"Ten People Acting Together Can Make a Hundred Thousand Tremble Separately"

Suresh's excellent post on the Occupy Wall Street movement reminded me of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution. It's a funny book; I don't know if it's much read today. One of its innovations, or eccentricities, is to place the American Revolution not just in the revolutionary tradition, but right at its center. Another is the focus on the idea of "public happiness" -- the idea that there's a distinct kind of wellbeing that comes from participation in collective decisionmaking. And most relevant to the current conversation, is its emphasis on the role of local councils -- non-elected but representative -- in every revolutionary situation, from 18th century New England town meetings to the soviets of 1918. These have independently developed, she argues, the"federal principle" -- the idea that democratic politics consists not in selecting leaders who then exercise power on behalf of the public, but rather of local bodies delegating specific tasks to more centralized bodies.

The connection to the Occupy movement is perhaps obvious, though Arendt isn't one of the writers people usually associate with this kind of politics. Her insistence that broad participation in public life is an end in itself, even the highest end, is a nice corrective to people who are impatient with the inward-looking nature -- meetings about meetings! -- of a lot of conversations around OWS. And the General Assembly structure looks different when you imagine them as proto-soviets. Of course the US today isn't anywhere close to a revolutionary situation, and one can't imagine General Assemblies exercising dual power. Or more precisely, there's no way anything like that will happen; people are imagining it, that's the point. Maybe the best evidence that Arendt is onto something important is that her book, written in the 1960s mostly about the politics of the 1780s, has distinct echoes not just of OWS, but of popular movements around the world, like the idea of "delegation" rather than "representation" coming out of Venezuela and Bolivia. 

I think the connection is interesting enough,it's worth putting some long quotes from On Revolution here. Which requires us to deploy the new-to-Slackwire technology of the fold. So, after it, Arendt.

While the [French] Revolution taught the men in prominence a lesson of happiness, it apparently taught the people a first lesson in "the notion and taste of public liberty". An enormous appetite for debate, for instruction, for mutual enlightenment and exchange of opinion, even if all these were to remain without immediate consequence on those in power, developed in the sections and societies... It was this communal council system, and not the electors' assemblies, which spread in the form of revolutionary societies all over France. Only a few words need to be said about the sad end of these first organs of a republic which never came into being. They were crushed by the central and centralized government, not because they actually menaced it but because they were indeed, by virtue of their existence, competitors for public power. No one in France was likely to forget Mirabeau's words that "ten men acting together can make a hundred thousand tremble apart." ...

"As Cato concluded every speech with the words, Carthago delenda est, so do I every opinion, with the injunction, 'divide the counties into wards'." Thus Jefferson once summed up an exposition of his most cherished political idea... Both Jefferson's plan and the French societes revolutionaires anticipated with an utmost weird precision those councils, soviets and Rate, which were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders. Like Jefferson's proposals, they were utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly, by the revolutionary tradition itself. Even those historians whose sympathies were clearly on the side of revolution... failed to understand to what an extent the council system confronted them with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organized during the course of the revolution itself. ...

The ward system was not meant to strengthen the power of the many but the power of "every one" within the limits of his competence [shades of Hardt and Negri]; and only by breaking up "the many" into assemblies where every one could count and be counted upon "shall we be as republican as a large society can be". In terms of the safety of the citizens of the republic, the question was how to make everybody feel "that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day"...

If the ultimate end of revolution was freedom and the constitution of a public space where freedom could appear, the constitutio libertatis, then the elementary republics of the wards, the only tangible place where everyone could be free, actually were the end of the great republic whose chief purpose in domestic affairs should have been to provide the people with such places of freedom and to protect them."

Shorter Hannah Arendt: We are our demands.