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I
L

 

 

 

RETHINKING THE MEANING OF POLITICAL STABILITY
AND DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION

By

C. Michael Liberato

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Philosophy

1 997

Copyright by
C. MICHAEL LIBERATO
1 997

ABSTRACT

RETHINKING THE MEANING OF POLITICAL STABILITY
AND DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION

By

C. Michael Liberato

This paper is on the meaning of egalitarian relationships within democratic spaces.
My central thesis is that an adequate conception of democracy for a plural and culturally
diverse society like the United States, a conception that seeks to locate political power in
its citizens equally, must provide conditions for all its citizens to be seen and heard by one
another.

I propose that we rethink the way we understand egalitarian relationships and
suggest that the notion of human visibility is more critical for designing democratic
institutions than are principles of organizing equal participation. 1 question the assumption
that stable democratic relationships are established by either the development of civic
virtues or by the regulation of citizen participation in public activities.

By distinguishing between conditions of public order and conditions of public
visibility, I argue that the problem of democratic stability (and of designing democratic
spaces) is not simply a problem of organizing citizens in symmetrical relationships but is
ﬁrst and foremost a problem of public visibility and perception. Through the use of a
metaphor of theatrical architecture, I suggest that, when designing democratic
institutions, theorists need to pay more attention to how humans appear to one another
before they concern themselves with how to regulate human appearances within those

institutions.

This paper is more of an exploratory work than analytical. My argument is to
defend a certain way of looking at democratic arrangements; namely, as spatial, but
spatial in a special way, with the spatial conditions of visibility and human perception. To
show that this approach has some pedigree, I present and compare the conceptions of
democratic relationships developed by John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, how they view the
problems of stability and democratic participation and how they approach the issues of
human visibility and public order.

Through further use of the theatrical metaphor, I then explore what those
conditions of visibility and perception might look like for democratic egalitarian spaces

that are designed to be open, inclusive, and contain a diversity of people.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been written were it not for the unalterable
support of my life companion and closest ﬁiend, Angela.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the encouragement and
critical appraisal of my director Dr. Stephen L. Esquith.

And ﬁnally, for the inspiration of my son, Antony Michael Liberato, for sharing his

“empty space” for me to see, I am most grateful.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................... 1
Chapter I

THEATER, HUMAN VISIBILITY AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SPACE. 8
Chapter II

RETHINKING THE MEANING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES. ............ 25

A. Rethinking the Problem of Democratic Stability. ................. 27

1. Political Education and Political Virtues. ................. 28

2. Theories of Deliberation & the Regulation of Public Discourse. 29

3. Constructing Political Spaces for Public Human Appearances. . 31

B. The Idea of Democratic Space & Human Visibility. .............. 34

1. From Political Stability to Political Space. ................ 34

2. Public, Political and Democratic Spaces. ................. 37

a. Public Spaces. ............................... 38

b. Political Spaces. .............................. 40

c. Democratic Spaces. ........................... 42

C. Designing Stable Democratic Spaces. ......................... 46

1. An Illustration of Constructing a Democratic Space. ........ 47

2. The F ragility of Democratic Spaces. .................... 53

3. The Conditions of Stable Democratic Spaces. ............. 58

a. The Conditions of Visibility. ..................... 58

b. The Conditions of a Democratic Common Sense. ..... 60
Chapter IH

JOHN RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRATIC STABILITY. 63

A. The Deadly Trap. ....................................... 63

B. Rawls’s Two Problems of Political Stability. .................... 66

C. Motivational Stability and The Virtues of Citizenship. ............. 74

D. Political Stability as Conceptual Consensus. .................... 87

1. Rawlsian Political Constructivism. ...................... 9O

2. “Justice as Fairness” as The Overlapping Consensus. ........ 94

E. The Meaning of Rawlsian Political Stability. .................... 97

Chapter IV

HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF POLITICAL SPACE. .......... 102
A. Democratic Spaces: Inventive and Improvisational. .............. 102
B. Arendt’s Critique of Traditional Political Philosophy. ............. 110
1. Instrumental and Performative Values of Political Activity. . . . 111
2. Rationality and the Condition of Plurality. ................ 115
3. Normative Morality and Political Stability. ................ 118
C. The Arendtian Conception of Political Space. ................... 123
1. The Public and Private Realms of Human Activity. ......... 123
2. Arendt’s Distinction Between Social and Political Spaces. . . . . 128
3. The World of Objects and Political Space. ................ 131
4. The Political Space of Human Appearances. .............. 139
D. Arendtian Political Space and How it is Constructed. ............. 150
E. The Instability of Arendtian Political Space. .................... 154
F. Arendt’s Remedies for Political Instability. ..................... 161
1. Unpredictability and the Remedy of Promise. .............. 164
2. Irreversibility and Its Remedy: Power to Forgive. .......... 166
3. Anonymity and The Remedy of Trust. ................... 168
G. The Meaning of Arendtian Political Stability. ................... 170
Chapter V
WHY THE POLITICAL? THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISIBILITY AND
ORDER. ....................................................... 176
A. Visibility and Symmetry in Public Spaces. ...................... 176
B. Why The Political? Rawls and Arendt on Human Freedom. ........ 181
l. Rawlsian Freedom. ................................. 182
2. Arendtian Freedom. ................................. 185
3. Freedom and Democratic Spaces. ...................... 191
C. Rawlsian Political Space: Searching for Symmetry and Order. ...... 194
1. “Justice as Fairnessz” An Economic Model. .............. 198
2. “Overlapping Consensus” Symmetry With Limited Visibility. . 202
D. Arendtian Space or Rawlsian Space? ......................... 207
1. Is Arendtian Political Space Anti-democratic? ............. 212
2. Remedies for Democratic Instability: Forgiveness and Promise
or Consensus. ................................. 222
E. Arendtian Political Constructivism. ........................... 226
1. The Model of Arendtian Constructivism:
Aesthetic Judgements of Taste. .................... 227
2. How Political Judgements Are Like Aesthetic Judgements:
Visual Arts v Performing Arts. ..................... 234
3. Public Discourse in Arendtian Political Spaces. ............ 239
F. Democratic Political Spaces Revisited. ........................ 247
List of References. ............................................... 253

vii

INTRODUCTION

The ﬁrst time I visited The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC I had a
difﬁcult time ﬁnding it. It’s an unassuming place, difﬁcult to spot from a distance, quite
different from most war memorials. I approached it from Constitution Avenue, after ﬁnally
getting directions. When I got to the ﬁrst panel I realized how different and uncommon
this space is. Its V-shaped design consists of two 250-ﬁ walls of polished black granite,
each sloping to the ground from an apex of 10 feet. On the walls are etched the names of
57,661 men and women of the United States who were killed or missing in the Vietnam
war. In the words of Maya Ying Lin, it’s Architect-sculptor:

The Memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving

composition to be understood as we move into and out of it. The passage itself is

gradual; the descent to the origin slow, but it is at the origin that the memorial is to
be fully understood. At the intersection of these walls, on the right side, is carved
the date of the ﬁrst death. It is followed by the names of those who died in the
war, in chronological order. These names continue on this wall appearing to
recede into the earth at the wall’s end. The names resume on the leﬁ wall as the
wall emerges from the earth, continuing back to the origin where the date of the
last name is carved. (From a statement by Maya Lin, Architect-sculptor of the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, presented as part of her competition submission.)

By the time I got to the “origin” of the Memorial I was overwhelmed and

exhausted by the images of so many men and women, daughters, sons, and ﬁiends, who

were killed or missing as a result of our conduct and execution of this war.

2

You pass the ﬁrst panel. A single line of four men killed in 1968. Guys from
Colorado, New York, Texas and Virginia. The second panel, three lines with
fourteen names. Six lines and twenty-nine names. Eight lines of thirty nine names.

As you walk from one panel to the next the list becomes thick and fast, the names

a blur. Soon the panels are waist high, head high, then higher than you can reach.

(Larry Heinemann, Chicago, 1996 - http://wwwpbs.org/pov/stories/vietnam/

storieshtml)

What is remarkable about this public gathering place is the way it keeps before us,
as a nation, these 57,661 individuals. As a memorial it says little, if anything, about the
controversial issues related to war, the differences and conﬂicts of values and meanings
that divided families and separated ﬁiends. It does not display the bravery and honor of
the men and women who fought, nor the convictions of those who resisted. As a
memorial it does not take sides, neither glorifying nor profaning the war. It simply shows,
in the chronological order in which they disappeared, the 57,661 ﬁiends, daughters, sons,
fellow citizens who were killed or lost in the war.

But it is because of the simple and unassuming presentation of these dead and lost
citizens, visible as names on the wall, that any one of us, whatever else we may have
thought about the war, whatever our backgrounds, values and beliefs, whether protestors
or supporters of the war, whether we served in Vietnam or opposed the war, is welcomed
into this space, to think about the conﬂict known as “Vietnam” and to begin to
understand what it was, and still is, that divides and separates us from one another.
Anyone who enters this space can see each one of these 57,661 names, which on a bright
day affect and even distort the reﬂections of ourselves on the black polished ﬁnish.

Whatever positions we may take, whatever views we may hold toward our government’ 3

actions during this war, when we enter this memorial each of us is able to see the effects

3

of power that resulted in the loss of 57,661 of our own citizens. How did each of these
deaths happen? Who was Capt. Thomas C. Metsker (or any one of the other 57,660) and
why was he killed? Will it ever happen again to one of us? Or to one of our children not
yet born?
At last they have made to the war dead A ﬁtting monument. Not a boast, not a
Victor’s trumpet, But a long black wall Telling the monotony of their dying, Not of
heroism, But of honest loss, the fact of their extinction.
No it is not resolved, it is not concluded. We have not come to terms with all the
issues And made a peace With ourselves, pulling it all together. Success proves
everything; the victory So clearly demonstrates the Victor’s rightness, But losing,
failure, leaves the mind in ribbons, What did we do wrong? Who made which
decisions? Whom can we blame, whom exculpate? The nagging Anguish goes on

until we bury it, Until another generation Says, “Very sad, but we are not invited.”

What have we learned?

All that we know is that grief is real, And grief must be respected. The man who

turns his face away, the buddy, And the girl dabbing her cheeks, That they are

rightly moved By an honest statement. Stone is to be trusted. (John Brain, a poem

entitled, “Memorial,” 1982 -http://www.pbs.org/pov/stories/vietnam/stories.html).

We know, many of us from our own experiences, that this war was the source and
focus of signiﬁcant conﬂicts and divisions between us. But, without the kind of public
space that Maya Lin has given us, where we, in our diversity, can come together and see
the same war dead and face the same consequences of our own actions, a space that keeps
visible for us the relationships and effects of power, unless we enter into such a space
together, the war will continue to remain the great source of political instability that it was
in the late 60’s and early 70’ s. What Maya Lin has designed for us is a place where we,

with all of our diﬂ‘erences, can gather and, around the common perception of 57,661

names on a polished black-granite wall, think about the war, who we are and how we

want to be related.

But Lin’s design and the architecture of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has not
only provided an open public space where we as a nation can think about ways to live
together with all our social, cultural, religious and philosophical differences (there is even
a “Moving Wall” one-third the size of the DC Memorial that is presently touring cities
within the United States). It has also provided the conditions for us to create extensions of
this same kind of space, wherein people have made themselves visible by responding to
what they have seen in the Memorial. On November 27, 1996 the Public Broadcasting
Service aired a 90-minute Academy Award-winning ﬁlm, W
W, produced, directed and written by Freda Lee Mock which
chronicles ten years of Maya Lin’s life and work, and highlights the power and effect of
Maya Lin’s designs. The ﬁlm, itself a remarkable “space,” exposes our continuing struggle
to decide how we want to live with one another by focusing our attention on Maya Lin
and her ongoing visionary work.

