Abstract
Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them.
Riots in the ghettos and rebellions on the campuses make “people feel they are acting together in a way they rarely can.” We do not know if these occurrences are the beginning of something new … or the death pangs of a faculty mankind is about to lose. (Arendt, 1970: 83–84)
Perceptive readers of Arendt have argued that her distinction between the social and the political failed, at best, to grasp the complexity of racial politics in the 1960s, and, at worst, mystified the foundational role of racism in US politics from its inception (Belle, 2014; Bernasconi, 1996; Norton, 1995; Owens, 2017). Discussions about Arendt’s concept of the social in this context typically concern the stark gap between her distinction and the reality it is supposed to illuminate. Is the gap so great, the distinction so rigid, that the latter is unworkable? Or can it be narrowed by making the distinction more malleable? In turn, the problem posed by essays such as “Little Rock” (Arendt, 2003) is the link between her infamous remarks on desegregation and Black Power and her more general political theory. These debates thus prioritize two questions. First, is Arendt’s distinction more malleable or flexible than it appears in her reflections on racial politics in the 1960s, such that it can be usefully retained? This question is typically answered by way of a second: what is the relation between the ‘abuse’ of the distinction in essays like “Little Rock” and its use in Arendt’s oeuvre as a whole?
This article argues for a shift away from these questions. Regarding the first, I argue that at issue in Arendt’s misrecognition of, for example, school desegregation as strictly social is not merely a gap between a rigid distinction and a complex and ambiguous world, but the question of how to manage what Arendt herself argues is an inevitable gap between concepts and political life. The problem is not merely that the concept is inadequate but that Arendt insists on the failure of the world to live up to it. At stake is a failure to live up to the task of political theory as Arendt (1998 [1958]: 5) defines it: to begin on the basis of our “newest experiences,” and therefore to “think what we are doing.” As Lefort (1988: 47) argues, this practice of “beginning on the basis of events” results in a “constant tension between the desire to elaborate a theory and a wish to remain free to react to events.” The terrain therefore needs to be shifted from the question of just how wide the gap is between concepts in the world, towards the question of how this tension is managed.
This necessitates thematizing the gap between concept and world as itself a terrain of political and practical intervention. This would be a critical rather than categorical distinction between the social and the political. Arendt, and her interpreters, typically distinguish the social and the political categorically. That is, she tells us which events, issues, and movements are political, and which are social. The distinction stands or falls, here, on whether its categorization adequately comprehends these events, issues, and movements. A critical distinction between the social and political begins from the premise that such moves of categorization are interventions in the events they describe. This distinction offers an analysis of how political phenomena are reread as social and vice-versa; in other words, how a description of things as ‘social’ becomes more or less real through practical interventions.
A distinction between the social and the political thus remains useful, not because it can adequately categorize events as social and political, but as part of a critical vocabulary for describing the ways in which political insurgency is converted into social behaviour. I call this process of conversion the counterinsurgent logic of the social. This names processes that recast political revolt as social disorder remediable only by the very political order it opposes and puts into question. Counterinsurgent logics of the social short-circuit political insurgency by imposing the object of its critique and action as an incontestable background of social disorder and re-ordering. I theorize this counterinsurgent logic by drawing on two key sources: Patricia Owens’s re-reading of the ‘rise of the social’ as inseparable from the management of rebellion, and Subaltern Studies scholar Ranajit Guha’s analysis of the ‘prose of counterinsurgency.’
Why not simply return to the Arendtian archive? Her work might also offer a similar analysis. After all, in her writing about the social she offers a vocabulary for the neutralization of the eventfulness of politics—the reduction of “action” to predictable and controllable (even if ‘disordered’) “behaviour.” In thinking about the fate of politics in an age of “world-alienation,” Arendt (1998 [1958]: 248–257) offers resources for contesting the “displacement of politics” in apparently “post-political” times (Honig, 1993; Mouffe, 2005). In one recent attempt to “read Arendt against Arendt,” Gündogdu (2015: 66) rightly notes that the question should be not “what is political and what is not political but instead what hinders politicization of an issue in any given context.”
One reason, crucially, is to shift the conversation away from the second question flagged above, the question of the coherence of Arendt’s thought as a whole—saving or burying Arendt—to situating her in two ways. First, she is one (potentially minor) figure in wider conversations about the matter as such: the distinction between the social and the political. I foreground this by putting her in conversation with Guha. Second, her writings are part of a wider context of debate about antiracist rebellion in the 1960s. This article therefore situates Arendt’s distinction between the social and the political alongside writers in Black liberation movements, who were thinking seriously about both the reduction of politics to behaviour and, crucially, the question of how insurgency might move past ‘social’ limits. These contacts are obscured by Arendt’s (1970: 19, 80) dismissal of what she called Black Power movements’ “silly demands.”
I examine the consequences of diverging evaluations of ‘the social’ through a distinction between rebellion and revolution common to Arendt and the Black revolutionaries she dismissed. For example, Harold Cruse (2009: 101) argued that rebellion is primarily rejection and protest, whereas revolution is a constructive projection of “programmatic ideas” that concern “structural arrangements” of collective life. Further, like Arendt, Cruse (2005: 360–361) argued that the task was to locate “institutionalisms” capable of converting rebellion into revolution. Detroit radicals James and Grace Lee Boggs, likewise, insisted on the need to distinguish between rebellion and revolution. The central point of divergence, here, was that Arendt portrays the social as a barrier between rebellion and revolution (or, at least, something that corrupts the latter), while these revolutionary thinkers engaging with the rebellions of the 1960s saw ‘the social’ as an expansion of politics.
