid, less hierarchical, and more experimental than public spaces in Central Europe (Benhabib, 2003: x–xi). Arendt's quest for other possibilities in the Western tradition crystallized further in 1943 when she received confirmation of the Nazi effort to exterminate Europe's Jews (Villa, 2021: 6). For her, it was clear that traditional Western political philosophy was unequipped to explain the Holocaust and totalitarianism in either its Hitlerian or Stalinist forms (Grosse, 2006: 35; Villa, 2021: 32). These unprecedented events demanded a comprehensive explanation of how millions of people could “coordinate”—to become depoliticized, thoughtless actors—with the Nazis even when not necessarily sharing their ideological convictions (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 364–388). This led to her most renowned book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which pre-saged much of her writing over the subsequent years. Making sense of totalitarianism required her to regard political subjectivity as something much different from the bounded liberal subject of Western modernity. Her major theoretical contribution, The Human Condition (1958), dedicated to a renewed understanding of political life in the modern age, articulated a relational subject who is unique but dependent upon recognition from peers to make its own being a worldly reality. Thus, the relational subject's quest for public distinction is intertwined with the care they bring to a jointly constituted polity.
Unlike anthropology, Arendt never sought alternative understandings of political life outside a Western historical trajectory. Instead, she searched diligently outside the standard narratives shaping the Western tradition of political philosophy. Anthropologists well know that history is much richer, more contradictory, and more variegated than the narrow stories of tradition that we use to describe and discipline it. “Western” history is not, in fact, a straight line from Plato to NATO, as the expression goes. Arendt's formidable command of the Western intellectual tradition freed her from its confines and allowed her to investigate the obscure, forgotten, and misconstrued aspects of the West's broader intellectual history from distinct and original angles. In common with her friend Walter Benjamin, she found inspiration in “pearl diving,” that is, looking for nuggets of wisdom that have been forgotten or secreted over with habitual, uncritical thinking (Arendt, [1968] 2007: 50–51; Bernstein, 2018: 84–85).
Much in Arendt's oeuvre helps anthropology achieve its long-standing goals of conceptualizing relational subjectivity and, along with it, a political formation in which relational subjects can live fulsome and creative lives. At issue here are not mere cross-cultural comparisons of personhood and polity, but rather, as Smith (2012: 60) urges, an outline of an ontology of being. To these ends, the article begins with a brief explanation of Arendt's breakdown of human life into three dimensions, together called the vita activa. These dimensions include labor, work, and action with the first and the third most relevant for purposes here. The article, secondly, specifies how Arendt's work lets us synthesize developments on relational subjectivity in the anthropology of personhood and in existential-phenomenological anthropology. She more fully elaborates how relational subjects are each unique, internally unresolved, mutually constituted with others, and, therefore, capable of inaugurating new events. She highlights the inner faculties of thinking and judging as the sinews linking relational subjects in “spaces of appearance” where they (re)constitute themselves and their polity through joint action. Arendt thus draws out the explicitly political dimension of relational subjectivity that remains implicit in these disciplinary subfields. Conversely, political anthropology now recognizes joint action as a vehicle for the actor's rebirth but has yet to articulate inner sinews linking relational subjects, focusing instead on the outer organizational arrangements securing egalitarian political spaces. Thus, the article, thirdly, argues that Arendt's view of the council system serves as a generic political form that lets us understand how a polity premised upon an equality of differences allows actors to reconstitute themselves as they reconstitute public space. This space necessarily resolves a key political dilemma: providing a stable, predictable world of equal and different actors that also preserves the revolutionary spirit motivating them to reconstitute its foundation and to move history in new directions. Fourthly, the article presents her argument that racism leads to the end of humanity so that we can align her work with anthropology's role in decolonization movements that it otherwise might seem to oppose. Arendt has come under great criticism in recent years for racist tropes and assumptions that appear in some of her writings. Those in Origins will be addressed as misguided, evolutionary overlays on top of deeper, insightful arguments about the political based on her three-part vita activa. This move allows us to use Arendt against Arendt, as her supporters often do (Bernstein, 2018: 52; Benhabib, 2003: xi).
Hannah Arendt's vita activa: labor, work, and action
Arendt's basic construction of subjectivity is elaborated in The Human Condition ([1958] 1998) where she defines it as the tripartite vita activa with each part—labor, work, and action—corresponding to different dimensions of human existence. Distinguishing these dimensions premises her effort to help us re-imagine the political for the modern age. Briefly, labor, conducted in the guise of animal laborans, is the activity through which humans collectively tend to the circular processes of biological reproduction through whatever social-economic arrangement they have developed; work, conducted in the guise of homo faber, is the activity through which humans craft durable objects supporting an infrastructure for public space; and action, conducted by people as a plurality of irreplaceable actors, enables them to constitute that space, which also preserves their distinctiveness through the collective memory of their speech and action.
Arendt insists that “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (Arendt, 1998: 8). The statement's apparent contradiction—that humans are both the same and unique from each other—signals the frightening ease with which our lives can be reduced to animal laborans, rendering us identical and dispensable, at the expense of our full political being. In the guise of animal laborans, we become faceless because labor only draws upon our common bodily strengths rather than our distinct political perspectives. She stresses that prior to the modern age, labor was regarded as a private household activity, because it tends only to our social-cum-biological needs rather than to world-building struggles where we distinguish ourselves through speech and action in front of other different persons, i.e., in public. To be political, one first had to be free from tending to life's necessities. In contrast, action requires a plurality of others constituting a public space between them based on agreements reached through their unique political or ethical judgments. Arendt holds no contempt for labor, as some critics charge, but rather warns us that industrialization has exponentially amplified laboring processes of production-consumption to the extent that this hitherto private household activity has unfolded outwardly and dissolved the political-public sphere itself. In its place, it leaves a social sphere that reduces politics to the management of the national economy, rendering us a society of “jobholders” (Arendt, 1998: 46, 219, 322). She is neither denigrating labor nor suggesting that laborers cannot take action. Instead, she argues that a society premised upon animal laborans—our laboring dimension that tends to social-cum-biological reproduction—cannot beget revolutionary action because it hinders people as a plurality from constituting their polity.