Lin withstood the bitter attacks and prevailed with her original design. The

Memorial’s dedication in 1982 was a profound, cathartic moment - not just for

those who fought in Vietnam, but for the entire United States. Since its

completion, Americans have ﬂocked to the site to grieve, to contemplate the
consequences of war and to heal. In one of the ﬁlm’s most moving segments,
veterans and surviving family members search for the names of their loved ones,
arranged chronologically by date of death.

“If you can’t accept death, you’ll never get over it,” says Lin. “So what the

Memorial’s about is honesty. . . . You have to accept, and admit that this pain has

occurred, in order for it to be healed, in order for it to be cathartic. . Al.l I was
saying in this piece was the cost of war is these individuals. And we have to
remember them ﬁrst ” WWW,
Producer/Director/Writer, Freida Lee Mock, PBS, 1996- http: //www. pbs. org/
programs/1996/November/ mayalinnovprhtml)

5

Reﬂecting on Maya Lin’s work - perhaps best characterized by her own words, “I want to
create spaces for people to think without telling them what to think” (Maya Lin, http://
www.pbs.org/pov/stories/ index.html) - we can see our own struggles to accept and live
with our diversity.

Immediately following that broadcast PBS Online set up an interactive web site
(www.stories.org) where people can read the stories of others, and respond by adding
their own stories of their struggles (since the war) to grieve, to contemplate and to heal
(see, for examples, Larry Heinemann and John Brain quoted above). This is yet a further
continuation of the “memorial space” where we can gather and think about who we are
and who we want to be without being told what to think.

I have reﬂected at some length on the Vietnam Memorial and its extensions to
illustrate the kind of accessible, common and unpretentious public spaces that I want to
focus on throughout this study. All these spaces, the Memorial itself and the extensions it
engendered (the ﬁlm, the public broadcast, and the web site), are political spaces where
ordinary citizens can come to recognize one another and themselves and struggle to ﬁnd
ways to live together. Such spaces are essential for democratic societies.

A central theme of this dissertation is that any adequate conception of democracy
for a plural and culturally diverse society like the United States must ﬁrst provide the
conditions for its ordinary citizens to be seen and heard vividly by one another. If the
power of a democratic society is to be located in its people, then its democratic
institutions need to provide those conditions for citizens to meet one another and together

work out ways to live with their unique identities and differences. The greatest threat to

6

democratic stability is not our pluralism but our inability to ﬁnd places where we can
acknowledge one another with all our diversity. If we can appear in public arenas only
under guises that mask our social, cultural and philosophical differences, then we begin to
lose faith in our political processes and institutions. When our differences remain hidden,
when there are no public places where we can clearly and plainly see who we are, then we
vie for power to control the conditions of our own visibility, as for example, when we
attempt to control the history of US. involvement in Vietnam for our own partisan
purposes.

As designers of democratic institutions, theorists need to pay close attention to the
conditions of public human visibility and build their institutions around those conditions
which provide for the most vivid appearances of human beings. As democratic theorists, it
is our task to deﬁne those conditions.

Insofar as Maya Lin has designed a public space where people from disparate
backgrounds can gather and, through a common experience of what is made visible,
deliberate on their common condition, she has provided a democratic space. Maya Lin
provided conditions for the 57,661 individuals who were killed or lost in the Vietnam war
to be vividly identiﬁed and presented in a public manner. She also gave us a way to see
ourselves, to see one another, and our relationships to our dead and missing. We are
invited to come into the Memorial and see the dead, and the images of ourselves behind
them, without prescriptive organizing principles. Then, after we have seen what is there,
the names of who we were and the images of who we are, we can think about and decide

how we are politically related to these 57,661 and to one another. Maya Lin does not do

7

that for us. That is our task as a democratic peOple. And that is what we do with the ﬁlm,
the public broadcast and the web site. We begin to make ourselves more visible to one
another.

Democratic political processes and institutions that dull human appearances by
their structures of organization and their criteria for ordering human relationships provide
an under-recognized threat to democratic stability. The notion of designing political spaces
for human visibility provides us with a critical tool with which to reform our democratic
institutions. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its extensions are such spaces, but there
are other illustrations, from union bargaining sessions to grass-root civic movements. This
dissertation is about what these democratic spaces have in common and why they are
important.

The organizing metaphor for this study of democratic space that I will be using is
theater, rather than the architecture of war memorials. But it isthe spatial dimensions of
theater - its political architecture, its dependence on human performances and its capacity
to establish conditions of visibility - that I want to exploit. Each chapter begins with a
quotation from Peter Brook’s W and a commentary on the political
boundaries within theatrical spaces. Using Brook I hope to show how similar boundaries

divide and organize our democratic spaces.

Chapter I

THEATER, HUMAN VISIBILITY AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SPACE.

I have had many abortive discussions with architects building new theaters
- trying vainly to ﬁnd words with which to communicate my own
conviction that it is not a question of good buildings and bad: a beautiﬁil
place may never bring about explosion of life; while a haphazard hall may
be a tremendous meeting place: this is the mystery of the theater, but in the
understanding of this mystery lies the only possibility of ordering it into a
science. In other forms of architecture there is a relationship between
conscious, articulate design and good functioning: a well-designed hospital
may be more eﬂicacious than a higgledy-piggledy one; but as for theaters,
the problem of design cannot start logically. It is not a matter of saying
analytically what are the requirements, how best they can be organized -
this will usually bring into existence a tame, conventional, oﬁen cold hall.
The science of theater-building must come from studying what it is that
brings about the most vivid relationship between people - and is this best

served by asymmetry, even by disorder? (Peter Brook, W,
65)

Peter Brook, former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in his reﬂection
on theater, W1, suggests that if we want to design good meeting places
where people gather and appear with one another in public, then we need to ﬁrst focus on
those conditions that bring about what is most vivid in human relationships. What makes

good theater is how strong and vibrant the characters appear on stage and how lively the

 

1Peter Brook, We: (Forge Village, MA: The Murray Printing Company,
1968)

 

 

9

audience is engaged by who and what appears there. He then raises the question whether
asymmetrical, even disorderly and unorganized spaces might not better secure the most
vivid performances. What he is suggesting is that the design of a good theater is not tied
to how well it is ordered, how ﬁrnctional or how beautiﬁrl it is, but to how much the
actors and their performances come to life for the audience, how vivid those appearances
are. He questions an assumption of most architects, that good theater requires order and
symmetry, by reminding us that the purpose of theater is the “explosion of human life.”

In designing theatrical spaces, Brook is suggesting, attention needs to be focused
not so much on what happens once people appear on the stage - that is the role of the
playwright, the choreographer, the director, the actors and stage hands - but on securing
those conditions that best allow an active interplay between actors and spectators. The
best theater design may well be a space that can accommodate asymmetrical even
disorderly relationships between the human beings who enter the theater with very
different ends in mind.

Ifwe think of political theory as a science of designing political spaces and of
democratic theorists as architects of democratic spaces, the challenge in democratic theory
is to design stable political spaces that are open to and initiate encounters between people
of different classes, ages, religions, ideologies, cultures, ethrricities and life styles. Brook’s
reﬂections on theatrical space suggest to us that, like theater-building, the science of
democracy-building, designing democratic spaces that are public meeting places full of
human diversity and freedom, “must come from studying what it is that brings about the

most vivid relationships between people.”

 

 

10

The best democratic spaces for pluralist societies like the United States are
designed to sustain a great diversity of human beings appearing to one another in all their
uneven and asymmetrical differences. Democracy-building is a process of designing
political spaces that provide the conditions for the most vivid public appearances of all
citizens.

One of the more ﬁrmly established theses in contemporary democratic theory is
that when designing spaces for egalitarian relationships there must be a trade 03 between
political stability and democratic participation; that to have a sustainable democracy that
survives the vicissitudes of citizen involvement we must ﬁnd a way to organize and
regulate citizen participation. The problem of political stability is most often seen as a
problem of order, of designing the proper requirements for adequate participation. How
do we understand participation? What are its procedures, and who can participate?
Participation and stability are customarily seen as opposing values that need to be balanced
against each other.

I want to question the assumption that stable democratic space means a political
space that is ordered and symmetrical. I want to suggest that designing stable democratic
space is ﬁrst and foremost a problem of providing the conditions for human appearances,
of making vivid the great diversity of human beings in their public appearances to one
another, and that public human relationships are most vivid when human beings appear to
one another as incongruous, rough, irregular, even unequal. Like Maya Lin’s memorial,
democratic space must be open on more than one side.

I want to suggest that the ﬁrst task of democratic theory is not designing how

1]

equally represented citizens can participate despite their differences, but rather designing
public spaces in which actual citizens appear to one another in all their diversity. To use
the theater analogy, the task of democratic theory is not choosing the right script and
selecting the best actors, but designing public spaces in which the characters, the audience
and their relationships to one another are vivid enough to be seen, heard, and critically
considered. In short, political stability is a matter of visibility. Only alter people have made
their public appearances, can we focus on whether and how they should relate to one
another on a more equal footing. Our attention to the problem of public human
appearances must precede our concern with rules and procedures for greater equality.
The signiﬁcance of a theatrical metaphor for political spaces is the notion of
visibility as “public human appearances.” In his discussion of the ideal theater, what he
calls “holy theater,”2 Brook characterizes theatrical appearances as making visible what is
invisible.
I am calling it the Holy Theater for short, but it could be called The Theater of the
Invisible-Made-Visible: the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can
appear has a deep hold on our thoughts. We are all aware that most of life escapes
our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of
patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as
rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behavior of people, of crowds, of history,
obeys such recurrent patterns . . . The theater is the last forum where idealism is
still an open question: many audiences all over the world will answer positively
from their own experiences that they have seen the face of the invisible through an
experience on the stage that transcends their experience in life. (W,

42) . . . All religions assert that the invisible is visible all the time. But here’s the
crunch Religious teaching - including Zen - asserts that this visible-invisible cannot

 

2Holy theater is one of four aspects of Brook’s description of contemporary theater.
The other three are “deadly theater,” theater at its worst; “rough theater,” theater that
deals with the widest range of human experiences; and “immediate theater,” theater that
asserts itselfin the present.

12

be seen automatically - it can only be seen given certain conditions. The conditions
can relate to certain states or a certain understanding. In any event to comprehend
the visibility of the invisible is a life’s work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we
arrive at a deﬁnition of holy theater. A holy theater not only presents the invisible
but also offers conditions that make its perception possible. (W,
56)

In the theater there are two places where humans make their appearances: on the
stage as actors and in the audience as spectators. In the theater the invisible rhythms of the
human condition are made visible to the spectators by the appearances of the actors on
stage in the characters they play. In the ideal theater the actors, drawing upon their own
experiences of the human condition, make visible the invisible rhythms that rule human
lives. Ifthey are successﬁil, the audiences, responding from their own experiences,
recognize that what they have just witnessed is the invisible in their own lives now made
visible to them, and it has transformed their lives. Having seen what is holy (or demonic)
on stage, they are able, for a moment at least, to see the holy or demonic in their own
lives. Theater is successﬁrl when both the actors and the spectators share, through a
common sense of the invisible-made-visible, what they both experience as the human
condition. Theater fails when the actors lose touch with that common sense or when they
speak in a language that is so rooted in their own solitary experiences that the characters
they portray are incredible, unreal, even fraudulent. Both the actors and the spectators are

essential participants for theater to be engaged.3 When the actors fail to make visible what

 

3“It is hard to understand the true notion of a spectator, there and not there, ignored
yet needed. The actor’s work is never for an audience, yet always is for one. The onlooker
is a partner who must be forgotten and still constamly kept in mind ...” Peter Brook, The
W, 51. The invisible cannot be made visible, except to someone. The spectator

 

13

is invisible, or when the spectators fail to perceive the invisible-made-visible, the power of
the theater as an explosion of life is unrealized.