By seeing the social as a hinge connecting rebellion to revolution, the Boggses take up a line of thought similar to Arendt’s. Indeed, as in her On Revolution, they distinguished negative liberation from the practice of building spaces of freedom. Their critical understanding of the social and political, however, highlights the necessity of practically intervening to make descriptions of political revolt as social less accurate by building rebellion into revolution. They thus avoid a pitfall of Arendt’s categorical distinction: the placement of social insurgency in a trap of social determination, where any attempt to escape appears as an invasion of the political rather than an expansion of its ambit. They do so by seeing in 1960s urban rebellions a revolutionary subject premised on the intensifying contradiction Arendt naturalizes and neutralizes: the foundation of ‘the political’ on Black subjugation in the US. They thus offer better resources for working against the counterinsurgent logic of the social, which is the aim of a critical distinction between the social and the political.
I proceed as follows. The first section does the legwork of shifting the conversation away from questions about Arendt to questions about the social and political, showing that recovering a flexible distinction in Arendt’s work does not remedy the problems posed by her remarks in “Little Rock.” The second section unpacks my account of the counterinsurgent logic of the social. Finally, I contextualize Arendt in debates about 1960s rebellion to show how a critical distinction offers better resources for pushing against the social limits of rebellion and the counterinsurgent logic of the social.
The reluctant integrationist: “Little Rock” and the social in Arendt Studies
Arendt’s interpreters often note that in her interventions into 1960s US racial politics, especially “Reflections on Little Rock” (Arendt, 2003), her distinction between the social and the political served to depoliticize rather than politicize. Mobilizing a distinction between the “political realm” in which discrimination threatens equal freedom, and a “social realm” in which discrimination is part of a legitimate practice of free association, she maps certain forms of antiracist struggle as political and others as social. This boundary marks out appropriate avenues of antiracist politics. The properly political locales for desegregation are places where it is “inhuman” and “conspicuous” such as the “railroad car or station,” “hotels,” and “restaurants in business districts.” Significantly, Arendt says that while these are “not strictly in the political realm,” they are nonetheless located “in the public domain where all men are equal” (Arendt, 2003: 207). These places sit ambiguously between the political and social, but Arendt maps them as ‘political.’
Public school is similarly ambiguous. It mediates private and public life, readying people for a “second birth” into political citizenship. However, Arendt (2003: 212) maps it as unambiguously social: “school … this public world is not political but social.” The use of this ‘social’ sphere to accomplish ‘political’ ends reduces politics to “social climbing.” In turn, this politicization of social, appearing as “forced integration” to Arendt, deprives parents of their “right over their children and the social right of free association” (Arendt, 2003: 212). Whereas fights against legal and political discrimination were needed to protect political equality and plurality, she writes, it is unwise “to begin enforcement of civil rights in a domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake, and where other rights – social and private … can be easily hurt” (Arendt, 2003: 213). The social here has its rights, its proper activities, threatened by their ‘politicization,’ for Arendt.
In turn, Arendt reads school desegregation as an incursion of the social into the political, where “social climbing” is used to accomplish political equality (Arendt, 2003: 213). While her analysis of the “pariah” seeking “legally gained rights” might have informed her analysis, she instead reads Black parents as “parvenus” seeking “upward social mobility” (Belle, 2014: 9, 23). School desegregation exceeds the appropriate boundaries of political resistance, she argues, because “not discrimination and social segregation … but racial legislation constitutes the perpetuation of the original crime in this country’s history” (Arendt, 2003: 197, 202). Locke argues that Arendt fails to see school segregation as the institutionalization of political and legal racial domination, a legally protected form of white social climbing (Locke, 2013: 543–549). Arendt misrecognizes this political enforcement of inequality as a natural, largely innocent development: “like attracts like” (Arendt, 2003: 205). This depoliticization and naturalization of racial inequality is especially evident in her proposal for more gradual desegregation, in which Black students would be “acceptable to white schools” only if they had exceptional records, a proposal that both admits the empirical inequality in education and presumes the intellectual inferiority of Black students (Arendt, 2003: 194; Belle, 2014: 23). This hints that Arendt’s distinction “is at the heart of her failure to address adequately the ‘racial issue’ in the United States” (Bernasconi, 1996: 4).
Even interpreters who see Arendt’s practice of drawing distinctions as generally productive see “Little Rock” as a place where this method imposed concepts on the world rather than illuminating it (Lane, 1997). Benhabib (2003: 146) argues, for example, that the social/political distinction “seriously misled” Arendt here because Arendt uses of the social and political as “content-domains,” what I am calling a ‘categorical’ understanding of the distinction (Benhabib, 2003: 156–157). This is one site where Arendt’s concepts risk being turned from generative moves of thought into “banisters … abstractions that are imposed on events” (Disch, 1996: 144). As Çubukçu (2020) argues, Arendt’s misunderstanding of antiracist politics in “the rebellious 1960s” obscures the changing shapes of antiracist insurgency and its relation to the law, fixing them in specific forms captured by her conceptual distinctions.
This remains a concern in discussions of Arendt’s reflections on race in the US. 1 Belle (2014: 48) argues that Arendt’s misunderstandings of racial politics in the US follow from “Arendt’s attempt to impose her theoretical framework, which rigidly divides the public, the private, and the social, onto situations which are at once all three or at least more complex than this rigid framework will allow.” In Arendtian terms, it is a failure to “understand” in the sense of “an unending activity by which, in constant change in variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality” (Arendt, 1994a: 308).