Ever since the 1958 publication of The Human Condition, Marxist and Marx-inspired scholars have vigorously criticized Arendt's distinction between the political and social spheres precisely because Marx premises political freedom on the activity of labor. The debate has continued right up to the present day in different forms. Some feminist scholars, for example, challenge Arendt's distinction between the public-political and private-labor, arguing that private matters, even those consisting of biological maintenance, are quintessentially political (Honig, 1995; Pitkin, 1995; Zerilli, 1995). More recently, anthropologists have argued that her conceptual distinctions are more fluid than she lets on when viewed in light of actions people take to improve their material conditions (Bear, 2015; Butler, 2015; Chalfin, 2023). To be sure, her distinctions have needed refinement and elaboration, not least because Arendt herself often applied them in unnuanced ways. 2 At the same time, it would be stingy not to credit her with realizing that her concepts—which are anything but Platonic forms—blur together in the real world.
If we want to deploy Arendt's tripartite vita activa in the service of decolonial anthropology, then we should note that mid-twentieth-century anti-racist scholars criticized the Marxist left in similar terms. Fanon criticizes Sartre for evacuating black people of their “impulsiveness” (i.e., their creativity and spontaneity), when the latter argued that Negritude is a stage in historical dialectic progression that will ultimately synthesize with white supremacy to create a society without race ([1952] 2008: 112–13; see also Feldman, 2024: 87). In reply, Fanon argues that a “dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom expels me from myself … I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am” ([1952] 2008: 114; see also Feldman, 2024: 87). James Baldwin likewise provides a leftist, but anti-Marxist, position in his critique of Richard Wright's Native Son, writing that “the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms” ([1955] 1983: 33; see also Césaire [1955] 2000: 94; Feldman, 2024: 79). Fanon, Baldwin, and Arendt are neither liberal nor Marxist thinkers but rather relational thinkers. In this light we must ask how Arendt's take on the relational subject can advance anthropological commitments?
Pluralities and newness: political being beyond the bounded subject
Delineating a relational subject requires us to elaborate how it is neither ego-centric (liberal) nor socio-centric (Marxist), but rather an open-ended entity that is both inseparable from the global field of relations in which it exists and distinct from that field because of the unique life that it lives (Feldman, 2024: 3; 2022: 318). The key feature of relational subjectivity is the presence of a plurality within each actor who nevertheless appears as a singularity before a plurality of other seemingly singular actors. Two particular strands in the discipline—the anthropology of the person and existential-phenomenological anthropology—have pushed forward on this matter over the last several decades. Arendt's work on thinking, judging, and action synthesizes and further develops their insights on this subject's interiority, while her work on revolution reveals a generic political formation where its freedom to be, as it were, can be realized. This section deals with the relational subject, while the next examines the polity it seeks to inhabit.
In the 1970s, McKim Marriot introduced relational subjectivity with his description of “dividuals” who, in contrast to Western undivided subjects, are “open, permeable and divisible, constituted by incorporated relations and transaction” (cited in Linkenbach and Mulsow, 2019: 326). Whereas the individual is indivisible with an essential core, the dividual is divisible and composed of separable and distinct aspects linking them to a wider sociality (Smith, 2012: 53). Marilyn Strathern expanded the dividual-individual dichotomy in her landmark book The Gender of the Gift (1988), where she argued that the dividual consists of an inner plurality by virtue of its plurality of relations with those others, so that each one contains a “social microcosm” within itself (1988: 13). 3 Taking a step forward, Strathern also explained how this inner plurality, composing subjects who appear as singularities, allows people to come together in new ways in which they reconstitute themselves as distinct beings while reconstituting the shared space between them. Though she writes in awkwardly biological terms, Strathern adds that singular entities themselves do not reproduce, but only pairs of them unite to create something out of their joint action, including new persons. The important implication here is that the actor, qua individual, is not political, but only actors, qua dividuals, undertaking joint action. Moreover, the identity of those dividuals is only revealed inter-subjectively in the course of action when it becomes a new and objectified person (Strathern, 1988: 273; see also Linkenbach and Mulsow, 2019: 328).
Strathern gave anthropologists much to discuss after The Gender of the Gift. 4 Linkenbach constructively reframed her dividual-individual dichotomy as “in-fluences” permeating and “mingling with each other” that give “rise to a uniquely entangled personhood with distinct agentive potential” (2019: 404). Her position parallels Smith who similarly sees a porous subject permeated by others while also “remaining open to ‘nature’, the ‘world’ and the mysteries of existence” (Smith, 2012: 60). Smith, rightly in my view, goes so far as to search for an ontological basis for selfhood free from the idea of the atomistic individual. He imagines a human being with inner depths but without the inner/outer distinction inherited from Descartes (Smith, 2012). Both Linkenbach and Smith push Strathern's model in important ways, but Strathern's initial contribution remains essential: that the inner plurality, which both, composes each actor and links it inherently to others, is the source of the new in human interaction and that this new only appears between actors as they combine together.
Developments in existential anthropology followed a similar path but explicitly drew on phenomenological thinkers for conceptual guidance. Michael Jackson also sought to avoid reducing the subject's social existence (read political existence) to either socio-cultural form or inner essence (2005: x) by means of ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and Indigenous Australia. More originally, however, he stresses the point that while our interior being intertwines with things social, our relations with it are “grasped only within ourselves” (Jackson, 2005: xxviii; similarly see Humphrey, 2008: 363; Mattingly and Throop, 2018). In this vein, Zahavi notes that we must distinguish individualism, as a culturally specific ideology that privileges the non-social subject, from individuality, which simply recognizes distinct subjects of experience who are constituted through their engagements in a historical field of social relations (2022: 402; see also Jackson, 2012: 3, 19; 2017). Drawing on Arendt, and paralleling Strathern, Jackson shows this point's nuance when explaining that this subject does not enter the world by either self-assertion or passive precipitation out of existing social relations. Instead, its appearance emerges in the shared space between actors, an encounter that likewise constitutes and reconstitutes the lifeworld of everyone involved as phenomenological anthropologists also argue (Jackson, 2005: xv-xvi; Zigon, 2021: 389; 2024; see also Desjarlais and Throop, 2011; Jackson, 2012; Throop, 2010: 276; Zigon and Throop, 2014; see also Feldman, 2015, 2024).