So too in ideal political spaces, there are two ways citizens make their
appearances: as actor-citizens and as spectator-citizens. In the ideal political space,
democratic space, citizens-as-actors, drawing upon their own experiences of both the holy
and the demonic elements in the human condition, struggle to expose the invisible and
oftentimes inequitable powers that relate us to one another and rule our lives. They are
successﬁrl when their rhetoric matches the common sense perceptions of citizens-as-
spectators and the invisible or unspoken inequalities between human beings in the ever
“recurrent patterns” in the “behavior of people, of crowds, of history" are made plain. If
the actor-citizens are successful, spectator-citizens may recognize these inequalities in
their own lives and then begin to remedy them.

Democratic politics is successﬁrl when citizens share a common sense of the
human condition with its multitude of powers, again both holy and demonic, that
constantly inﬂuence human affairs. When citizens rely on personal imagery and ﬁxate on
their own experiences of power, when they use a specialized language which betrays their
lack of a commonly shared sensibility, they lose touch and credibility with one another.
Without a common sensibility of how power operates, political space is empty and
politics fails to engage us. If spectator-citizens do not ﬁnd the actor-citizens performances
believable, they will not recognize the differences between one another nor the inequalities

of power in their own lives. And, without that perception, the great promise of democratic

‘

is necessarily a participant in theater.

 

 

14

politics, to continually remedy inequalities of power, cannot be fulﬁlled. Political space
comes apart when citizens are unable to perceive the invisible currents of powers that
relate them to one another.

Thus, both the participation of the actor-citizen and the spectator-citizen are
necessary for democratic politics. In democratic spaces both are participants, active
companions, in making visible those inequalities of power in human relationships. In other
words, the space of democratic politics is not just on the stage or in the audience but in
the space between the two. The intersubjective space between the actor-citizens and the
spectators-citizens is where human appearances and the hidden inequalities that criss-cross
their lives are made vivid. And it is only there, in the space between citizens, that
inequalities are made visible and remedies are constructed.

As theorists designing democratic spaces, it is our task to provide those conditions
that make the perception of these invisible powers by which human beings are related and
ruled most vivid. “A holy theater not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions
that make its perception possible.” Well-designed democratic spaces make it possible to
perceive the uses and effects of powers that invisibly “rule over us.”

I suggested earlier that the best way for making these inequalities of power most
vivid is to sustain and support the uneven and asymmetrical public appearances of human
beings. Diversity does not show up so clearly when human appearances closely resemble
each other. Difference and inequalities cannot be seen all that well when only a
harmonious and compatible multitude is allowed to appear in public spaces. If we want

democratic political spaces to contain and sustain a diversity of human beings in

 

 

15

relationships with one another, then we need to ﬁrst secure those conditions under which
such a diversity of human beings appears. Once human appearances are stabilized, that is,
once people are assured of their own appearance, we can then pursue the question of
normative egalitarian relationships among those who so appear to one another.

An often hidden source of democratic instability is a lack of public visibility of the
differences and distinctions of democracy’s diverse citizens. When people can appear in
public arenas only under guises that ﬁlter out many of their social, cultural and
philosophical differences, they lose faith in political processes that represent them. Citizens
will mistrust social and political institutions not merely because they believe they are not
being treated fairly, but also because they are unable to be heard and seen.

Public visibility of democratic citizens is not simply a result of the individuals’ civic
virtues, nor of their capacity to exercise political power or manipulate its eﬂ‘ects, nor of
the public procedures of democratic participation. Public visibility is conditioned as much
by the quality of political spaces in which people appear as by what they do in these
spaces. As designers of democratic institutions, scholars need to pay more attention to the
conditions of public visibility and build institutions that provide for the most vibrant
appearances of human beings.

In suggesting that democratic stability is ﬁrst a problem of visibility and only then a
problem of order, I am also suggesting that when we design our democratic spaces we
must avoid mixing the conditions of public visibility with the condition of public order.
The problems of designing political spaces for human visibility are distinct from the

problems of directing public performances that occur in political spaces. The visibility and

16

perceptual conditions for a diversity of human appearances are different from the
normative conditions for arranging roles and distributing resources among those who
appear.

While the conditions for visibility in democratic spaces sustain inequalities and
asymmetries in the appearances of one another, these inequalities must not be allowed to
spill over into the conditions that order such spaces and, thereby, generate unequal
distributions of power or unjust principles of social relationships. Likewise the conditions
of public order that secure egalitarian relationships must not be allowed to dull the
visibility of differences and distinctions. Democratic stability that is secured only by
principles of order that sustain egalitarian relationships may, at the same time, keep hidden
the very people who are (supposed) to be democratically related.

To bring out the difference between a public space conditioned by visibility and
one secured by order, let us examine an actual space designed by the application of the
First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the ﬁeedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a
redress of grievances. This general principle has traditionally been interpreted as a
principle for establishing stable democratic order rather than securing democratic visibility.
The following case illustrates this.

In an attempt to prevent Frank Collin and his Neo-Nazis group from parading
around their Village Hall, Skokie, Illinois, which (in 197 7) contained a sizable Jewish

population, secured court injunctions against Collin and passed a set of “Racial Slur”

17

ordinances that effectively excluded the kind of demonstration that Collin had planned.
(Collin planned to “peaceﬁrllf’ demonstrate for some 20 to 30 minutes on the steps of the
Village Town Hall in full Nazi-style military uniforms). Skokie Ordinance 994 provided
that permits for public demonstrations would be issued if the village manager determined
that “the conduct of the parade, public assembly, or similar activity will not portray
criminality, depravity or lack of virtue in, or incite violence, hatred, abuse or hostility
toward a person or group of persons by reason of reference to religious, racial, ethnic,
national of regional afﬁliation.” Ordinance 995 made it a misdemeanor to disseminate any
material (deﬁned to include “public display of markings and clothing of symbolic
signiﬁcance”) “which promotes and incites hatred against persons by reason of their race,
national origin, or religion.” Ordinance 996 prohibited the display of swastikas and
military uniforms, by specifying that “no person shall engage in any march, walk or public
demonstration as a member or on behalf of any political party while wearing a rrrilitary
style uniform.”4

Collin took the village of Skokie to court, arguing that such ordinances violated his
constitutional right of free speech. After a lengthy series of court injunctions, legal
maneuvers, appeals and counter appeals (using various legal doctrines, including the
“ﬁghting words” doctrine of Chaplinsky and the “fear of responsive violence” of

Brandenburg and Feiners) to the Illinois Appellate Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, and

 

‘Aryeh Neier, WERE!!! (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979) 48-49.

5368 Steven Shiﬂ’n'n, Jesse ChOPer, W
(St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1991) 204-205. Also Aryeh Neier, opus cit., 38-68.

 

18

the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals‘, these ordinances were eventually overturned and
the injunctions against the marches lifted.

The constitutional design of our democratic society as prescribed in the First
Amendment requires that a free speech space be protected and made available to all
citizens. In the case of Collin and Skokie, it was decided that the Nazi marchers (in spite
of the arguments of clear and present danger, incitements to riot, and substantive harm to
the Jewish residents) have the constitutional right to enter the space around the Skokie
Village Hall in ﬁrll Nazi-style military uniforms; that such an appearance is equivalent to
their political free speech. Collin must be given ﬁee access to that public space so that he
can be seen by all and speak in his own words, even if his appearance incites violence or
his words wound.

According to First Amendment activists, when the courts secured “Frank Collin’s
right to express his ideas in order that everyone may examine those ideas and accept or
reject them,” they not only secured Collin’s right to appear in public, but strengthened and
protected democracy for all.7

But look at the actual space that Frank Collin was given by this application of his

constitutional rights. While he decided not to march around the Skokie Village Hall, he

 

6Collin v. Smith, 578 F. 2d 1197 (7th Cir 1978), cert. denied, 439 U. S. 916, 99 S. Ct.
291, 58 L Ed. 2d 264 (1978)

7David Hamlin, WWW (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1980) 175. According to Hamlin, the Illinois Director of the ACLU during the time
it represented Collin in the courts, “The First Amendment to the United States is
Democracy.” One gets a strong impression from Hamlin that whenever the courts widen
and strengthen the First Amendment application it is tantamount to securing and
stabilizing democracy.

19

did elect to exercise his right to assemble at the Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago on

June 24th, 1978 and to lead a demonstration in Chicago’s Marquette Park in ﬁrll Nazi-

military uniform on July 9th. The following account of the actual march and demonstration

that took place is given by David Hamlin, then Director of the Illinois Chapter of the

American Civil Liberties Union which represented Collin:

For obvious reasons of security, the Chicago police dictated Collin’s every move.
The Neo-Nazis were loaded into a police van and transported to the Federal Plaza
in downtown Chicago. Moving quickly and careﬁrlly, the police escorted Collin
and his followers through the basement of the Federal building and out onto the
concrete plaza. Frank Collin and his followers marched onto the plaza through a
corridor of uniformed Chicago police, emerging on the plaza itself to face a crowd
of several thousand seething, ﬁrrious, screarn-distorted faces. Although he had a
portable ampliﬁer, Collin could not be heard at all; the ceaseless angry roar made
whatever Collin said impossible to hear. The demonstration lasted no more than
ﬁfteen or twenty minutes. Frank Collin and his followers left the plaza and returned
to their headquarters under heavy police guard all the way.

Hamlin then goes on to give a briefer but similar report of the demonstration in Marquette

Park.

On July 9th, after Richard Troy had tried without success to get both the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to stop the demonstration, Frank
Collin led a demonstration in Marquette Park. Again he faced a huge hostile
audience and again his message was inaudible for the cries of opposition.

Both of these spaces were well organized and politically stable in the sense that

people on both sides of the conﬂict appeared in their proper positions, relating to one

another without “hurting” each other. They were well—ordered; separated by barricades

and police lines that kept them distinct and symmetrically related to one another. But in

what sense can we call this a democratic space where the participants are visible and

20

audible to one another? Both sides were speaking but neither was being heard; both sides
appeared in the same space but neither was visible to the other. In what sense is this space
a victory for ﬁeedom of speech? Hamlin claims that Frank Collin was secured the right to
“express his ideas in order that everyone may examine those ideas and accept or reject
them.” At the same time he tells us that Frank Collin “could not be heard at all.” Then
how did everyone exanrine his ideas and accept or reject them?

I am not suggesting that the political spaces created by the First Amendment are all
fraudulent. What I am suggesting is that when we design a free speech space that is
democratic we must pay close attention not simply to conditions of order, but to those
conditions that make the participants visible and audible to one another. Such conditions
are not automatically present. Well-designed democratic space “not only presents the
invisible, but also oﬂ‘ers conditions that make its perception possible.” The conditions of
public order are not the same as the conditions of public visibility; and the problem of
designing spaces for mutual visibility is not resolved by simply designing well ordered
public spaces where each is assigned her proper position and relative distance from one
another. In fact, it would seem that the space set aside for Frank Collin not only failed to
satisfy the conditions of visibility, but even dulled the appearances of all parties.