Those on “theoretical salvage projects” (Lane, 1997) aim, however, to stretch the social/political distinction Arendt employed in the context of the 1960s. These readings highlight a double trajectory towards the “cautionary” and “constructive,” the rigid and fluid, in Arendtian distinctions (Berger, 2009). Markell (2011: 15–44) argues that while the social/political distinction might be an instance of Arendtian “boundary-setting,” the ambiguity and mobility of the concept hint at a more mobile rather than “territorial” understanding of conceptual distinctions. Duran (2009: 610), similarly, insists that even “Little Rock” gives grounds for an immanent critique, not least in Arendt’s admission of “fluid” spaces located between the social and the political. Palazzi examines how her work on judgment might have grounded a different analysis that of “Little Rock” (Palazzi, 2017). Writers in this literature aim to locate a flexible Arendtian distinction between the social and the political by showing the flexibility in Arendt’s thinking as a whole. Bernstein (1986: 117), here, argues that often with Arendt the “straightforward and sharp is much more ambiguous, ambivalent, and internally contradictory.” In turn, Hyvönen (2014: 580) suggests that Arendt’s “essayistic” deployment of concepts allows us to see her concept of the social as a “tentative, experimental concept.”
The question, however, is: experiments in what? While the concept is employed in various and flexible ways, here Arendt employed it specifically to outline the limits of acceptably ‘political’ forms of antiracist insurgency. This is especially clear given that in this context the social appears not only as a threat, but as a sphere that shelters certain practical activities and freedoms. We therefore might see this rigid, unproductive appearance of the social/political distinction as a perverse product of this ‘flexible’ and ‘experimental’ character of Arendtian distinctions. Therefore, the attempt to soften or extend her distinction is not enough.
Arendt did not merely misrecognize the world, but enforced that misrecognition by imposing her distinction on the world. Arendt “never changed her view” (Lane, 1997: 148) about school desegregation. What change she did take up was not on the question of segregation or the role of racial domination in the US as such but on the issue of democratic “sacrifice” that Ellison raised in objection to “Little Rock” (Allen, 2001; Belle, 2014: 22; Steele, 2002). While she noted her failure to grasp “the complexities of the situation,” she did not shift her conceptual distinction in a fundamental way here, even if the social was an otherwise “experimental” concept elsewhere. Arendt is not merely misunderstanding a situation but insisting on the failure of that situation to live up to her conceptual distinction (Burroughs, 2015). In “Little Rock,” she was not merely categorizing various forms of struggles for desegregation (political/legal vs. social) but intervening in a practical and public discussion about the future of desegregation. Indeed, she hopes to slow its pace. 2 This, and her problematic missed engagement with her critics, hint that “Little Rock” and ‘the social’ present a set of problems explicable not through a return to the Arendtian archive, but by situating Arendt’s reflections on Little Rock as interventions in debates about 1960s rebellion, and her distinction between the social and political among alternative accounts of ‘the social’ such as those examined in the next section.
The counterinsurgent logic of the social
What is needed is an account of the social/political distinction not as a set of concepts that are more or less accurate categorizations of practical life, but as a distinction that discursively intervenes in struggle, as a prose of insurgency or counterinsurgency. Such an account would highlight how this distinction can be made more or less ‘accurate’ through practical intervention—through politicization or depoliticization. This section takes up Patricia Owens’s alternative account of the historical rise of the social as a set of techniques for managing worker and anticolonial insurgency, and Ranajit Guha’s essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” to theorize a counterinsurgent logic of the social. Guha’s analysis implies that the critique of the social cannot be a matter of making concepts better represent the world. The difficulty is that the activity of explaining and categorizing revolt is inevitably an intervention in it: “distortion … is built into its optics” (Guha, 1988: 77). Or, as James and Grace Lee Boggs (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 193–194), discussed in the next section, argue, “how you name something is in itself an action.” This makes for a shift from categorizing insurgency as social or political and towards mapping the paths from one to the other.
This extends a thread already present in Arendt’s thinking: “the social” as the blockage of the new through the conversion of free action into manipulable “behaviour.” Arendt’s worry about the social concerns, as Richard H King (2011: 33) argues, “a shift … from participatory freedom to political and historical necessity.” “The social” describes the processes (and theories) that threaten to enact this shift. Broadly speaking, Arendt’s argument is that the fragile boundaries of the public sphere and the ephemeral character of political action are increasingly consumed by the automaticity and necessity of the economic. Arendt portrays this as the consumption of political life by the cyclical, biological, and ultimately economic logic of labour. This “relatively new” shift tracks the development of a “national economy,” in which the public sphere of collective action and deliberation is recast as “a family … taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping” (Arendt,1998 [1958]: 28). The unpredictability of action is sidelined by a reduction of practical life to what is predictable: behaviour rooted in biological need. This reduction enables a form of household rule in which subjects are socially manipulated rather than politically persuaded. This, taken as a whole, represents the social’s “irresistible tendency to grow, to devour realms of the political and the private” through the “substitution of behaviour for action” (Arendt,1998 [1958]: 45).
Arendt’s theory of ‘the social’ offers a vocabulary for thinking about depoliticization: the reduction of the novelty of action, as the miraculous interruption of regularity, to the expected, the predictable, the controllable. Arendt charts this replacement in the rise to publicity of issues and concerns that might properly be considered economic and private. When this happens, politics as deliberation risks being replaced by the search for the best ‘solutions’ to apparently technical problems. This is bad not least because it produces a kind of ruling-over rather than ruling-with. Politics becomes the management of misbehaviour. The latter might be ‘free’ in the sense of free will, but in statistically calculable ways. This deviation becomes, indeed, a central pivot of household governance or social rule. It is a locus for, as Hanna Pitkin (1998: 14) argues, “making us behave, as an irritated parent might.”