Jackson locates this phenomenal experience in the “event”—that which deviates from the routine—where a kaleidoscope of interests, forces, and perspectives combine, pushing the participants to decide upon its ethical implications with the result surpassing the participants’ own expectations (ibid: xxvii). Jackson sees events as that which offers the possibility of a “second birth” (ibid: xxi; 2018: 150; see also Feldman, 2015: 95–105). Here he echoes Strathern's reproductive metaphor of actors joining together to create something new. Arendt, however, best understood the political dimension of rebirth when arguing that action—which, for her, requires a plurality of actors rather than a single one—is “ontologically rooted” in “natality” (1998: 247). She reaches this conclusion by means of Augustine (2003: 432–434, 500–502) who argued that human plurality rendered each new birth not merely as a new beginning in the common world, but rather as a new subject who is itself capable of inaugurating new beginnings (1998: 177–78, 2006a: 165–66, 1978: 216–17, book 2; see also Elshtain, 2008: 4; Feldman, 2024: 162–168). If we accept human subjectivity as a relational phenomenon, then we can regard political action—as distinct from the routines of biological-cum-social reproduction—as the expression of newness in human affairs.
The above explorations into subjectivity unfolded independently of decolonial anthropology, but they share with the latter a desire to break the objectifying confines of modern liberal epistemology. With Jackson and the anthropologists following him, the latter also shares phenomenology as a source of inspiration on this front. For example, via Levinas's idea of the “infinity,” Kavesh (2023) seeks a decolonial anthropology of Pakistan that refuses the colonial-totalizing gaze, which itself reduces the ethnographic subject to a finite category to facilitate comprehension, command, and control. This gaze suppresses the mutually constituting relations that compose all beings in the world, thereby limiting the possibilities inherent in their togetherness. Levinas's phenomenological orientation sees objects as that which appear between distinct subjects, who themselves reach a common understanding of it from the plurality of their standpoints from which they view it. Should their standpoints change, then they may change their shared definition of the object. The term “infinity,” which circulates in phenomenological discourse, denotes the limitless possibilities that result from such open-ended subjects mutually engaging each other and their shared world. Nothing is trulty objectified, so nothing is finite. In this vein, Frantz Fanon, who draws on phenomenology, makes the point in Black Skin, White Masks when challenging the delimiting and dehumanizing categories of Western racism. He declares that “…my soul [is] as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity” ([1952] 2008: 119). 5 In a similarly phenomenological vein, Arendt speaks of contingent human history as a story of “infinite improbability” (1998: 246; 2006a: 168). Things happen that no one could have ever predicted. How so?
Arendt does not use the term “relational subjectivity,” but it captures the modalities of action in the vita activa and thus helps us use her work to tie together the above strands of anthropological thought in a neat braid. The issues to address are (1) How to explain the fact that each subject is composed of an inner plurality but appears as a singularity before a plurality of others? (2) And why is this relationality the source of newness in our personal-political worlds? Arendt approaches the subject's inner plurality as a struggle for it to live in harmony with itself based on how it lives with others in its relational field. The faculty of thinking is the means by which we come to understand the new dilemmas it presents us. Arendt regards thinking neither as mental operations of abstract, mathematical logic nor inferences toward a theory based on empirical evidence. Rather, thinking is the inner dialogue that the subject has with itself as it contemplates its ethical ties to the wider world. The thinking subject splits into two voices, specifically “me” and “myself,” which talk to each other about how they can reach an inner agreement based on how that subject lives with others. While thinking, the subject attempts to see shared issues from the other's standpoint and so re-presents their view in the inner thought dialogue (Arendt, 1978: book 1, 184–93). Hence, Arendt (ibid: 189) writes, “I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well.” What appears as oneness to the interlocutors already has difference built into it (ibid: 183). In this way, with Strathern, we can regard the individual as an inner plurality by virtue of this inner thought dialogue composed of the multiplicity of external voices that have this actor inspecting the viewpoints of others in its relational world. In this aspect, the actor is a dividual composed of an inner plurality.
Nevertheless, Arendt explains that the subject cannot forever remain divided, incoherent, and trapped in the inner thought dialogue. It needs the company of others to save it from the equivocation of endless thought and to “restore the identity which makes [it] speak with a single voice of one unexchangeable person” (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 476). To this end, the thinking subject will issue a generalized ethical judgment about the worldly dilemma that prompted it to think. It will then try to persuade others of a course of action to reconstitute political space so that its inhabitants can live together in such a way that they can each live with themselves when they are alone (1978: 179–93, book 1). The thinking and divisible actor returns to the world and is then recognized as a singular speaking and acting being. In this aspect, the actor is an individual, a singularity circulating among a plurality of others who confirm its unique identity through public recognition. While thinking and judging presuppose the presence of others in our lives (Arendt, 1992: 74), action is the vehicle through which actors become their own particular beings through their mutual constitution of each other and the public space they share. Since these actors were previously divided, open-ended subjects, per their inner thought dialogues, their actions will necessarily be unpredictable, rendering action an open-ended phenomenon capable of inaugurating new directions in contrast to maintaining the predictable circularity of biological-cum-social reproduction. The actor's internal plurality and its inherent ties to others enable new beginnings in public life and render political action promising (as well as disappointing).