It is diﬂieult to keep these two sets of problems (visibility and order) distinct and
to focus on the problem of designing political spaces for mutual visibility, though it seems
we have an easier time of isolating the conditions of good democratic order. But if we
don’t get the perceptual conditions right (and mistakenly mix conditions of order with

conditions of visibility), then some citizens’ appearances may not show up at all and some

21

inequalities may not be visible or, worse yet, they may appear as conditions for everyone
making public appearances. The court orders or rulings giving Collin his free speech space
show that a political space based only on satisfying the conditions of good order and
proper arrangements may even militate against the conditions of visibility.

What I am suggesting, then, is that we rethink the meanings of democratic political
stability and democratic participation. The problem of democratic political stability is not a
problem of ﬁnding a conventional way of regulating conﬂict, but a problem of designing
conditions for sustaining public appearances among diverse human beings. The problem of
democratic participation is not who is getting onto the stage, speaking their mind and
making demands, but a problem of perceiving the mutual differences between citizens.
Ordinary citizens are essential participants in democratic spaces not merely to empower
political leaders, but because without their perceptions, their common sense of differences
among themselves, inequalities are not even seen, let alone ever remedied.

Democratic spaces are not stable places where egalitarian relationships are
guaranteed. There are no places like that. Inequalities of power are part and parcel of any
ongoing and lively human relationship. Rather, genuine stable democratic spaces are
places where these inequalities are continually being exposed, and as much as possible,
remedied by the conditions of order and the principles of justice which are established by
those who appear in public. The promise of democracy is not to secure, once and for all,
equal political power, but rather to secure a space where there are ﬁrst, objective
conditions necessary for mutual visibility and audibility (people can be seen and heard),

second, enough common sense to perceive ever new and recurring patterns of inequality,

22

and third, enough public virtue to attempt remedies of visible inequalities and to respond

to new inequalities that will eventually follow in the wake of the old.

The design of this study is to give greater attention to the problems of public
visibility and to ﬁrrther the investigation of those conditions that make public perceptions
of human beings and their inequalities most vivid.

In the next chapter I sketch an interpretation of the meaning of democratic political
space and the conditions of human visibility. I show how the metaphor of space allows us
to move the problems of democratic legitimacy beyond issues of political stability
maintained by public order and democratic participation toward more critical
considerations of how human beings appear to one another. I then suggest how our
understanding of democratic space should include conditions of human visibility that allow
inequalities of power to be exposed and remedied. I begin by examining the traditional
approaches to the problem of stability and show why I think they are inadequate. After
presenting an interpretation of the notions of public, political and democratic spaces, I
suggest how to design democratic spaces that include conditions of visibility and
conditions for a common perspective from which to perceive differences and inequalities.

In Chapters Three and Four I present the conceptions of democratic space
developed by John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, how they view the problem of stability and
democratic participation and how they approach the question of human visibility and
public order. In Chapter Three, I discuss how John Rawls’s political liberalism speciﬁes

the conditions of visibility, particularly through his use of the original position as the

23

common perspective from which citizens are to perceive one another. I focus my
examination of Rawls on whether and how Rawlsian democratic space, with its
hypothetical and constrained dialogue, provides conditions that make inequalities of power
visible and vivid enough for citizens to remedy. In Chapter Four, I present Hannah
Arendt’s conception of the political, with its reliance on a theory of human action and
speech, as an alternative to the Rawlsian conception of political space.8 I explore how an
Arendtian approach addresses the problems of visibility and order, democratic
participation and inequalities.

In Chapter Five, I return to the task of designing stable democratic spaces which
secure the conditions for human visibility and the perception of vivid public relationships. I
begin by critically examining how Rawls’s original position and Arendt’s analysis of
Kantian aesthetic judgement provide models of a common perspective by which citizens,
each within their own perspective and position, can together construct a political space in
which they are visible to one another and in which inequalities can be spotted and
transformed. I show how Rawlsian liberalism, with its design of the original position, is
more concerned with order and symmetry than with visibility, and how Arendt’s

distinction between social and political spaces allows for a much clearer focus on the

 

1'There are, of course, other alternatives to the Rawlsian conception of political
discourse, most notably Habermas’s discourse ethics with its emphasis on actual
participation. The Arendtian alternative, as we shall see, is more extreme. Also, it would
appear that Haberrnas, in his more recent work on constitutional democracy, Between
W (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996) while
placing signiﬁcant emphasis on the role of informal democratic discourse, has moved more
in the direction of Rawlsian theorists of “deliberative democracy.” See Frank Michelrnan’s
review, “Jurgen Habermas: Between Facts and Norms,” WWW, Vol.
XCHI, N. 6 (June, 1996): 307 ﬁ‘.

24

conditions of human visibility. I argue that Rawlsian political space, while providing for an
adequate account of the conditions of democratic political order, fails to give a sufﬁcient
account of public visibility needed for an adequate conception of democratic politics.
While Arendtian political space is more attentive to conditions of visibility, I also show
how her analysis of those conditions is inadequate and incomplete.

Finally I examine how Arendt’s interpretation and use of Kant’s analysis of
aesthetic judgements as a model for political judgements promises to provide a
philosophical basis for constructing a common perspective by which human beings appear
most vividly to one another. I show how Arendt’s analysis of aesthetic judgements (if
limited to forms of aesthetic judgement that reﬂect the conditions under which human
performances are given - such as found in the performing arts, particularly theatrical
performance) can satisfy both the objective conditions of human visibility and the
subjective conditions of a common perspective needed for securing mutual public

appearances of human beings in democratic spaces.

Chapter II

RETHINKING THE MEANING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES.

It is hard to understand the true notion of spectator, ignored and yet needed. The
actor’s work is never for an audience, yet always is for one. The onlooker is a
partner who must be forgotten and still constantly kept in mind . . . (Peter Brook,
W, 51) . . . Now the moment of performance, when it comes, is
reached through two passageways - the foyer and the stage door. Are these, in
symbolic terms, links or are they to be seen as symbols of separation? Ifthe stage
is related to life, if the auditorium is related to life, then the openings must be free
and open passageways must allow an easy transition from outside life to meeting
place. But if the theater is essentially artiﬁcial, then the stage door reminds the
actor that he is now entering a special place that demands costume, make up,
disguise, change of identity - and the audience also dresses up, so as to come out
of the everyday world along a red carpet into a place of privilege . . . The only
thing that all forms of theater have in common is the need for an audience. This is
more than a truism: in the theater the audience completes the steps of creation. In
the other arts, it is possible for the artist to use as his principle the idea that he
works for himself. However great his sense of social responsibility, he will say that
his best guide is his own instinct - and if he is satisﬁed when standing alone with
his completed work, the chances are that other people will be satisﬁed too. In the
theater this is modiﬁed by the fact that the last lonely look at the completed object
is not possible - until an audience is present the object is not complete. (Peter

Brook, W, 126-127)

Here Brook focuses his attention on the role of spectator and the importance of an
audience for performances in the theater. What he is concerned with is the relationship
that exists between the actors on stage and the spectators in the audience when a
performance is happening.

There are two ways to get to a theatrical performance: through the stage doors,

25

26

the path taken by actors, and through the foyer, the path taken by the audience. Brook
asks whether these two passageways are best understood as two different paths to two
different places in the theater (one to the stage, the other to the seats) or as two paths
leading to the same place, the theater where the performance is to happen.

If our understanding of theatrical performances is limited to what is happening on
the stage, then theater is “essentially artiﬁcial,” where the relationship between actors and
audience is based on costumes and disguises. In such “artiﬁcial theater” even the
spectators, because they are there simply to observe a performed spectacle, must “dress
up,” wear disguises, in order to be admitted into the “place of privilege.”

But if theater is related to life, if it is a place for meeting others and making visible
what is invisible, then the two passageways must be seen as leading to the same place. For
Brook, theatrical performances, if they are to bring about an explosion of life, do not
occur on the stage but in the theater. More speciﬁcally, they occur in the space that lies in
between the actors and the audience.

Indeed, according to Brook, there is no performance without the audience. The
audience is common to all forms of theater not because actors need to have something in
ﬁont of which they perform, but because the audience is essential for performance. A
theatrical performance that occurs in a theater (and not merely on the stage) is not simply
a product of playwrights, directors, actors and stage hands. “The audience completes the
steps of creation” of the performance, the completed work, the work by which the
invisible is made visible. In theater, and this is the signiﬁcant difference between

performing arts and other arts, the activities of both the actors and the audience are

27

essential for the creation and completion of a performance.

What Brook suggests to us as we begin to design democratic political spaces
is an understanding of political space that engages the ordinary citizen as an active
participant. prolitics is related to life, if political space is to be a meeting place where the
invisible powers that rule our lives are made visible, then democratic political space is not
simply a place in which to observe and applaud spectacles that have been well rehearsed,
ﬁnely written and expertly directed, but is instead a place that exists somewhere in
between its citizens.

In designing democratic spaces that are not “essentially artiﬁcial” and require
disguises and costumes (a “change of identity”), but are places where everyone can be
seen and heard in all their differences, we need to understand this space that lies in
between people and that brings about an explosion of life. How do we understand political
space between people and how does such space provide the conditions needed for the
perception of inequalities of power and for remedying those inequalities? I approach this
question of the meaning of democratic political spaces through the notion of political

stability.

A. RETHINKING THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRATIC STABILITY.

The traditional problem of democratic stability is said to arise because on the one
hand political power is supposed to be based on the deliberative consent of individual
citizens, and on the other hand, those citizens are often so disparate in their own political

values as to be continually in conﬂict with one another when exercising that consent. If

 

28

citizens are so divided, how can they ensure enough political unity by means of their
collective deliberation to sustain the democratic polity?

Historically the stability of many political regimes was often based on religious,
ethnic or moral unity within the society at large. Even with the doctrine of individualism,
appeals for political unity amid diversity would be made on the basis of these shared
religious or moral values, ideas and principles. But in contemporary democracies like the
United States, where such shared values and beliefs are no longer uniformly held, if ever
they were, political stability seems much more difﬁcult, if not impossible, to ensure. Today
the diversity of conceptions and beliefs of what is valuable and honorable often puts
individuals at odds with one another not only in their personal pursuits of their own good
but in their public deliberations about public goods as well. Solutions to this traditional
problem of stability have tended to concentrate on regulating public conﬂict and restricting

which issues can be placed on the ofﬁcial (state) political agenda.

One approach to regulating conﬂict focuses on identifying the right psychological
and moral characteristics among individuals which would secure their mutual cooperation
as citizens. Here we are concerned with the development of effective social institutions,
child-rearing practices or socialization processes which foster the proper psychological
dispositions and moral feelings among individuals. This approach, however, requires some
prior determination of political unity, goals and purposes in reference to which the proper

dispositions of citizens can be identiﬁed and measured. About what do we expect citizens

 

29

to cooperate? The particular virtues of cooperation will depend to a large extent upon the
nature of the cooperative venture. A further challenge for this approach is to ﬁnd the right
balance between psychological and moral unity and recognition of diversity in order to

maintain stability without the intrusive use of state power in personal and family life.