This account, however, does not describe the conversion of ‘political’ things to ‘social’ ones. It remains a categorical distinction that charts the rise of distinctly social or economic relations at the expense of political ones. In On Revolution, for example, the rise of poverty as the focus of popular insurgency threatens to recast the freedom and plurality of action as the expression of biological(-cum-historical) need. It is the rise to politics of a population who were not free “because they are driven by daily needs” (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 38). Arendt famously argued that the American Revolution succeeded because it avoided the “question” of poverty and misery as issues despite their presence as facts. The French Revolution, however, made the public social when it “opened the gates of the political realm to the poor”: It was overwhelmed by the cares and worries which actually belonged in the sphere of the household, and which … could not be solved by political means, since they were matters of administration, to be put into the hands of experts, rather than issues which could be settled by the twofold process of deliberation and persuasion. (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 81)
While her categorical distinction between the social and the political charts the rise of properly private or social problems as public issues, it serves to divide and name specific struggles as social or political. What she does not chart is the conversion of social insurgencies into political ones and vice-versa. This diverts analysis away from the question of how categorizations of events and struggles as social or political are made more (or less) accurate precisely through ‘administration.’ Arendt does hint at this latter point when discussing social science in The Human Condition. She argues that “Economics … could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behaviour” (Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 42). Similarly, in On Revolution, she writes that social revolution becomes increasingly susceptible to logics of historical necessity as it begins actually operating on measurable and predictable forces of biological necessity (e.g. hunger) (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 51–54). She hints here how the gap between concept and reality is closed when categorizations are made accurate in practice.
Patricia Owens expands this analysis in her contextualization of the ‘rise of the social’ in the history of counterinsurgency. She claims that theories of the social emerged in the 19th century as tools, intellectual and practical, for containing the growing insurgency among workers and the colonized: “the historical context for distinctly social thought … was the problem of populations in revolt” (Owens, 2015: 10). Whereas in Arendt’s account the social is ascribed to those who revolt—those undertaking social kinds of struggle—Owens reads the social as a vocabulary responding to novel and ambiguous forms of revolt by categorizing them as social.
On this reading, the social offers a language for neutralizing the contradictions in political orders structured by domination. That is, if capitalism presents us with the spectre of conflict between workers and capitalists, or colonialism between colonized and colonizer, these conflicts are absorbed and deferred through the construction of a politically neutral and unifying ‘social’ background. This latter, in turn, works to explain the causes and sources of revolts as problems resolvable only within the very political order structured by them. The social considered on this level, Owen argues, is not something “discovered” in the world but a postulation of a social ‘whole’ or background that works to contain revolt conceptually in order to service its practical containment (Owens, 2015: 135).
For Owens, this context discloses the connection between the social as the neutralization of action’s novelty, and ruling-over, or administrative rule. The categorization of struggles as social renders them amenable to the latter. The transformation of action into behaviour converts political revolt—aimed at the structures of domination and contradictions of a given order—into social disorder ineluctably within that order. In this move, “revolt from below” is read as misbehaviour in need of “management … administered from above” (Owens, 2015: 16). Owens’ account suggests that the social, as a conceptual and political language, emerges in relation to questions of “how to rule over – depoliticize – populations” (Owens, 2015: 87). Arendt’s misrecognition of Black struggles over equal education can be read, therefore, as an iteration of this logic that rereads political insurgency as merely social.
This re-orientation of the historical ‘rise of the social’ points to a counterinsurgent logic of the social: the imposition of an interpretation of insurgency as social disorder or misbehaviour rather than political revolt. The language of social causation and behaviour was useful for remedying “popular uprising” (Owens, 2015: 10, 135). Re-interpreting revolt primarily in terms of its proximate causes while leaving the background order intact directed attention away from the transformation of wider political arrangements while positing revolt as a ‘disorder’ in need of control. In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall et al. (1982: 166) observe: To find an explanation for a troubling event, especially an event which threatens to undermine the very fabric of society, is of course the beginnings of a sort of ‘control’ … to give shocking and random events ‘meaning’ is to draw them once again into the framework of the rational order of ‘things understood’ – things we can work on, do something about, handle, manage.
Distinguishing the social and political remains useful here for conceptualizing this redescription and administration of revolt as social disorder. In Ranajit Guha’s analysis of colonial discourses about peasant revolt in India, he criticizes the reduction of revolt to a pure, almost automatic reaction to immediate context. This reduction occludes the risks involved in even the most minor revolt, which imply that it could not be “spontaneous and unpremeditated”: such revolt involved upending the “signs which he [the rebel] had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a meaning out of a harsh world” (Guha, 1988: 45). Guha argues, however, that the prose of counterinsurgency works not merely by saying rebellion is irrational and senseless but by claiming to know and manipulate its causes.
For Guha, the prose of counterinsurgency recasts subjects of revolt from an “entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis of rebellion” into patterns of behaviour. Paralleling Arendt’s (2006 [1963]) worry that the world of politics is increasingly described in terms of natural disasters, Guha (1988: 46) argues that revolt is reconceived as a quasi-natural phenomenon knowable through “natural history.” In this natural history, the political aims and claims of insurgents are sidelined for the “explanation” of their acts through “an enumeration of causes … triggering off rebellion as a sort of reflex action …” (Guha, 1988: 47). This is nothing other than what Arendt saw as the replacement of action with social (mis)behaviour, political judgment with social administration. The latter is epitomized in the search for causes rather than reasons or aims: “Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason” (Guha, 1988: 47). Revolt’s placement in proximate causes severed from the political structures they contest diverts concern from their character as a nascent political critique and project.