We can find the political manifestation of human relationality in Arendt's The Human Condition. Here, she presents the daimōn of Greek religion, which is roughly comparable to a soul. However, the daimōn remains behind the actor's shoulder, not inside the person per the Christian view, visible to others but not to the actor itself (Arendt, 1998: 192–94). Rather than assert ourselves as pre-given liberal subjects, we only disclose our interests through our speech and action to others hoping that it will appeal to them as a generalized principle of living together (Benhabib, 2003: 145). In any case, those others will tell our story based on their judgments about our speech and action. Each actor's daimōn—how it is essentialized in public as a who not a what—is narrated by others (not ourselves), rendering political being a fluid, phenomenal experience, not a liberal one of consistent self-definition. This relational being differs decisively from liberalism (ego-centrism) and socialism (socio-centrism) because each distinct actor's desire for public recognition interweaves with its commitment to also recognize others as constituent members of a secure, shared space. The choice is not between a space composed of individual utilitarian contracts, on the one hand, or of individuals conforming to a mass will, on the other, but rather of a space where unique, and equal, actors depend upon each other to secure a common polity where they can be.
Arendt calls the relational space emerging between these mutually constituting actors a “space of appearance” (1998: 192–201, 1992: 41–58; see also Shindo, 2012). This space is not pre-given but rather materializes between subjects who become distinct individuals in the course of the joint action that likewise constitutes that relational space. No one in this “space of appearance” will forever remain the same coherent entity because new dilemmas arise compelling people to reconstitute themselves and that space once again. Absent action, the space and those singularly appearing subjects vanish. Without such action, the subject might facelessly participate in the state's reproduction (or, more broadly, the status quo) but it will lack appearance as a distinct subject. This situation might appear to achieve a certain modern democratic equality, but it rests on an equality of sameness with each faceless person replaceable by another (Arendt, 1998: 213).
We cannot be satisfied with attributing the above explications of political subjectivity to cultural differences despite the variations among them. Akin to Smith, anthropologists, in dialogue with ethnographic interlocutors around the world and with Western theorists who themselves articulate a mode of relational being free from “modern” epistemological presuppositions, are developing an ontology of being. Key among those insights are the ties between subjects, who appear as singular entities but contain pluralities within themselves. The interweaving of singularly appearing subjects who are composed of inner pluralities is precisely what gives us the capacity to inaugurate new beginnings—for better or worse—into our shared lives. The question becomes the generic political form—not a specific arrangement—through which the uniqueness of relational subjects can be realized.
The council system: a generic political form to guarantee the revolutionary spirit
The relational subject's capacity for rebirth through joint action finds its explicitly political expression in the capacity for revolution, a fundamental reconstitution of the shared public space. Any descriptions of relational subjectivity not accounting for the centrality of political action to the phenomenon itself would be unduly limited. Action is not an added feature on a base relational subject, but rather a mutual experience bringing that subject into a new reality with others. Yet, this endeavor immediately faces a basic dilemma: on the one hand, those taking action must organize practices that institutionalize a stable and predictable public space that will endure from one day to the next, and, on the other hand, they must keep open the possibility for unplanned, open-ended action that can reconstitute that same space (Arendt, 1990: 222–223). This space must guarantee equality among differences unlike political arrangements premised upon an equality of sameness per nation, race, or class, for example, as these categories eliminate the particular perspectives that the citizenry inevitably hold. Engagements with sameness preclude the transformative effects that those with “others” would otherwise generate.
Political anthropologists now stress the links between political and personal transformation among different but equal actors. For example, Razsa and Kurnik (2012) deploy affective terminology to showcase the human possibilities offered through pluralistic action as exemplified in the Occupy Slovenia movement of the early 2000s. The very form of this movement's organization, which the activists call a “democracy of direct action,” “unleash[es] creative energies” (2012: 244) because “differences come together and are transformed in the process” (2012: 249). Similarly, Bonilla focuses on people's challenges to the status quo in Guadeloupe that give them “the feelings of solidarity, the pleasure of creative activity, and above all the feeling of being a historical actor—the awakened sense of ‘being there,’ of not having missed one's rendezvous with history” (2015: 176). Lazar describes two union organizational forms in Argentina, one vertical and the other horizontal, that each convey what she calls the “political sacred.” This term explains, on the one hand, how religious ideas inform “political narratives and ethical self-formation,” and, on the other hand, how the formation of a new ethical subject results from a religious-like action (2021: 113; see also Lazar, 2017). Hankins (2019: 180) points to the importance of institutional arrangements created by Buraku activists in Japan and Dalit activists in Chennai in which the former “transformed themselves individually and collectively, even as they transformed their connection to the Dalit.” These arrangements were necessary supports in their engagements given the wealth differences between these otherwise low-caste groups in their respective countries. Eckert (2023: 439, 440) rightly notes, regarding such pluralistic arrangements, actors must “conceive the constitution of polities as a matter of a shared present rather than a shared past.” In all these cases, such transformations occur not as a result of achieving a prescribed political goal, but rather though sustaining an organizational ethos allowing it to happen as effects of joint action itself (see also Bishara, 2023; Bryant and Reeves, 2021; Feldman, 2015, 2024; Postero and Elinoff, 2019). The task before us is unpacking a generic political form that enables this rejuvenation. 6 It will need to resolve the political dilemma of stabilizing a shared public space that nevertheless guarantees the capacity for foundational change, what Arendt and others call the “revolutionary spirit.”
For Arendt, council-style politics guarantees the political empowerment of a plurality of relational subjects and resolves the basic political dilemma. As a theoretical proposition, she even viewed it as a “system of governance that would overwhelm the traditional notion of state sovereignty” (Kohn, 2018: xiv; see also Martel, 2011: 143; Jennings, 2011). She rejected sovereignty, understood as “uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership,” because it was antithetical to human plurality (1998: 234). Here, Arendt associates it with the nation-state form, which she finds, like decolonial anthropology and any form of critical political anthropology, to oppose political being even if it might be a useful step in a liberation struggle. In a Euro-American trajectory, examples of council systems appear quickly, though infrequently, in moments of revolutionary fervor beginning in the late eighteenth century. The political assemblages formed at the beginning of the French Revolution (sociétés révolutionaires) and Jefferson's vision of a ward system (described below) bore uncanny resemblances to other revolutionary councils that emerged spontaneously during the 1848 revolutions, the 1871 Paris Commune, 1905 and 1917 soviets, and 1918 and 1919 rätesystem in Germany (Arendt, 1990: 249; see also Arendt, 2018: 133–134). Unfortunately, historians of revolutions, along with professional revolutionists like Lenin himself (Arendt, 1990: 257–58), would regard them as “temporary organs” in the revolutionary struggle rather than a genuinely new form of government constituted by people acting in concert (Arendt, 1990: 249). Although these councils would ultimately yield to party or state bureaucracies, Arendt saw them as the antidote to political apathy and to rule by a distanced elite.