 

The more conventional approach of liberal theory has been to regulate the conﬂict
among citizens by appealing to certain principles of public reason - neutrality, impartiality
and reasonableness - by which irreconcilable differences are either precluded from entering
the political domain or regulated once they arrive there. The challenge for such an
approach is to establish a morally neutral basis for such principles and secure a consensus
among the conﬂicting parties regarding their use. Most often these principles are said to
favor more liberal positions. Other difﬁculties of this approach have to do with specifying
the relative strength of the preclusionary principles.

Those who favor strong preclusionary principles generally presume that stable
participatory democracy requires that (1) political and social conﬂicts must be limited and
controlled in their intensity, (2) the rate of political change must be restrained, (3)
economic security must be maintained, and (4) a consensus on basic political values
preserved, particularly where a pluralist social organization exists.9 With the demands of

stability understood in this way, theorists have tended to develop concrete forms of

 

9These are suggested by a reading of Carole Pateman’s analysis of “traditional
democratic theories” particularly her comments on B. R. Berelson. See Carole Pateman,

BMW (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 5-8.

30

political deliberation that fall short of the democratic ideal - citizen participation tends to
be “normalized” into predictable, routine and more conventional forms of involvement.

On the other hand, those who favor greater citizen participation argue for weaker
preclusionary principles and greater regulatory principles.10 These theorists tend to design
the idea of active citizenship around the notion of democratic deliberation and conceive of
the demands of stability much more loosely.‘l

To determine the degree to which participation of citizens in political deliberation
is feasible and defensible is to ask what sort of political stability is required and what sort
of deliberation undermines or sustains such stability. In developing a credible conception
of deliberative democracy one of the difﬁculties is to balance the demands of justice with
the ideal of democratic legitimacy. The challenge theorists face is to formulate realistic
public deliberative procedures that meet both the demands of more inclusive participation
and the demands of stability, to come up with deliberative procedures that are open and at
the same time supportive of just social structures. Can we ﬁnd a way to uphold the
democratic ideal without sacriﬁcing political stability?

For most deliberative theorists the problem of stability goes hand in hand with the

problem of participation; participation and stability are balanced in an inverse proportion

 

10For a discussion of the balance between preclusionary principles and regulatory
principles see Amy Gutmann & Dennis Thompson, “Moral Conﬂict and Political
Consensus,” Ethics 101.1 (October, 1990): 64-88.

llHabermas’s communicative rationality, for example, is open to and tolerant of a wide
range of beliefs, values, and practices. He prefers to secure stability not with “stipulations’
on the content of discourse, but with discursive procedural criteria for resolving disputes
and constructing principles of just relationships.

,

31

to each other. What kind of political stability do we need to sustain democratic
deliberative ideals of citizens as free and equal participants? And, what kind of democratic
deliberation (who, how and where) is required (permissible, possible) to maintain a stable,
just democracy? The ﬁrst question assumes some notion of deliberation among free and
equal citizens. The second assumes some notion of stability (often tied to a conception of

public justice).

 

A broader and more complex approach to the problem of stability is to situate
democratic participation within properly constructed stable political spaces. This approach
maintains that political stability can be more democratically assured not by constraining
political discourse nor by simply forming the right kind of political virtues or proper
motivation designed to keep the peace, but by constructing stable domains within which
people make their public appearances and relate to one another democratically. The idea
here is that stability is seen ﬁrst as a quality of democratic spaces which contain competing
as well as complementing human appearances and regulate human relationships, and
subordinately as a consequence of political virtues of tolerance or civility or of deliberative

processes by which conﬂicts are resolved. '2

 

12I am not suggesting that this third approach negates those mentioned above, only that
it is more comprehensive in that it also addresses the underlying basis for these other
approaches. Indeed, this broader approach, if it is to be successﬁrl, must still eventually
account for principles of regulating public discourse as well as civic virtues required for
good citizenship. One might even argue that if this broader approach fails, the narrower
liberal attempts at stability - defending the principle of tolerance and deﬁning virtues of
citizenship - will eventually collapse as well.

32

The advantage of this approach is to address the demands of political stability
independently of resolving the predicarnents that public deliberative processes might pose
for democratic participation. What do I mean by that?

Most theorists and critics of deliberative democracy build their solutions to the
problem of stability on certain kinds of allowable public discourse, claiming that public
deliberation and political judgements need to be ﬁltered through a prescribed rational
moral process which will provide an assurance of justice and efﬁciency without prejudging
the content of the discourse. But political stability cannot be assured simply by procedures
of public deliberation. We can deliberate all we want and still remain hopelessly at odds
with one another. Deliberation, even good deliberation among virtuous citizens, cannot
produce the kind of stability wherein political conﬂict is no longer part of political
relationships. Ifit did, it would not be political deliberation. It certainly would not be
democratic deliberation.

To try to found political stability solely on the basis of public deliberation is to
force citizen participation into certain restrictive forms of public appearance that in the
long run nullify the promise of democracy. To address the demands of stability by
establishing legitimate forms of public deliberation invariably limits who appears in public
and how they appear. This, in turn, leads to a kind of stability wherein there remains a
constant battle, albeit a hidden battle, between those who are in and those who are out.

Finally, and most important, if people can appear in public spaces only with certain
deliberative capacities - an ability to set goals, make plans, discern means to ends, and

make rational judgements - then one of the premiere values of democratic participation,

33

namely, its potential for recognizing inequalities and developing new and innovative
arrangements of more egalitarian human relationships, is seriously circumscribed.

In this third approach the problems of stability and participation are addressed not
by theories of deliberation which struggle to balance stability and participation by means of
deliberative procedures, but by constructing democratic spaces within which the public
appearances of citizens are vivid enough to be perceived and which provide conditions for
the perception of inequalities of power that are part of most, if not all, human
relationships. This third approach requires, therefore, that we disentangle the problem of
participation ﬁom the problem of deliberation, that we reconceptualize the meaning of
participation and that we reconﬁgure the problem of stability.

Democratic participation is not a question of how well people deliberate, but who
appears in public and how vividly they appear to one another there. And, these public
appearances are independent of, even prior to, any specialized deliberative skills people
may need in a prescribed process of public deliberation. Thus, the ﬁrst problem for
democratic participation is not how to design deliberative procedures, but how to design
political spaces in which people who appear can perceive the hidden and often unequal
powers that nrle their own lives.

Political stability is a quality of political spaces, spaces in which people appear
publicly and vividly to one another, rather than a result of more or less constrained public
deliberation. The problem of stability will be resolved by designing political spaces which
“bring about the most vivid relationships between people.” To appreciate this third

approach two notions are axiomatic: the idea of political space and the idea of designing

34

political spaces for human appearances. In the next section I will specify what I mean by
the metaphor of political space and particularly democratic political space. Following that,

I will illustrate what I mean by designing democratic spaces for vivid human appearances.

B. THE IDEA OF DEMOCRATIC SPACE AND HUMAN VISIBILITY.

I have argued above that political stability cannot be understood simply as a
consequence of certain skills or characteristics of citizens (e.g., the political virtues of
reasonableness or civility) or as a consequence of certain rules and procedures governing
democratic deliberation but is rather based on another aspect of how citizens appear to
one another. I want to now demonstrate how the idea of political space focuses our
attention more clearly on the conditions of this aspect of human appearances.

The ﬁrst point to make is that the idea of political space is already implicit in the
notion of political stability, that political stability is itself a spatial metaphor. Ordinarily
when we talk about the stability of something, we mean to indicate that it is “able to
remain in the same relative place or position in spite of disturbing inﬂuences?“ Something

is stable if it is steadfast and has the ability to withstand disrupting forces in such a way

 

13‘See “Stability,” WW, vol. 16 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
429 ff. “1. In physical senses. a. Power of remaining erect; freedom from liability to fall or

be overthrown. b. F ixity of position in space; freedom ﬁom liability to changes of place. c.
Ability to remain in the same relative place or position in spite of disturbing inﬂuences;
capacity for resistance to displacement; the condition of being in stable equilibrium,
tendency to recover the original position after displacement. Also of a body in motion:
ﬁeedom from oscillation, steadiness. d. Fixedness, not ﬂuidity. e. Of a system of bodies:
Permanence of arrangement; power of resisting change of structure. 2. Of an immaterial
thing: Immunity from destruction or essential change; enduring quality.”

35

that it will maintain its place and/or position - that is, it will retain its relationships with
other things around it and the internal relations of its own parts. Stability is an ability to
remain “standing” in place, or an ability to retain “equilibrium,” a balance between its
“parts.”

When we talk about something as physically stable, we are not simply talking
about the thing itself, its inherent or intrinsic qualities, or its component parts. To say that
something is stable is not simply to say that it has a certain size and weight, or is
composed of certain elements. Rather, to say that something is stable is to talk about its
relationship to other things in its spatial environment - for example, its weight is large
enough to keep it from falling over - or to talk about the internal relationships of its parts
to one another - for example, the bond between its parts is strong enough to resist being
broken under certain inﬂuences. A thing’s stable position is deﬁned by its ﬁxed relation to
other physical objects and their positions.

As physical stability is related to the “ﬁxity of position in space,” the political
stability of a society is the ﬁxity of public human relationships in its political space.
Political stability is the ability of the arrangements of political objects, citizens in their
relationships with one another, to retain some degree of constancy or ﬁxity; to have a
“power of resisting change of structure,” to remain in their present political relationships.
To say, for example, liberal democracy is unstable in the United States is to claim that the
political relationships that already exist between citizens are not able to withstand certain
internal or external forces.

By using the metaphor, political space, we focus attention not so much on the

36

inherent qualities of political things, say the qualities of citizenship, but more so on their
political interrelationships, on their relative locations, places, and positions - the distances
between one another, and how these distances are maintained. Thus, to understand what
citizenship ﬁrlly means, it is not enough to identify and explain the qualities or capacities of
citizens - their rationality, capacity of judgement, agency, virtues, etc. - but also how
citizens relate to one another. In talking about citizens as they appear within political
spaces, we are talking about how it is that citizens are gathered together, related to and
separated from one another, as well as their relative “movements” toward and from one
another. The problem of stability in political theory involves, ﬁrst and foremost, preserving
the spaces between citizens, by which they are related to one another. These spaces
between citizens are essential for their appearances to one another and are what I mean to
get at through the notion of political space.

Thus, discussions of political stability require an understanding of how people
enter into “politically spatial” relationships with one another, how they appear to one
another as citizens, and an understanding of the conditions that allow them to appear the
way they do, their own visibility and their “sense-ability” by which they perceive others.
As with physical spaces, we can identify a variety of political spaces. Not all are the same.
Indeed some political spaces may be oppressive, some may be enabling, some may make
certain people invisible and other people “larger than life.” These various spaces are
distinguished one from the other by their different conditions under which people appear

and are perceived.

37

2. WWW

To explore the value of the notion of political space in focusing attention on the
conditions of human appearances, I want to distinguish between public spaces, political
spaces and democratic spaces.

Consider an example of a public space where people are gathered, united and
separated around the public good of education, speciﬁcally the education of their children,
the public school. When we go into a public school, we see and hear speciﬁc things that
distinguish it from other public spaces, as well as from other public schools. What appears
to all who enter the space of a public school are the speciﬁcs of an educational
organization or structure - its faculty, students, curriculum, teaching methodologies,
disciplinary rules, administration and board policies, textbooks, budgets and tax revenues,
the buildings, size of rooms, equipment and supplies, as well as the activity of teaching and
the relationships between teachers and students.