This description is linked to counterinsurgent practice, which makes this misreading of politics as social real through the transitive imposition of social management as the answer to revolt. This follows from the linkage between cause and control: to know the cause of a phenomenon is already a step taken in the direction of controlling it. To investigate and thereby understand the cause of rural disturbance is an aid to measures ‘deemed expedient to prevent the recurrence of similar disorders.’ (Guha, 1988: 74)
A central mechanism of this prose of counterinsurgency is the postulation of an overall whole as the uncontestable ‘administrative’ background for these “disorders.” As Guha notes, revolt and the immediate reaction of colonial power (police, military, and carceral) leave little room for “neutrality.” The insurgent rebel and counterinsurgent agent of colonial power stand in an “irreducible” “antagonism” (Guha, 1988: 59). The prose of counterinsurgency, while it reads rebellion in terms of its proximate causes—rather than political aims—nonetheless claims to resituate these proximate causes in a wider “meaningful whole,” historical and social, that inserts revolt into an “axis of historical continuity between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’” (Guha, 1988: 66). The prose of counterinsurgency therefore attempts to displace the antagonism opened by revolt to the past through a leap towards a “realm of neutrality … where the Aorist presides” (Guha, 1988: 53). By claiming to sit outside the wider whole in which events happen, the prose of counterinsurgency claims to understand and control them.
This claim to neutrality is undercut by the fact that it is premised on a move connecting the proximate causes and consequences of revolt to a history and a social whole. In Guha’s essay, this whole was the British Raj, whereas in Arendt’s it is an “America” growing, as the Kerner Report remarked, more separate and unequal. While revolt cracks open the political question of what this whole is and what it might be, the counterinsurgent logic of the social refigures it as irrevocably internal to the order it works against. The Kerner Commission read rebellions that put into question the direction and shape of the country as a whole as disorders deviating from an otherwise progressive course. Guha, in sum, argues that a double move reduces political insurgency to its proximate causes and resituates it as disorder within an inevitable and incontestable social background. This serves to “register the event [of revolt] as a datum in the life-story of the Empire,” obscuring that “consciousness which is called insurgency” (Guha, 1988: 59).
In Guha’s account, the redescription of revolt in social terms (as Arendt understands them) is a counterinsurgent act, aimed at reworking one side in a political antagonism (the colonial order) as the inevitable context of revolt and any response to it. The regime that is at stake in revolt becomes the sole subject of “politics.” This has the additional consequence of limiting responses to revolt to technical solutions administered by the regime. Revolt’s solutions appear as the prevention of their future occurrence emanating from the very order that provokes it, and at whose destruction or transformation revolt aims. Arendt herself enacts this logic in her response to antiracist insurgency in the 1960s by naming certain forms of rebellion as social and therefore incapable of transformation into ‘revolution.’ In turn, her contemporaries in Black liberation movements pointed precisely towards the task of turning ‘social’ rebellion into ‘political’ revolution.
Thinking against the social limits of rebellion in the 1960s
As previously noted, debates about the social in “Little Rock” typically revolve around the role of this essay in the whole of Arendt’s corpus and her theorization of the social in The Human Condition and On Revolution. A critical social/political distinction, concerned with the gap between concept and world, re-situates Arendt as one intervention among others in her own moment. “Little Rock” is best read from the Arendtian archive’s exterior: as one minor but instructive intervention in densely populated debates about the possibility and limits of antiracist insurgency in the 1960s US. 3 I do so mainly through an examination of James and Grace Lee Boggs’s writing contemporary to Arendt’s. This is partly because their concerns often parallel Arendt’s: they are concerned with problems of totalitarianism in the 20th century, with the increasing replacement of politics with economics, and the need to rethink the concept of work. Indeed, they cite Arendt approvingly on this last point (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 232–233).
The key point of comparison here is the distinction between rebellion and revolution. Arendt’s and the Boggses’ diverging mobilization of this distinction foregrounds the distinct implications of a ‘categorical’ as opposed to ‘critical’ distinction between the social and political. Whereas Arendt takes the social to block shifts from rebellion to revolution, James and Grace Lee Boggs offer an analysis of the social limits of rebellion as points of the expansion of the political. This is notable because some argue that Arendt’s distinction between rebellion and revolution is pliable enough to rectify the problems plaguing that between the social and the political (e.g. Benhabib, 2003: 159).
After rebellions in cities across the US, writers sympathetic to Black Power movements worried these rebellions might be neutralized through administrative logics. The Kerner Report (NACCD, 2016: 1) on “civil disorders,” though relatively sympathetic to participants in these ‘disorders,’ was centrally concerned with preventing their recurrence by locating and removing their immediate causes. The Commission posed the problem as one of maintaining and reproducing American political order, and not of probing possibilities for wider social and political transformation. The Commission read the rebellions as a deviation, a temporary crisis in need of correction. In 1969, Robert L Allen (1990: 193) argued, on this note, that the language of crisis was preferable to “liberal whites … to them the cities present not a battleground but a crisis to be managed.” Allen criticized a kind of counterinsurgent logic of the social – “a program of domestic neocolonialism” (Allen, 1990: 17) – that would cast rebellion as ‘riot’ or ‘disorder’ remediable only through the very power structure that rebels rose up against. Cruse, writing about the trajectory of Black rebellions in the 1960s, was concerned with “how well the American system can absorb it, and thus, negate its force” (Cruse, 2005: 361).