Arendt lauded the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet-backed Communist rule as an example in her time of the quickness and spontaneity with which council politics appear, despite it lasting a mere 12 days. She stressed that leading activists well understood that the key question was not which freedoms should be demanded (assembly, speech, vote, etc.) but rather “how to stabilize a freedom that was already an accomplished fact, and to find the right political institution for it” (Arendt, 2018: 131). In her telling, what began as a student demonstration became an armed uprising within 24 hours due to the military's decision to ally with the students and arm the people. From then on, “no programs, points, or manifestoes played any role” since the people's demands were “so obvious to everyone that they hardly needed elaborate formulation” (Arendt, 2018). Revolutionary councils sprouted up in neighborhoods, cities, and counties, among writers and artists, students and youth, in the military, the civil service, and among the workers. These councils, in turn, formed coordinating committees and ultimately empaneled in a Supreme National Council as a counterpart to the national government and a National Revolutionary Committee to replace the parliament (Arendt, 2018: 138–139). The Red Army crushed the revolution before these two higher-level bodies could take action.
Arendt's (1990) most extensive analysis of council-style politics focused on the US Revolution. Following Montesquieu, she reasoned that state-level republics needed to be kept at a relatively small size so that citizens could be directly involved in public deliberations, and then be arranged in a federation that kept a balance of power among them (Arendt, 1990: 153–154). In contrast, the European model of the nation-state siphoned off power from lower-level divisions to the capital effectively generating tyranny out of sovereignty despite its revolutionary claims (Arendt, 1990: 152–153). The American model multiplied equivalent power centers in order to prevent any one of them from snuffing out another (1990: 150–154). Yet, even this arrangement proved insufficient as the republic's constituent states would usurp power from below to their own level. Arendt thus maintained that the spirit of the US Revolution died out in the decades following its birth because the new Constitution failed to incorporate townships, or wards, into the structure of government. This move, favored by Jefferson, would have precluded the state-level abrogation of lower-level power. Jefferson referred to these wards as “elementary republics” where the “voice of the whole people would be fairly, fully, and peacefully expressed, discussed, and decided by the common reason of all citizens” (Jefferson cited in Arendt, 1990: 250). For him, the incorporation of the wards would save the federal republic by salvaging the revolutionary spirit that originally inspired it (Arendt, 1990: 250–251). The wards were the local councils where people debated and acted upon decisions as matters of public affairs (Arendt, 1990: 251). Councils could then integrate that spirit into a governing structure with wards supporting counties, which support states, and which support the whole federal republic. Each higher level would be composed of deputies supported by the lower level (Arendt, 1990: 278). This bottom-up approach allows for leaders to emerge who inspire confidence through their integrity, courage, and judgment. That individual is not bound by anything except “the duty to justify this trust in his personal qualities…” (Arendt, 2018: 137). The entire structure, then, allows for a public arena where everyone could be free as equal but different constituent actors in the practice of government (Arendt, 1990: 278). To be sure, Arendt was not naïve about council systems’ chances of success. When asked about its long-term prospects, she replied “Very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all—in the wake of the next revolution” (Arendt, 1972: 233). This cryptic answer accurately reflects her view of the newness incumbent in political action—inextricably linked to the “rebirth” of persons through their relational encounters—in which the present results from the above-mentioned “infinite improbability” of historically contingent events that no one thought could happen … until they did (Arendt, 2006a: 168).
Arendt's description of the council systems in the early US example should not be read as a specific policy prescription for all cases (Roy, 2023), but rather as a version of a generic political formation that resolves the dilemma of securing a public space while preserving the revolutionary spirit of foundational change. Graeber distills further the essence of this resolution with respect to anarchist politics, which bears a striking resemblance to council-style politics. 7 Ideologies are crucially absent. Or, as Graeber (2002: 70) explains, anarchy “is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy.” What matters primarily is establishing a space of freedom where common interests can be decided and courses of action initiated. Instead of applying a formal theoretical doctrine, Graeber notes that anarchism features movements among three different poles: an attitude toward existing circumstances; a vision of how the world should be to rectify those circumstances; and a set of practices that ensure egalitarian procedures for moving in that direction (2009: 215; see also Feldman, 2024: 144). None of the three poles dominates the others. The vision of the world does not function as a transcendent ideology because people can change it when new circumstances prompt new visions emerging from egalitarian decision-making procedures. The practices themselves do not dominate the arrangement since daily life is not reduced to unreflexively maintaining social order through instrumental logic. Instead, attitudes toward daily life are re-assessed to produce a new vision and re-configure practices for the polity (Graeber, 2009: 216).
Council-style politics creates a space where actors experience an “authenticity of being,” a temporary but fulfilling state when engaged as constituent participants of a world in ways that resonate with their own ethics and joys (Moran, 2000: 239–40). Both Arendt and Graeber simply regard this experience as freedom. Hence, Graeber (2009: 433) remarked in his characteristically casual tone that “those who carry out direct action are insisting on their right to act as if they are already free.” Most anthropologists would balk at the word “free” given its liberal connotations. To be “free” in the context of council politics is not a matter of living without constraint as long as it does not impinge upon another's right to do the same, but rather to experience the fullness of one's being, however fleeting that experience might be. Crucially, that experience, in contrast to the liberal, individualist idea of freedom, only emerges in the company of others when constituting shared space on terms that those actors find mutually agreeable. It is only available to those who participate in council-style politics. The effect is nothing short of thrilling and is consistent with Graeber's (2002: 72) observation that “it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It is one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible.’ It is another to experience it, however momentarily.”