While all these things do not appear as the same to all who look upon them, they
nevertheless do appear to all who enter this space. For example, some may see the science
equipment as inadequate, others as indulgent. But they all see the science equipment.
Some may judge student-teacher relationships as enabling, other as stiﬂing, but they all see
the relationships.

Furthermore, when we enter such a space, we also become public objects
ourselves - objects to be seen and heard by others in that same space. Upon our entry, we
are seen and heard now as parents perhaps, or as concerned citizens. Some of us may even

enter this space in two or more guises. A teacher who has a student attending the school

38

might appear in this space as teacher, as parent, and as citizen.

a. Public Spaces.

A space is considered a public space when what appears within its boundaries,
along with its deﬁning objects, are a multitude of human beings who enter and become
“objects” as they make their appearances. The public school is indeed an educational space
where the meanings and conditions of the social activity of education determine how
human beings within its boundaries are related to one another. But it is a public space
because it stipulates how human beings appear as human beings within its boundary. In
public schools human beings appear as teachers, parents, students, administrators, staff
and citizens.

The shopping mall, as a marketplace for the exchange of commodities, is also a
public space, though it is distinct from the public school in two ways: ﬁrst, it orders and
organizes human beings who appear within its boundaries differently, and second, it
“stipulates” that humans appear therein differently - now as clerks, manufacturers,
consumers, managers and stockholders, etc. 1‘ Both the school and the mall are public

spaces because a multitude of human beings exist within their boundaries and make their

 

”While the mall has places (sub spaces) within it other than retail stores, such as
theaters, restaurants, children’s play areas and so-called leisure places for sitting and
talking, even theatrical stages for “civic” events, we generally recognize that these places
are subservient to the retail exchanges. I am not distinguishing these spaces ﬁ'om the
retails shops of the mall, but instead consider the mall as a “single-minded” space. See
Michael Walzer, “Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity,” Dim (Fall, 1986): 470-475. The
point I want to make here is simply that even a retail space, by stipulating how human
beings appear to one another and ordering those appearances, is a public space.

39

appearances, in the one case as teachers or students, in the other case as consumers or
clerks.

What originally distinguishes one public space from another are the different ways
human beings appear within their respective boundaries. And, these appearances mediate
the relationships of people in those spaces. Public schools are different from shopping
malls principally because the sorts of humans who appear in schools as educational spaces
are students, teachers, administrators, parents, board members, citizens, state bureaucrats.
And it is the guises under which humans appear in these spaces that determine the
relationships between people who appear therein. The sorts of humans who appear in the
shops of a mall (sales clerks, owners, managers, investors, customers, and consumers)
condition the kinds of relationships that are possible between people appearing therein.

This is what I meant when I said earlier that the ﬁrst condition for mediating and
ordering public human relationships is the way human beings appear to one another.
Public spaces differ from one another not simply by the way they organize and mediate the
relationships of persons who appear within their boundaries, but originally by the
conditions they provide for the very appearances of persons. The key to adequately
distinguishing and eventually designing diﬂ‘erent kinds of public spaces has to do with
understanding how human beings can and do appear differently in different spaces.

What distinguishes public spaces from what we often refer to as private spaces, for

example, what distinguishes public schools from private schools, is not so much whether

 

40

public monies or resources are involved, but the guises under which people appear.15 In a
private parochial school besides appearing as a parent or teacher or student, one also
appears as a member of a religious organization, whereas in a public school such guises
are supposedly excluded. On the other hand, people do not appear as taxpayers in private
schools as they do in public schools. Still, public and private schools have much in
common. Many of the objects and guises found in private schools are similar to those
found in public schools (teachers, students, parents, citizens) and there is a sense in which
private schools are public spaces. It is because people do appear, even in private spaces, as
citizens with constitutional and civil rights that such spaces are never completely private.
Indeed, it is on this basis that we justify, though not without a certain amount of

controversy, public laws and regulations of private and parochial schools.

b. Political Spaces.

Not all public spaces are political spaces. What makes a public space political is
that in political spaces human beings appear to one another by means of their own voices
and deeds. The “objects” that exist within political spaces are human beings who speak
and act toward one another. To say that in political spaces people appear as citizens is to
say that they appear to one another as speakers and actors. Thus, the appearances of

human beings to one another in political spaces are determined by the conditions of human

 

15Private and public schools also differ in what kinds of objects appear within their
different boundaries. For example, in parochial schools there are such things as religious
symbols, rituals, events and spaces, not found in public schools. In addition, the guises of
teachers and administrators while similar are also different in that in parochial schools they
have an added element of religious authority and power.

 

41

speech and action. Political spaces are, thus, distinct from other sorts of public spaces
because people appearing therein are gathered together and separated not by material
things or exchange commodities, but by their own voices and their own actions. In this
sense political relationships are mediated directly, by the appearances of people with their
own voices and deeds.

Perhaps this is what we mean by democratic political power - the ability to make
one’s own appearance in public, to be seen and heard by others for what one says and
does. But, if so, then political power, appearing in public by one’s own words and deeds,
is not solely a ﬁrnction of the political character of individual citizens, but more so, a
ﬁinction of the conditions under which human beings speak and act toward one another.
And these conditions are not merely set by the capabilities of citizens to speak with their
own mouths and act with their own bodies, but also by the perceptual conditions (a sort of
political “acoustics”) in which spoken words are heard, and done deeds are seen. One may
use her own mouth to speak “words” which are not her own but which are the only words
available to her within the acceptable, conventional language because they are the only
ones that are heard and seen. If that is the case, the visibility and audibility conditions of
such spaces allow only certain voices to be heard and only certain deeds to be seen.

Some political spaces might be dominated by certain preferred or privileged
“words and deeds” to such an extent that these words and deeds serve as a sort of
“prototype” for anyone making her own appearance. If, in order to make a public
appearance, someone must speak with a certain tamed discourse and conventional tone of

voice, or must use a certain dialect, then we would say that her appearance is determined

42

or controlled by a privileged model of how human political appearances are made. In such
political spaces, the appearances of people are controlled by elites whose words and deeds
determine how others must speak and act if they are to appear and compete for power.
Thus, what is signiﬁcant for understanding political arrangements of power is to
understand the perceptual conditions for public human appearances by means of words
and deeds. We make vivid the given arrangements of political power by understanding
(and designing public spaces on the basis of) how it is that anyone appears in public by
means of the words they speak and the deeds they perform, rather than by asking how
people are treated by one another once they appear. That is what I hope to get at by
focusing on the idea of designing political spaces, rather than designing how people carry

on their public discourse and reason within those spaces.

0. Democratic Spaces.

Many, perhaps most, political spaces are not democratic, egalitarian spaces.
Marshall Bermarr, in a discussion with Michael Walzer and Michael Rustin about the shape
and design of urban public gathering places such as parks and malls“, describes his vision
of a modern “open-minded” public space for plural societies like the United States as

follows:

 

l6See Michael Walzer, “Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity;” Marshall Berrnan. “Take It
to the Streets: Conﬂict and Community in Public Space;” and Michael Rustin, “The Fall
and Rise of Public Space: A Postcapitalist Prospect,” Dissent (Fall, 1986): 470-494.

43

. . . It would be open, above all to encounters between people of different classes,
races, ages, religions, ideologies, cultures and stances toward life. It would be
planned to attract all these different populations, to enable them to look at each
other in the face, to listen, maybe to talk. It would have to be exciting enough and
accessible enough (by both mass transit and car) to attract them all, spacious
enough to contain them all (so they wouldn’t be forced to ﬁght each other for
breathing space), with plenty of exit routes (in case encounters get too strained),
and adequate police (in case there’s trouble) kept well in the background (so they
don’t themselves become a source of trouble). . . .

Our open-minded space must be especially open to politics. We will want
to design spaces within the larger space for unlimited speech making and
assembling. (New York’s Union Square used to have this sort of sub-space.) But
we will want our public space to be suﬂiciently differentiated that people who
don’t want to listen or join in will also have places to go. We will try to design
acoustic enclaves, such as already exist in some places (for instance, Washington
Square Park), which enable many kinds of discourse - speech, music, song - to go
on simultaneously, without drowning each other out.

No doubt there would be all sorts of dissonance and conﬂict and trouble in
this space, but that would be exactly what we’d be after. In a genuinely open
space, all of a city’s loose ends hang out, all of society’s inner contradictions can
express and unfold themselves. ‘7

A democratic political space is one in which the conditions for human appearances
are open and inviting; where the conditions provide for the perception of a diversity of
appearances of people of different classes, races, religions, ages, genders, ideologies, and
cultures - of people with different “languages” and “practices.”

Democratic spaces are vibrant and colorﬁrl, and warm enough to attract all sorts of
human beings. They are accessible to all who want to enter. They are spacious enough to
contain them all with enough room for them to breathe without having to push each other

out of the way. The conditions of perception within democratic spaces invite and enable

 

l7Marshall Berrnan, “Take It to the Streets: Conﬂict and Community in Public Space,”
Dim (Fall, 1986): 484.

44

people of such differences to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to listen to and talk
with one another directly and face to face without being “in the face” of one another.

Democratic spaces also contain enough “exits” or escapes so that when direct
human encounters in words or deeds get too strained and loud, people may leave without
having to resort to violence. Democratic spaces also contain sufﬁcient sub-localities so
that a variety of discourses can occur simultaneously without anyone being overpowered
or muted by any other, and so that anyone may move ﬁom place to place, from discourse
to discourse. There are even places for silence and calm.

Such spaces do not sort and screen who can enter and who cannot. Inconsistencies
of accent and manners are not eliminated, at least not at the entrances to such spaces. This
does not mean that everyone will be seen and heard by everyone else. That depends on a
number of factors, including the abilities of individuals to perceive differences and
diversity, the environmental conditions of the localities within the space, as well as the
willingness of people to open their eyes, to watch and listen. Proper lighting and acoustics
are essential. But in democratic spaces whether people can be seen and heard is not
decided by their accents and their mannerisms.

One cannot do anything and everything once inside democratic spaces. There is
indeed an order that needs to be maintained within these spaces as in all spaces. Orderly
arrangements are essential for justice and equity in human relationships. But that order
becomes an issue only after people enter a common political space and make their
appearances. In democratic spaces, anyone may appear. And that’s its uniqueness.

Certainly such democratic spaces that allow anyone to enter will be ﬁlled with

45

dissonant voices and conﬂicts between those vying for local sub-spaces. But again, that’s
a problem of order which is addressed by an “adequate police force kept well in the
background” - perhaps by the right sort of moral force inculcated in citizens and by the
proper education or “orientation” of those who enter the space.

There will indeed be disruptions and tensions, disorder and asymmetry between
and among democratic human appearances. But if democratic spaces are designed to
accommodate a diversity of people, isn’t that what we want? If democratic spaces are
open spaces, then all of its citizens need to have access. We could choose to preclude the
conﬂicts and disharmony by controlling who enters, but only at the cost of a certain human
impoverishment - the impoverishment of living without a density and a breadth of diverse
human relationships.

The focus of my concern is on the stability of democratic political spaces - how to
design and construct public spaces in which human beings vividly appear to and with one
another in all their ﬁrll diversity? My use of the metaphor of political space has, therefore,
the following force. In designing such spaces, we need to pay as much attention to how
peOple make their appearances with one another as we do to the ﬁnal shape of the
appearances they make; as much attention to relative conditions under which people make
their own appearances as citizens as to the capabilities and skills that citizens are required
to possess for orderly negotiations once they enter the political space; as much attention to
creating public spaces in between people as we do to creating criteria or conditions that
must be satisﬁed in order to enter such spaces.