On this score, thinkers such as Allen, Cruse, and the Boggses did not believe that the urban uprisings were inherently revolutionary. As Cruse (2005: 383) writes on Watts: What was missing was the larger social strategy that might have encompassed much more than Watts. Without this strategy, the full enactment of what Watts represents—a process with a beginning, middle, denouement, and end—will never take place in this society.
James and Grace Lee Boggs, likewise, argued that the “commotion in Detroit” was neither riotous disorder nor revolution. It was a “rebellion” (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 15). For them, rebellion primarily rejects the political and economic structures in which people live: “rebellion springs from specific social conditions, but does not go beyond rejection” (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 194). Revolution, by contrast, demands a move from rejection to “projection,” offering up an organization and scene for political deliberation concerning the future (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 28–29, 185). Rebellions, however, are important elements of revolution: they “break the threads that have been holding the system together and throw into question the legitimacy and supposed permanence of existing institutions.” In rebellion, “the inertia of the society has been interrupted” (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 16–17).
These writings foreground the task of charting paths from ‘social’ rebellion to ‘political’ revolution, rather than a once-and-for-all categorization of events. This means mapping the forces of depoliticization (counterinsurgent logics) and possibilities of politicization: understanding less what the uprisings were but what, in turn, could be made of them. Arendt herself had flagged this problem in On Revolution in her own distinction between rebellion and revolution. As with the above thinkers, she argues that rebellion is an “essentially negative” matter of “liberation,” whereas revolution involves the creation of new, enduring political spaces (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 22). Revolution connects “liberation from oppression” to the “constitution of freedom” (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 25).
For Arendt, as for her contemporaries commenting on antiracist rebellion, the line between these was never clear-cut: “it is frequently difficult to say where mere desire for liberation … ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins” (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 23). Crucially, the shift from one to the other is not “automatic” (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 19). Indeed, in the case of specifically social kinds of insurgency this passage from rebellion to revolution is blocked. For her, insurgency that is premised on the meeting of needs—insurgency as behaviour—produces an endless desire for liberation indexed to the endlessness of desire itself. The social question short-circuits revolution by centring apparently unending problems of “liberation from necessity,” which in turn “always take precedence over the building of freedom” (Arendt, 2006 [1963]: 102). Though Arendt, like her contemporaries, sees the problem as connecting rebellion (liberation) to revolution (the expansion of political freedom), her insistence that struggles are social rather than political risks reading this endless loop of liberation as a fait accompli.
This becomes clear in the contrast between Arendt’s and the Boggses’ analyses of 1960s insurgency. Arendt remarked in 1967 that it expressed genuine grievances but remain futile: “riots have, of course, occurred throughout history, and they have never led to anything; nothing blows away so quickly, leaves so little trace” (Young-Bruehl, 1987: 415). For Arendt, these events held none of the seeds of futurity and endurance that connect the beginning (archein) to the practical continuation (prattein) of action. The ephemerality of political life is here turned against the apparent impotence and futility of riot as a form of action.
Arendt’s remarks hint at her position on the social limits of rebellion in the 1960s. Arendt argues that the conditions of Northern US cities depoliticize struggles against racial domination and exclusion. While Civil Rights activists had “extraordinary success” in the South by sticking to “purely legal and political matter,” they “could accomplish nothing” when they “collided with the enormous social needs of the city ghettoes of the North” (Arendt, 1972: 202). The distinctly social struggles blocked the movement from a desire for liberation to the creation of lasting political spaces and movements, for Arendt. In this, the silent compulsion of social need, left naturalized and depoliticized as an inevitable background by Arendt, marks the parameters of acceptable antiracist resistance. The subjects of ‘riot’ found therein cannot break out of their ‘social’ conditions. There may be some political significance to these uprisings, but merely as a lashing-out of those Arendt sees as irrevocably trapped in social determination (see Arendt, 1970: 83–84).
This entrapment means that social rebellion (in the ‘Northern cities’) can only instigate antagonism, a demand for liberation without revolution. The tactics of the Civil Rights movements were successful in “eliminating discriminatory laws and ordinances in the south,” enacting a set of durable legal accomplishments, but failed when they “encountered the social conditions in large urban centers—the stark needs of the black ghettoes on the one side, the overriding interests of white lower-income groups in respect to housing and education on the other” (Arendt, 1970: 76). Rebellion in the North could remain only that, because it highlights an ineliminable and counterproductive antagonism. All it could accomplish was to “bring these conditions into the open, into the street, where the basic irreconcilability of interests was dangerously exposed” (Arendt, 1970: 76). The social misery and political subjugation of Black populations in the US returns, but only as a sign of an insoluble antagonism best left depoliticized in terms of the “formidable task of liberating those who were not so much constrained by political oppression as the sheer necessities of life” (Arendt, 2018: 376). Arendt enacts the counterinsurgent logic of the social by rendering unchangeable the very social conditions that she says limit the revolutionary potential of ‘riots.’
A central issue raised in this moment was the shift from “Southern Activism and Northern Impasse”: how to move from the impasses of reactive “protest” to revolutionary transformation (Cruse, 2005: 403)? James and Grace Lee Boggs agreed that the ‘social’ conditions posed important limits on rebellion. Symptomatic of this was the search for external solutions, a search for models for revolution elsewhere: “The moment the movement came north, it went to Africa and got lost; it broke the link with its own past in the US” (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 260). They criticized certain iterations of Black nationalism for seeing rebellion as the final moment in struggle, epitomized in separation and escape (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 259). They identified these with an understanding of revolution as immediate transition or liberation rather than long-term creative work. Contra Arendt, however, they argued that the theoretical task was less to locate properly political struggles in the North that would avoid the limits of social determination, but to move from one to the other: to show how social insurgency contains the possibility of moving beyond itself.