For Arendt, this freedom appears as public happiness, a long-forgotten goal of Enlightenment politics, where the pleasure of action itself is greater than any gains that might come of it. She notes Jefferson's correspondence with John Adams where he playfully writes that all he seeks in an afterlife is to keep meeting with his colleagues in Congress to debate the issues and win their approval for a job well done (Arendt, 1990: 131; see also endnote vi). Arendt makes the same observation with other examples, most artfully with the French Resistance poet Rene Char's description of such political experience as a “treasure” (2006a: 4). This metaphorical reference to hidden riches captured two aspects of Char's and his colleagues’ time in the resistance: that they found authentic versions of themselves, not because they resisted Nazi tyranny per se, but because they constituted a public space of freedom among themselves to organize their actions; and that what they achieved dissipated with the war's end because mainstream party politics could not incorporate their story, leaving it to vanish like an illusion in a fairy tale (see Arendt, 2006a: 3–6). These experiences of happiness are not instances of individualized self-satisfaction, but rather the joy of bequeathing to those who follow a space of freedom that would carry on after the actors’ death. As Arendt (1990: 175) puts it, “…the constituting, founding, and world-building capacities of man [sic] concern always not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our ‘successors,’ and ‘posterities.’”
Arendt's wide-ranging work on subjectivity allows us to comprehend synthetically how our interior selves and the public realm are inextricably linked through the faculties of thought, judgment, and action. This subjectivity involves different, singularly appearing entities who themselves are composed of inner pluralities engaging each other. The unpredictable possibilities emerging from their association, if conducted as equal and different actors, render “natality” as Arendt's ontological condition of politics: the capacity to introduce newness by virtue of being born into the world (1998: 247). Anthropologists have examined in scattered ways the elements that Arendt pulls together more comprehensively. On the one hand, Strathern's work on the dividual subject pioneered our understanding of subjectivity as neither ego-centric nor socio-centric, but rather as composed of inner pluralities that intertwine with each other, thus making transformation inherent to our shared existence. The political importance of this insight, however, remains insufficiently explored. On the other hand, political anthropology now recognizes action as a personally transformative experience, but more work is needed to explicate how the web of connections between relational subjects enables ongoing transformation through political action itself (Feldman, 2022: 329, 2024: 120). Arendt's work on subjectivity bridges the gap between these subdisciplines to show the interweaving of persons and their polity, of being a constituent actor in the world and an actor whom the world constitutes. The political form corresponding to human relationality is a council system as it resolves the basic dilemma of establishing a stable public space that nevertheless enables the revolutionary spirit to inaugurate foundational change.
Preserving the anti-racist core from racist tropes in Arendt's writing
The trickiest task in arguing for Arendt's relevance to contemporary anthropology is grappling with the anti-Black racism tarnishing certain areas of her work. How can one maintain that her non-liberal and non-socialist views of political subjectivity are an asset for anthropology when confronted with passages delivered in the rhetoric of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought? Leaving this issue unaddressed risks losing her synthetic understanding of relational politics to the charge that she regards the colonized as inferior to the colonizer, and thus the council-style politics she advocates, requiring equality among differences, could not transgress racialized lines. The racist tropes appearing in her Conradian analysis of imperialism in part II of Origins merit particular attention when addressing this question. 8 These work as a foil—intentionally or not—to demonstrate that the colonial oppressor's own loss of their political personae results from their oppression of the colonized and that this loss pre-conditioned totalitarianism in Europe. In brief, imperialism reduced everyone involved—colonizer and colonized—to animal laborans as described above in Arendt's tripartite vita activa, thereby eliminating the human capacity for action via relational subjectivity. Indeed, Arendt maintained that political action “is the absolute antithesis of totalitarian systems” (Crick, 2001: 100; see also Kohn, 2018: iii).
As Owens frames it (2017: 405–06), scholars in postcolonial studies, critical International Relations, political theory, and other disciplines disagree as to whether anti-Black racism compromises Arendt's oeuvre at a theoretical level (Allen, 2004; Bernasconi, 1996; Çubukçu, 2020; Gines, 2014; Klausen, 2010; Norton, 1995; Owens, 2017) or only draws attention away from that level, thus requiring proper contextualization (Benhabib, 2003: 78n48; Berkowitz, 2018; Bernstein, 2018; Gündoğdu, 2011; King, 2015: 165–66, 172–76; Villa, 2021: 55). The fact that the debate has not been resolved by depositing her work in an archive of mid-twentieth-century political thought is significant. A reason for its endurance might be that Arendt provided one of the first comprehensive arguments that systemic European racism in the African colonies pre-conditioned totalitarianism and the Holocaust in Europe, also known as colonialism's “boomerang effect.” This fact leads Grosse (2006: 36) to identify Origins as “one of the constitutive books of postcolonial studies…” Arendt well understood the destructive affinity between relentless European imperial expansion, capital accumulation, racism, and state sovereignty. Her writing after the publication of Origins, particularly in her theoretical work, seeks to undo the stranglehold that those four phenomena continue to hold on our political thinking and practice, a goal shared with today's decolonial anthropology.