We need to give as much attention to the design of political spaces, as we give to

46

normative criteria of how people ought to act once they appear within a given political
space. Democratic political space is not simply a product of “political character,” if we
mean by that only the political skills (including the skills of democratic deliberation) that
individual citizens have or develop. Rather it is more a consequence of the vivid
relationships between people which allow them to see others and be seen by others, to
hear others and be heard by others, as citizens with or without political character, and

whether or not they are capable of public deliberation.

C. DESIGNING STABLE DEMOCRATIC SPACES.

While physical space is a necessary part of the human condition (all human lives
are necessarily conditioned by actual space-time locations), political space is not. We
ourselves create or set up the political spaces in which we appear and about which we
move. In fact, it is because political spaces are constructed, and not given, that the
question of stability even arises in the ﬁrst place. The demands of stability make sense
because we have options in designing our own political spaces.

To approach the problem of democratic political stability is to ask which
construction of democratic space is the most stable. It should be clear by now that when I
talk of constructing stable political spaces I am not talking about establishing and
maintaining ordinary political institutions. The ordinary democratic institutions such as
constitutional deliberative bodies do not, and cannot, of themselves assure democratic
political space. Nor will any reformation of such institutions ensure that such spaces will

be democratic. The approach taken in this study recognizes that political institutions and

47

organizations are democratic only insofar as they are sustained by stable appearances of
citizens in other locales.

Thus, my concern is not with the stability of conventional political institutions, but
rather with the stability of human perceptions (humans appearing to and perceiving other
humans) - the experiences between a diversity of humans beings appearing in public. The
problem of stability, as I have reconﬁgured it, is how to design and sustain such political
spaces in which people appear by their own words and deeds, and where their vivid
appearances remain relatively stable.

But we must not forget the dangers we face in designing such spaces. Since the
political spatial conditions are not given to us (as they are with physical space), but are
themselves human constructions, the spaces we create can too easily be the products of
our own private perceptions. We need some sort of normative criterion for recognizing
those conditions that make human appearances most vivid. These normative criteria, as
suggested earlier, are based on common sense perceptions of human appearances. To get

at what these might look like, let us consider the following example.

1. WWW
To illustrate what I mean by designing a non-conventional, stable democratic
space, let us consider an example of labor-management negotiations involving the Packard

Electric Company and the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers

48

(TUE), Local 717 in Warren, Ohio.18 In May of 1978 the management of Packard Electric
and the local union established a joint Jobs Committee whose initial purpose was to
“develop an ongoing union-management approach that will maintain job security and
identify opportunities for hiring in the Warren operations” within the context of
management’s goal to increase productivity (SN, 302). During the previous summer there
were three work stoppages. Employee morale was at an all-time low. There was, by then,
a high degree of absenteeism, and the company had been steadily declining in its economic
performance. Management had earlier established its own task force to improve
productivity and the union had demanded to be represented on this task force.

Because the formation of this committee involved a new pattern of labor and
management interaction designed to go beyond addressing simple common concerns such
as a joint United Way drive, a toys-for-tots program, voter registration and credit
counseling, many of the initial statements made by the committee were designed to secure
the support and conﬁdence of employees. Thus, along with the initial purpose statement, it
was agreed early on, by all the members of the committee, that “no employee will lose his
or her job as a direct result of the project” (SN, 144). Once the employees accepted and
supported this new approach to union-management dialogue (prior negotiations involved
the traditional opening positions, offers, counteroffers, etc), the committee began then to
tackle the issues of increasing productivity while providing job security.

Following nine months of open dialogue and more cooperative approaches to the

 

"This example is taken from the case studies presented in Richard E. Walton, Joel E.
Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and Robert B. McKersie, SW (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1994).

49
problems facing both labor and management, the committee reached agreement on the
substantive issues for which it was designed. They agreed to place new branch facilities in
Warren (rather than Mississippi or Mexico), to hire 100 new employees, to appropriately
reclassify jobs in these new facilities, and to implement job rotation programs and team
work approaches to plant tasks.

But in addition to these substantive agreements which addressed the interests of
both labor and management, there was also an unexpected intersubjective space that
developed between and among the members of the committee during these negotiations
and which the committee sought to maintain in operating the new plant facilities:

We believe that every business has a responsibility to its customers, its employees,

and the community in which it exists, and shall strive to satisfy the needs and

security of each.
We share in the belief that a successful business provides and maintains an

enrdnonmentfoLohangeandis builtonafouudationoftmst, We
treated with respect and WW We are totally

committed to the patience, dedication, and cooperation necessary Muﬂdjhis

foundation
We also believe that it can be accomplished through a ﬁrnctioning partnership

built on the wisdom, the knowledge, and the understanding of the employees, the
union and management. (Wm, 302, emphasis added)

This newly developed “operating philosophy” certainly had a signiﬁcant role in
shaping future cooperative attitudes of labor and management of Packard Electric, thereby
enabling both labor and management to “get what they wanted.” But it also indicated an
entirely new and enlarged public space in which the ideals that “every person is treated
with respect,” that all are given an “opportunity to participate” and where the perspectives

of “employees, union and management” are given equal “partnership” were at least

50

advocated. The substantive issues for labor and management remain tied to the operation
and production of the company, but the experiences of the Jobs Comnrittee members made
possible the creation of a larger common perception, a common sense, within which ﬁrture
labor management relations would be worked out.

To be sure, there were competitive pressures placed on the company which
strained its collective bargaining negotiations in the following years. And, no doubt, this
partnership will continue to be strained. But this newly created shared space eventually

” 6‘

lead to a remarkable 1984 company-wide “living agreement this agreement will remain
in ﬁrll force and effect forever” - which, according to researchers, Walton, Cutcher-
Gershenfeld, and McKersie, provided management with an “underlying partnership
relationship with the union,” provided the union with “experience in joint dialogue with
management over core strategic decisions,” and provided employees with a “Lifetime Job
and Income Security Agreement for the Warren Operations.”19
In the Packard case, the construction of an enlarged “political space” followed

ﬁ'om labor and management gathering around a common concern of maintaining a viable,

secure and competitive corporation. What emerged around this concern, however, was a

 

l”Ibid., 145-147. When we look at the speciﬁc way this “living agreement” came about,
we ﬁnd that it was greatly due to the position of Nick Nichols a lone member of the union
bargaining committee. “Many of the newly elected ofﬁcials argued that the union should
withdraw ﬁ'om all cooperative activities, but Nichols took a unique stance. He urged
continued support for cooperation and attention to improving the company’s competitive
situation, but he also pressed for attention to job security.” Eventually his position
prevailed - an “enlarged perspective”. He took the position he did on the basis of judging
the situation of Packard Electric and its employees ﬁ'om the perspectives of both the
employees (his “attention to job security”) and the management (his “attention to
improving the company’s competitive situation”), not merely his own perspective.

51

“larger” common perception of who they were and how they wanted to relate with one
another. When the Jobs Committee went beyond the ordinary forms of negotiation, and
established its own innovative practice of interacting, rooted in the subjective experiences
of all its members and enlarged by the perspectives of all participants, a common sense
was formed, which allowed them to look at one another and themselves in a different way.
That common sensibility, eventually expressed in the living agreement, identiﬁed how they
were to appear and relate to one another.

They moved from a space deﬁned by an economic context of business and labor
practices and created a space of mutuality and partnership not only at the institutional level
between union and management, but also at the individual level between management and
employees. The space created by the committee and subsequently ratiﬁed by labor and
management was democratic by virtue of its conditions for human visibility; it was a space
where “every person is treated with respect and offered an opportunity to participate,”
where all participants are committed to “the patience, dedication and cooperation
necessary to build this foundation,” and where there is a “ﬁrnctioning partnership built on
wisdom, the knowledge and the understanding of the employees, the union and
management.” The appearances of people in this “ﬁrnctioning partnership” were not
regulated by how involved someone was in the negotiations of the substantive issues, nor
even by how well one spoke, but was “guaranteed” by a “living agreement,” an agreement
that allowed all participants to appear; whether they were “actors” on the stage, i.e.,
members of the committee who met face to face, or “spectators” in the audience, i.e., the

rank and ﬁle who “ratiﬁed” - gave credibility to - the work of the committee.

52

What is most signiﬁcant about the Packard case is that the enlarged, democratic
space, created by the newly constructed common sense perception of labor and
management, made vivid the invisible relationships of power that ruled the lives of both
employees and employers, and that had probably contributed to the decline of the
company’s productivity. The early recognition of the committee for the need of an initial
agreement that “no employee will lose his or her job as a direct result of the project” (SN,
144) shows how vivid the inequalities of power were to the committee members. And, the
ability to perceive these power relationships and their effects on the “visibility” and voices
of both labor and management was the ﬁrst condition that allowed the committee to
develop remedies for these invisible inequalities. The remedies they then designed were (1)
providing management with an “underlying partnership relationship with the union,” (2)
providing the union with the means for “joint dialogue with management over core
strategic decision,” (3) providing employees with a “lifetime Job and Income Security
Agreement.”

What is ﬁnally most noteworthy about the Packard case is not only the creation of
a democratic space in which they were able to make visible the inequalities of power and
resolve their substantive issues, but their recognition of the uniqueness of the space they
created and particularly their understanding of the conditions for its existence which led to
their subsequent desires or attempts to give it some degree of permanence. What they
sought to make permanent and stable was not the substantive agreements nor even the
remedies for inequalities of power, but the way they were to appear to one another as they

gathered to forge any agreement, or design any remedy. And, while Packard’s future is

53

not guaranteed and the actions of its owners and employees remain unpredictable, this
newly formed democratic space promises to provide the best conditions for making vivid

and remedying ﬁirther inequalities that may threaten the viability of the company.

2. IhoEtagilitxofllemoorauoSnaoos

The creation of an enlarged democratic space at Packard and their experience of its
positive value in remedying inequalities of power led them to try to stabilize human
appearances by means of their “living agreement.” Of course such an agreement does not
assure that the kind of space they were able to open up will continue in existence.
Certainly, if it does remain “in force and effect forever,” it is the kind of space that cannot
be enforced. Can such spaces be established in such a way as to guarantee their
continuation? If so, how?

In their sociological study of various democratic movements, BEE—$1149.95, Sara
Evans and Harry Boyte make note of what seems an inherent diﬂiculty with sustaining
democratic spaces once they’ve been opened up.

Free spaces are never a pure phenomenon. In the real world, they are always

complex, shiﬁing, and dynamic -oartialin_tlraiLfreedom_and_damocratio

Winn, marked by parochialism of class, gender, race, and other biases of the

groups which maintain them. There are no easy or simple ways to sustain

experiences of democratic participation and values of civic virtue in the heart of

broader environments that undermine them and demand, at least on the face of it,

very different sorts of values. Democratic movements have had varying degrees of

success in sustaining themselves, in spreading their values, symbols and ideas to
larger audiences, in changing the world. W5, 19, emphasis added)

The difﬁculty in maintaining such democratic political spaces seems to lie in the

54

human plurality within which they are created.20 The “liberality” and indulgence required
for such political spaces, an openness to an abundance of human relationships and to an
enlargement of innumerable perspectives needed for the formation of a common sense,
seems to further their very instability, their fragility and unpredictability.