James Boggs argued that the ‘Southern’ Civil Rights struggle’s encounter with ‘social’ misery was a possible moment of transition from rebellion and protest to revolution. Precisely because the Civil Rights struggle against “legal barriers” hits a limit in the face of what Arendt called the “stark needs” of the cities, it reveals the inseparability of legal struggles from the dismantling of the social conditions that make them impossible (Boggs, 2011 [1974]: 256–257). Here, the boundary of the social and the political is a point where one’s conception of the political is expanded because strictly ‘political’ revolution is shown to hinge precisely on the ‘social question.’ From this vantage, the ‘social’ does not invade politics. Rather, social misery is politically produced: it is not a natural or chance outcome of ‘social’ life but a product of policies.
The boundary between rebellion and revolution thus exposed both limits and possibilities. This is especially clear in James Boggs’s analysis of the Black Panther Party (BPP). He polemically argued that their Program was “an ultra-democratic demand for civil rights” rather than a revolutionary program. It was premised, he claims, on leaving the overall power relations intact—not a “strategy” but “a statement of grievances and concessions demanded from the white power structure.” It is a significant program of rebellion but not revolution. The latter would involve serious debate on “the conquest of power” and its consequences (Boggs, 1970: 183). This does not mean that it is trapped in a scene of rebellious confrontation. Rather, Boggs insists, movements like the BPP showed the precisely social conditions of revolution: the revolutionary potential of the unemployed, ‘unemployable,’ youth that make up racialized surplus populations in post-1960s capitalism (Boggs, 1970: 185–186).
My point here is not to endorse Boggs’s reading of the BPP but to highlight his dialectical and critical distinction between ‘social’ rebellion and revolution. Here, designating a given movement or struggle as ‘rebellion’ as opposed to ‘revolution’ is not to direct one’s gaze away from the former to find the latter elsewhere. It trains one’s eye on those features of the former that might lead to the latter. In the Boggsian analysis, Arendt’s barrier between the social and political is a kind of hinge. It exposes not irreconcilable antagonism but dialectical contradiction. Rebellion crystallizes underlying, but difficult-to-diagnose contradictions in a social order, staging them as sites of political motion. As CLR James put it in dialogue with Detroit revolutionaries, “if there is no sharp contradiction, then there is no movement to speak of and there is stagnation, compromise” (James, 1980: 92).
Arendt sees the contradictions sharpened by urban rebellion as dangerous antagonisms. Indeed, she worries that “the achievement of social, economic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country rather than assuage it” (Arendt, 2003: 200). That the Boggsian analysis seeks primarily to shift this antagonism into a revolutionary politics (in the sense of the constitution of a new site for and practice of political life) stands in sharp contrast here. This difference lies in their insistence that we locate our thinking about the world at the edges of our concept’s ability to grasp it. This practice of “thinking dialectically” begins from the presumption that the world will outstrip political thought, emphasizing awareness that “life [has] caught up with and made a critique of theory” (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 42). Arendt shares this concern that concepts and names can be become frozen abstractions split from the world, but her own analysis of revolutions risks being turned into just such a split abstraction. James and Grace Lee Boggs argue that the task here is to avoid “imposing a theory upon struggles developing in this country,” instead crafting a “theoretical understanding” from the experience and examination of reality’s movements (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 171).
A corollary to this point is that there are no strict ‘kinds’ of revolution (e.g. social and political). There is no “model” of revolution: one must begin with the unique contradictions at hand (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 138). In the 1960s, James Boggs argued that a central contradiction in US political development was that between the expansion of US capitalism and Black subjugation and “underdevelopment” (Boggs, 2011 [1963]: 130–139). The displacement of the social question, which Arendt lauds, was a product of the continual management of this contradiction and its expression in Black insurgency. In the post-war moment, Boggs argues, the provision of labour ‘progress’ for white workers came at the expense of Black workers, whose jobs were more vulnerable to automation. This was coming to a head because automation was producing surplus populations for whom there was no place in the social and economic order. As he writes, “Automation replaces men. This of course is nothing new. What is new is that now … the displaced men have nowhere to go” (Boggs, 2011 [1963]: 102). He calls these people with nowhere to go the “Outsiders” (Boggs, 2011 [1963]: 109–119).
Because these Outsiders were no longer assimilable to the workforce, they exposed the limits of purely economic or ‘social’ solutions. Only those thoroughly determined by social conditions could reveal the need to overcome the link between economic development and Black political subjection. They posed the necessity of spiritual and political transformations towards a “totally new type of society” into which they could be “absorbed” (Boggs, 2011 [1963]: 103). Boggs poses the question of the expansion of rebellion in the 1960s through the staging of social contradictions intensified by racially textured automation, contradictions making possible revolution—the constitution of a new order of political life. This means that the ambiguous line between rebellion and revolution, and the social and political, is a productive one, one that makes possible and necessary a form of political action in which “the struggle for power [is] tied to the gradual realization of new socioeconomic structures” (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 95). Distinguishing between the social and political was to illuminate the close contact and possible shift between their terms.
The Boggses’ precise understanding of the shift from rebellion to revolution shifted as the fate of rebellion in the US changed from the 1960s onwards. Broadly speaking, the shift was from the party to community-building work as scenes for moving from rebellion to revolution. Concerning the party, they argued in the 1960s and 1970s that a vanguard party was crucial for moving past rebellion. Parties, they argued, are places for offering programs and theses that might mobilize rebels, sparking lines of critique, expansion, and rejection of those programs: they are political spaces in which people might appear in word and deed (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 192, 246). This does not presuppose a relation of superiority between party leaders and the ‘masses.’ Their position was born from their sense that subjects of rebellion are unique, with desires, demands, and ways of life that resist easy unification. The task is not “discovering” and unifying identities but “creating identities” for the sake of “new appropriate relationships.” (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 179). The party is not about imposing programs, but creating spaces of political deliberation centred around how any program will grind up against the singularity of those taking it up.