Arendt insists that racism marks the beginning of the end of humanity. She derives this argument from an analysis of Leviathan, even though Hobbes himself does not speak of race. His rendition of state sovereignty, however, excludes as a matter of principle the idea of a common humanity protected by international law ([1951] 1994: 157). International relations become a lawless endeavor fought between state-based homogeneous populations as if they lived in Hobbes's pre-political state of nature, where singular entities are constantly engaged in acts of self-protection from and competition with others. Moreover, these populations homogenize themselves by agreeing to be ruled by a sovereign who “may reduce all [the people’s] wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will” (Hobbes, [1651] 1994: 109), the same reduction of human plurality that leads Arendt to disparage modern state sovereignty (1972: 229–233; 1990: 153, 244; 1998: 234). Hobbes, intentionally or not, provides the theoretical foundation for racist ideologies in the subsequent centuries, particularly polygenesis, in which each homogeneous population (read as race) is trapped in a struggle for survival against all others ([1951] 1994: 157; see also Mbembe, 2017: 58). From this point, she concludes that Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death. ([1951] 1994: 157)
For Arendt, two new “devices” emerged with imperialism that helped to destroy political life in Europe by the 1940s: race as a full-fledged ideological construct and unaccountable bureaucracy ([1951] 1994: 185). Both developed in response to the “scramble for Africa” initiated after the 1885 Berlin Conference. First, “race” became the “emergency explanation” for Europe's encounters with people “whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species” (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 185; see also Mbembe, 2017: 56). European colonizers absorbed this attitude, she argues, from the Boers (descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers), and recognized its utility in establishing their own exploitative relationship with peoples of southern Africa. Second, colonial bureaucracy enabled the “great game of expansion” in which every territorial possession was viewed as “an instrument for further conquest” (ibid: 186). It was conducted secretly by an overseas colonial elite and thus away from parliamentary supervision in the home country. In deadly combination, these devices enabled the slaughter of millions of Africans, regarded as “administrative massacres,” for the sake of territorial acquisition and geopolitical advantage against European rivals (ibid: 185–186). These devices returned to Europe in the forms of unaccountable party bureaucracies that would overtake the state's executive functions as fascist-cum-totalitarian trends accelerated in the 1920s and racially exclusive citizenship policies began in the 1910s. Those policies led to waves of denaturalization of national minorities in European countries during World War I and into the 1940s.
However, while she deployed a razor-sharp critique of European imperialism, her depictions of the colonized often lapsed into Euro-centric distinctions between “civilized” and “savage” (Klausen, 2010; Said, 1994: xvii-xviii). For example, she saw Australia and the Americas as spaces where people had not distinguished themselves from nature and thus had not created a culture and history of their own (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 186). She also describes Indigenous African peoples as “living without the future of a purpose or the past of an accomplishment” (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 190). In describing the relationship in southern Africa between the Boers and enslaved Bantu-speaking peoples, she remarks that “The natives, at any rate, recognized them as a form of tribal leadership, a kind of natural deity to which one has to submit…” (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 193). These are jarring descriptions especially given that Arendt critiques racism as fundamentally opposed to humanity but then incorporates it into her own writing (Gines, 2014: 86).
We should address these descriptions squarely rather than dismiss them as the unfortunate prejudices of mid-twentieth-century European society. The question arises as to the work these misrepresentations are doing to advance her argument that imperialism abroad helped prepare the ground for totalitarianism at home. For her, again, totalitarianism was the antithesis of the relational politics advocated here for anthropology. Recall that Arendt distinguishes the human qua political actor, through which we mutually recognize each other as distinct and equal beings while we constitute public space, from the human qua laboring entity (animal laborans), through which we collectively meet the needs of biological-cum-social reproduction. This latter activity only depends upon an “animalized,” interchangeable, and faceless version of ourselves. As political persons, we are all different; as laboring persons, we are all the same as we metabolize with nature's own cycles to guarantee our sheer biological survival. 9 For Arendt, these dimensions of human existence are neither mutually exclusive nor signify different evolutionary phases. However, they do present us with a basic conundrum that directly parallels the political dilemma discussed in the previous section: how to collectively meet our biological needs for reproduction through our integration with nature without dissolving the political world in which we mutually constitute ourselves as a plurality of unique actors. 10
In this vein, Arendt does not link the African's alleged lack of a political life to skin color, but rather to their having “treated nature as their undisputed master” ([1951] 1994: 192). She argued neither that Indigenous peoples could not create a culture and history nor that they needed colonialism to help them do so. Her point, instead, is that living solely within the confines of nature's own circular rhythms exemplifies either a “prehistoric” existence in which a polity has not yet been built or a “posthistoric” catastrophe that ended the polity (“civilization” in her parlance) and returned its inhabitants to a fully natural-cum-laboring existence (Arendt, [1951] 1994). In both cases, “history” has been vacated from public life, and, with it, the opportunity to inaugurate unprecedented action inspired by the revolutionary spirit. History is the effect of political action, which moves time in new directions, while, in contrast, an existence premised upon our laboring capacity only leaves us trapped in the circular time of nature's rhythms. For Arendt, the absence of “history” reflects the absence of people engaging in the full vita activa, inclusive of our political, pluralist dimension.
Arendt's gross misrepresentations of the Bantu as mere laboring beings unseparated from nature's own cycles serve the purpose of showing how Europeans likewise (and with greater factual accuracy) reduced themselves to animal laborans as they thoughtlessly pursued imperial-capitalist expansion. Accumulation for accumulation's sake—whether perpetrated by the actual laborer, the manager, or the investor—renders all involved replaceable parts in endless cycles of production and consumption, a process made even more intense by feeding nature's energies into the unnatural powers of industrialization. The circular process begins with the Boers who abandoned “civilization” when they trekked into the southern African interior to live hedonistically off enslaved labor (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 191–194). It escalates enormously when the European imperial enterprise reduced the colonizers themselves to atomized beings focused only on land acquisition, resource extraction, and labor exploitation, greatly achieved through administrative massacres (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 185–186). Imperialism created a vast space of violence premised fully upon the laboring capacity of now faceless colonizers and colonized alike. People reduced to their biological capacity for labor, according to Arendt, are particularly vulnerable to racism along with the affiliated horrors of exploitation, neglect, or extermination because they are not seen as a human plurality but as animals, i.e., animal laborans ([1951] 1994: 197). This sad effect will return to Europe from the colonies. Here, she echoes Césaire's well-known argument that the colonizer who insists on “seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (Césaire, [1955] 2000: 41, original italics; see also Mbembe, 2017: 106). In this context, Dana Villa (2021: 55, original italics) correctly explains that throughout Origins, though she fails to recognize the contributions, creativity, and diversity of the colonized, “Arendt's critical focus is on the effect of the role played by the naturalizing gaze of the oppressors” … and “that European politics and culture … [repudiated] … the Enlightenment idea of a universal humanity and … [rejected] … shared responsibility for creating and preserving a human and humane world.”