Their defence of vanguard parties might seem anachronistic today. Nonetheless, their analysis foregrounds two consequences of a critical distinction between social rebellion and political revolution: first, it centres the problem of locating institutions capable of enacting a shift between them; second, it takes critical aim at counterinsurgent logics of the social that insist on what social revolution is and not what it might be. Their analysis rejects the imposition of historical or social necessity on revolutionary politics, such as in claims about an “instinctive drive of the working class.” Such claims replace the necessary political work required for shifting rebellion to revolution with a logic of historical, indeed ‘social,’ necessity. The Boggses called this logic putting “economics in command” of politics (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 30). Presupposing either an inevitably revolutionary or ineluctably ‘social’ subject obfuscates the necessity of political intervention in and development of rebellion. They risk turning the battleground opened by rebellion into something manageable by “experts and technicians” (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 131–132). The party—like other institutions—is a way of “putting politics in command of economics,” for seeing ‘social’ conditions not as a limit on politics but as a site for expanding the scope of political intervention (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 60).
The social is a contradictory site of possibility, rather than a space where action is irredeemably reduced to behaviour. It was this sensibility that motivated the Boggses’ later shift to community-building. In community-building, locally and collectively organized social reproduction, the ‘social’ part of practical life, is a site for cultivating durable political communities and spaces. It was a way for people to teach themselves, as Grace Lee Boggs more recently put it, that they are not “victims” of historical change and “catastrophe” but people who could craft a “new, more humane society” (Boggs and Kurashige, 2012: 167). Community-building was an everyday practice of resisting the dangers of “economic determinism,” the way ‘the social’ appears under conditions of deindustrialization: the way “we no longer believe in the capacity of human beings to determine the course of society” (Boggs, 2011 [1976]: 280).
As with the party, the point here is not to defend community-building as such but to show that it is a productive answer that emerges from a critical distinction between the social and political that insists on charting paths from the former to the latter. Community-building enacts this by seeing ‘quotidian’ social reproduction as precisely an enduring “space of freedom,” a way of political life in which people teach themselves that they make history, even if not under conditions of their own choosing.
Conclusion
Crucially, here, the terrain of debate has been shifted to the relative importance of Arendt’s distinction, and its failure in “Little Rock,” for Arendt’s work as a whole, and towards the problem of distinguishing between the social and the political in a capacious and critical fashion: that is, in a way that highlights the practical and discursive moves by which social events are made political and vice-versa. Attempts to describe rebellion as merely social, as expressions of need or social position, are practical interventions in those rebellions that obscure paths to revolution by reading them as problems solvable by administration. In such an orientation, the distinction between the social and the political is useful for a critical theory of how the appellation of an event or struggle as social (or political) is made more or less accurate through practice. On this account, Arendt’s own reduction of anti-racist insurgency to ‘the social’ is not merely a misunderstanding in which the gap between a rigid conceptual distinction and the world becomes apparent. It closes off what social struggle might become by insisting on what it is, by categorizing it.
We are left with two diverging approaches to the social limits of rebellion offered by categorical and critical distinctions respectively. Arendt approaches social limits as harbingers of political doom closing prospects for novelty, continuance, and therefore revolution. James and Grace Lee Boggs’ social limits remain, indeed, limits, but their dialectical understanding of this limit allows them to see charting these limits as part of a project for moving past them, and categorization as a practice that names things it hopes to change. Political analysis, here, should reside precisely on the boundary between the social and political, seeing designations of struggles as social or political as claims that can be made more or less real.
In turn, this allows us to reread Arendt’s ‘misunderstanding’ as a practical intervention in antiracist insurgency, an attempt to place it within the confines of its social limits, whereas the Boggsian interpretation recasts these limits as sites of productive contradictions. Without an understanding of how social struggle might become political, Arendt’s insistence that strictly political revolution is an absolute irruption of the new, it becomes difficult to see revolution as anything but a ‘D-day’ or miracle. Her understanding therefore risks passing into the language of natural cause, “a mystical concept of revolution as a miracle … closely linked with the tendency to think of revolution as a spontaneous, unpredictable act of god or of other forces outside of human control – something like a forest fire and earth-quake” (Boggs et al., 2018 [1978]: 18). Indeed, in the face of the radical and widespread depoliticization imposed by the rise of the social and totalitarianism, Arendt (1994b: 478–479) points to the miracle of birth as a reservoir for the political: the freedom to begin anew “is guaranteed with each new birth; it is indeed every man.”
James and Grace Lee Boggs offer a different locale for the irreducible remainder of politics in times of depoliticization, a different source for ‘the new’: the projection of alternatives on the basis of social contradictions. The ‘political’ is located in the revolts to which the counterinsurgent logic of the social responds. Such an analysis fulfils the Arendtian demand that theory begin from our newest experiences, that it live up to the event, that we see the event as a site for stretching politics rather than enclosing it. The basically critical function of a distinction between the social and the political, here, is to map both the conversion of potentially political revolts as social, and the possibility of extending ‘merely’ social rebellions to political revolutions—and the ways these logics fail and succeed. To assign immutable boundaries to politics, to designate and categorize certain struggles as political and others as social, is to be “governed by what politics has been” while failing to ask what it might become (Boggs and Boggs, 1974: 205).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