Indeed, central to Arendt's entire oeuvre is the ease with which people of any backgrounds can lose their political personae in modern conditions through reduction to our laboring dimension. This broader frame allows us to understand how, along with the Boers and the Bantu-speakers, Arendt saw post-WWI stateless peoples and the survivors of Nazi concentration camps as living in states of nature, by which she means without the protection of a political artifice that differentiates them from the cyclical processes of maintaining bare life, that guarantees equality of difference, and that enables them to take political action of their own (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 194 and 299–302, respectively). Similarly, the entirety of The Human Condition, published seven years after Origins, warns us that the primacy of industrialization absorbs and decimates the public sphere because it amplifies exponentially the repetitive cycles of production and consumption that confine us to our natural laboring dimension (Villa, 2021: 54). Arendt's main worry was that modernity as we know it demands this reduction of us, or, in her own outdated parlance, “that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages” (Arendt, [1951] 1994: 302).
Arendt's core ethical argument about racism remains: that it annihilates humanity precisely because it destroys plurality, which, again, is the fundamental condition for being fully human as relational subjects (Arendt, 1998: 7). She applies that argument in a shift to mid-twentieth century Europe when she issued a stunning judgment against Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi's officer responsible for the Jewish deportations, that differed from the District of Court of Jerusalem where he was convicted in 1961 (2006b: 279)
11
: …just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations … we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
The violence of racism is firstly epistemic as it compels us to deny the fact of relationality among all people, thereby rendering those in weaker power positions as objects to be used. It obscures the ways that people mutually compose each other and their polities by insisting on discrete borders between racialized subjects. Fanon himself sees a direct link between bounded subjectivity and racism. Hence, in Wretched of the Earth, he bluntly argues that the superstructure of Western values needs to be destroyed, and that “first among [those values] is individualism,” the very foundation of Western political-economic order (2004: 11). He adds that the colonial bourgeoisie “hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his own subjectivity” (2004: 11). In Black Skin, White Masks, he insists that we destroy this “massive psycho-existential complex” for the sake of his “brother, black or white” ([1952] 2008: xvi). From here, sensing human relationality, Fanon ([1952] 2008) almost naively asks “Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Unexpectedly, his openness seems to prompt a direct reply from Arendt whom many see as his antagonist after her 1970 publication of On Violence where she disagrees with him on the role of violence in political action. 12 She writes in her posthumously published Life of the Mind that “whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched” (1978: 29; see also Feldman, 2024: 88). Fanon and Arendt alike seek an ontological understanding of politics that accounts for equality, difference, openness, and relationality.
Beginning with Hobbes, Western political philosophy, along with state practice, normalized the idea of a world composed of exclusive demographic groups ungoverned by international law. These groups would create racialized categories that would be arranged hierarchically through colonialism, resulting in the dehumanization of everyone regardless of their position in the global power hierarchy, as Arendt well understood. The evolutionary tropes she relies upon to make this case are unfortunate to say the least, but she ultimately strives to convince us that a political world based upon the equality of difference—that is, based on relational subjectivity—is not given to humanity by nature. Instead, people must deliberately institutionalize arrangements that secure such a polity, one that both stabilizes daily life and and allows people to reconstitute it when the revolutionary spirit takes hold.
Conclusion
Anthropology's effort to identify a non-bounded, non-liberal subject strikes at the core of the discipline's commitments to those seeking liberation from the limits of modern Western hegemony. We should not be coy in declaring what we might offer people worldwide whose array of struggles provide our professional sustenance, thus placing us in their debt. We should be clear that we seek to articulate an ontology of relational subjectivity that finds a variety of expressions, partial or whole, in ethnographic cases separated by time and distance. Relational subjectivity, neither ego-centric nor socio-centric, does not pit self-interest against the public good, but ties the actor's want of distinction to their care of public space. Arendt gives us a synthetic view of it that weaves together anthropological subdisciplines that have been moving toward each other for some time. On the one hand, the anthropology of personhood, along with existential-phenomenological anthropology, articulates a subject whose being is inextricably linked to others creating Strathern's “social microcosm” inside the person. This complex arrangement enables the subject to transform itself while initiating new changes. However, the subject's dependence upon joint political action for its full realization remains underdeveloped in this formulation. On the other hand, political anthropology now recognizes that action itself, when organized upon the equality of difference, transforms the actor and the polity it shares with others, but it has left the actor's interiority and the modality of its relations to others largely unexamined.
To pull together these convergent anthropological directions, we can utilize Arendt's identification of thinking and judgment as key modalities that render each subject both distinct and inherently related to others. Thought is composed by the multiple voices inside the subject that arise from its engagement with others, thus splitting apart the erstwhile singular subject until it makes a judgment about what it must do to reach agreement with itself about how it lives with others. That judgment, if others find it persuasive, leads to joint action through which a plurality of actors reconstitute themselves as they reconstitute the shared space between them. Their mixed and fluid composition is precisely what creates the sovereign possibility of inaugurating new foundations and new directions through political action (Feldman, 2022, 2024). A certain political form is needed to generate this effect. For Arendt, council systems, understood generically, describe such a place where deliberations and actions reconstitute both the actor and the space they share with others. They resolve the key political dilemma of creating a stable foundation that nevertheless enables the revolutionary spirit to carry on.
This quest to articulate relational subjectivity sits at the heart of the discipline's decolonial project as well. As Jobson (2020: 267) puts it, “anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject” and remain true to that cause. Though Arendt's view of that subjectivity is motivated by struggles grounded in specifically Western political experience, it nevertheless corresponds to the struggles of those resisting the global hegemony of Western modernity anywhere. Both seek an understanding of the political outside the narrow confines of the Western political tradition. Arendt knew that the state-capital nexus demands our depoliticization and serves as a necessary condition for racism and totalitarianism. She sought to think past these disasters by means of Western knowledge and practice marginalized by the disciplining effects of Western political tradition. Likewise, scholars and activists of anti-racism draw upon epistemologies and practices pushed into the margins of global liberal hegemony in their resistance to centuries of that same tradition. Arendt's work is much too generative on these matters for any critical discipline to ignore. Where her unfortunate prejudices make their appearance, we can use her own insights to dissipate them, that is, to use Arendt against Arendt. An enhanced political imagination demands that we do so.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