If democratic political spaces are founded upon direct human relationships, such
spaces will indeed be fragile. People change, new members are always added to the
“ranks,” and how people relate is always undergoing modiﬁcations. The reality is that we
are only partially able to stretch beyond our own imagination and to step outside the
limiting conditions of our own histories to see the invisible and to enlarge our own
perspectives. Inequalities, “marked by parochialism of class, gender, race and other
biases,” still remain, making “democratic” spaces still undemocratic.

Because of the fragility and incompleteness of actual democratic spaces many
attempts at securing political stability opt to construct political spaces not on fragile and
unpredictable human relationships but on institutional structures, communal identities, or
human necessities that are designed to make political spaces more equitable. In the end,
however, these attempts often erode or limit the freedom of action and initiative necessary

among citizens in order to construct a common sense understanding of inequalities and

 

2"F or an excellent analysis of the historical condition under which democratic “free
spaces” are created see Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, W (New York:
Harper & Row, 1986), particularly Chapter 1, “The People Shall Rule” and Chapter 6,
“Free Spaces.” Their studies show, on the one hand, how commonplace such spaces are
and can be, and on the other how fragile and short-lived they tend to be. In some cases
attempts at institutionalizing “free spaces” - creating organizational structures around
“movements” - have led to their destruction. Our understanding of how such spaces get
created seems much clearer than why so few survive.

55

their remedies.

Let us look at a particular example taken from Evans and Boyte’s study of the
history of the labor movement that shows the difﬁculty involved in sustaining such
democratic spaces.

By the mid-1950s, what had been a vibrant, grass-roots union movement two
decades before had become largely acquiescent. In the interests of stability and
particularly under the pressure of wartime production, major unions shifted to a
mmmsjnesslikemmjon In part such quiescence can be traced to the
W under the legal protection and regulation of the
state. The very legislation that promoted unionism in the 19305, the Wagner Act
and the National Labor Relations Board which it created, also Wm
oﬂcomml over the bargaining process to the state . . . One consequence is that the
process of bargaining has become routinized and the focus of bargaining narrowed

.With the NLRB, one of the great legal achievements of the American labor
movement, one also sees the WM with its proud
defense of workers’ prerogatives, their right to deﬁne and control their work. The
trade off was for higher wages, increased job security, and a more predictable
labor system for both workers and employers. W, 144-45, emphasis
added)

While the various labor movements were begun under unfair labor conditions and
inadequate pay (inequalities of power), they were started as forms of democratic
participation, where the common laborer participated in affecting changes and acted with
one another on the basis of an equality they experienced between one another. Referring
to the 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, Evans and Boyte
reported the following:

Louis Adamic described the sit-down as a “social affair.” Thousands, suddenly idle

in the stilled factory, turned to one another in a new way. “ ‘Why, my God, man,’

one Goodyear gum-miner told me in November 193 6, ‘during the sitdowns last

spring I found out that the guy who works next to me is the same as I am, even if I

was born in West Virginia and he is from Poland. His grievances are the same.
Why shouldn’t we stick?”’ Victory in Flint was met with delirious joy. One

56

participant, decades later, told Studs Terkel what it meant: “When Mr. Knudsen
put his name to a piece of paper and says that General Motors recognizes the
UAW-C10 - until that moment, we were non-people, we didn’t even exist
(laughs). That was the big one. (His eyes are moist)” (13313124935, 143-44)

What happened between the 193 Os and 19503 was the loss of the democratic space
that originally existed between the rank and ﬁle members. In the drive for stability, the
labor movement institutionalized its functional goals and activities in an attempt to
guarantee its capabilities for negotiation - these spaces became “more businesslike in
operation” and “conceded elements of control” to governmental institutions. In doing so it
failed to adequately provide for the democratic, “artisanal” space between its members
which was the original basis of the power of the movement. In institutionalizing their
movement they stabilized their function but failed to maintain the conditions for human
appearances between their members. The basis for the stability of democratic movements,
as well as democratic institutions, lies in their success at identifying and remedying
inequalities of power by maintaining human visibility conditions. But, when the labor
movement structured itself in such a way that it turned its members into tools (strikers) for
accomplishing its goals (increased wages and better worker conditions), it lost, perhaps
destroyed, the space it had previously created for the visibility of its members and their
relationships.

I’ve twice mentioned the potential dangers in constructing democratic spaces: the
failure to distinguish the conditions of visibility from conditions of order, and the tendency
to substitute subjective perceptual conditions of visibility for objective ones. A failure to

keep the visibility and order conditions distinct resulted in the institutionalization of labor

57

movements (maintaining order) without, at the same time, protecting the visibility of its
members, what Louis Adamic called, the “social affair.” And, the substitution of subjective
perceptual conditions of visibility for objective ones resulted in the inability of labor
movements to create, or at least sustain, a common sensibility which contained Adamic’s
perspective. Adamic’s perspective, with moist eyes, was “we were people.” But the
union’s perspective deﬁned the worker as a striker. The union bosses’ perspective was
eventually adopted and resulted in the destruction of the “artisanal space” between the
workers which subsequently led to the destruction of the space in which a common sense
could be created and sustained.

So we return to the question with which we began this section: can democratic
spaces be established in such a way as to guarantee their continuance? As long as
democratic spaces are built on fragile human relationships, there are no guarantees. When
we try to stabilize democratic spaces by institutionalizing a rule for the ordering of its
members, we risk destroying the very base of their power. The base of power in
democratic spaces is the direct human relationships in which people are visible to one
another; Adamic’s “social affair.” The best we can do to stabilize democratic spaces that
retain their power is to design them in such a way that secures the visibility (and audibility)
conditions under which people appear to one another.

It is doubtﬁrl that we’ll ever construct actual spaces in which inequalities of power
are not present. But if we can construct political spaces where these inequalities are or can
be made vivid, then the participants in such spaces have a better chance of spotting and

correcting them.

58

3. mmwm

So can we design stable spaces between people in which the inequalities of power
certain to be part of public relationships appear and which allow for remedies of those
inequalities? We have heard Peter Brook’s suggestion that when we design spaces for
human appearances we need to “not only present the invisible but also offer conditions
that make its perception possible.” In the above illustrations we have suggested how
democratic political spaces provide for the appearances of human participants in all their
differences as well as the formation of a common perspective from which inequalities of

human relationships of power are seen and remedied.

a. The Conditions of Visibility.

Democratic spaces between people, that is, between people who appear to and
perceive each other in all their diversity and fragility, require two conditions: the diversity
of individuals with their distinctive voices and unique deeds, and the unity of a common
space, wherein, as distinct citizens, they speak to and hear one another.

How to balance both of these dimensions, the unity of a public space and the
diversity of its actors and spectators, can be gleaned from an allegory provided in another

labor-management case study taken ﬁom Wm:

Sometimes both parties will together make signiﬁcant symbolic moves. For
example, labor and management leaders in Budd’s Detroit plant agreed to
construct a special room for union-management meetings, but they were very
careful about designing the table for the room. They rejected a rectangular table as

59

Mammal and a round table as W. Finally, they settled on a

curved, oblong table with one end squared for the labor and management
committee 00-chairs. This design Wag
separatoidontitios (Sitatsgioblegotutirzm, 303, emphasis added)

A proper construction of democratic political space brings all, even adversaries and
outcasts, together around “the same table.” But differences and distinctions are not
ignored. In fact they are laid out clearly and for all to see. A political space built only on
our similarities (sameness) will either fail to be stable or be stable in the wrong way.
Without “retaining separate identities” there is no W, since there is no
difference, no distinction, no space in between one another. To construct a meeting space
where there is no distinction of place, no difference of perspective or position, a political
space wherein differences are left outside, is to force the participants into counterfeit
positions, deceptive and dishonest political identities that not only fail to make visible the
invisible powers that rule our lives but continue to hide them from view.

Clearly, the ﬁrst condition for democratic spaces is that all participants, whether on
the stage or in the audience, are audible and visible to one another no matter how well
they speak and present themselves. And this mutual perception can be assured only when
our spaces are designed so that diﬂ‘erences of positions that can be seen and heard most
clearly. The “visibility” of these differences of positions can be best assured not by the
actions of individuals, whether as performers or spectators, nor by the quality of the voices
they use, but by designing spaces in such a way that what exists within their boundaries
are human beings who appear in their own voices and deeds whatever the quality of those

voices and deeds. Human visibility and audibility in democratic spaces require an

6O

“acoustic” that makes audible the widest range of human voices, not merely a narrow
band of pitches and tones, and a “visual ﬁeld” in which human actions can be seen, not
simply certain qualities or virtues of actions.

For example, groups of people whose political identity and power are restricted by
existing public institutions, such as women, or the poor, are assured of their own
appearances in democratic spaces not by being taught to speak the proper political
language, and not by the prevailing powers “giving them an equal voice,” but by designing
an acoustic in which they can be heard in their own voices, no matter how “well” they
speak. The public appearances of the poor are best assured not by advocates, champions,
or promoters “standing in for them,” but by creating open public spaces in which they can
be seen in all their tattered garments and eccentric habits. Only in this way can differences

between people, and particularly inequalities of relationships of power, be even heard and

seen.

b. The Conditions of a Democratic Common Sense.

In addition to the objective conditions that assure the visibility of differences, we
need to specify the subjective conditions of perception whereby those differences are seen
and heard. Democratic spaces are created from the simultaneous positions of a diversity of
citizens, positions that are partial perspectives and local, and, at the same time, enlarged
enough to include or contain the perspectives of others. Democratic spaces are not only a
multitude of simultaneous, side-by-side perspectives on the world, but they are

interconnected, interrelated perspectives, where the perspective of one is contained in

61

another’s in such a way as to “enlarge” it.

Stable democratic spaces are best designed not around a particular method or
procedure of speaking and acting, but around a plurality of citizens who, by presenting
their own positions and, thereby, their own perspectives, their own faces, their own
voices, their own personae, their own public masks to one another, together determine
how the world is to look and how we are to act and live in it politically.

The notion of one’s “political position” contains the idea of perspective, as in “My
position toward the policy of afﬁrmative action is . . . ,” but also adds two other
dimensions; the notion of locality, one’s position within a given political space, how one is
related to others, and, as the meaning of its root word, “posit,” suggests, the notion of
acting or doing something, to posit or place oneself in a relationship with others. Thus, to
take a political position is not only to hold a particular perspective of one’s political world,
but also to place oneself within that political world, to be located in relation to others.

This subjective condition that makes possible the perception of human appearances
in their diversity is the formation of a common sense, an ability to perceive the world of
human aﬂ‘airs together, commonly. It is a sense that we all can share, by enlarging our
own perspective, and which provides the basis for constructing a uniﬁed political world
from the diversity of positions. The common political world is not the world as we know it
to be, as a spectacle seen from the perspective of an onlooker, but the world as we
compose it, a composition; a combining of a plurality of interconnected positions that
creates the world between us.

One of the more promising approaches to understanding the problem of political

62

stability as both a problem of specifying the objective condition of visibility and the
subjective conditions of human perception and of enlarging one’s perspective is the
political constnrctivism of John Rawls. Rawls’s vigorous recognition of pluralism and his
belief in the human capacity to construct objectively just political relationships has led him
to design a democratic space, “justice as fairness,” in which the appearances of all human
beings are built on a common point of view that all can share. In the next chapter I
examine Rawls’s approach with the hope of laying out more speciﬁcally both the
conditions of visibility in the political space he constructs and the conditions for the
formation of a common sense (Rawls’s original position) for remedying inequalities of

power.

Chapter [11

JOHN RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRATIC STABHJTY.

Life is moving, inﬂuences are playing on actor and audience and other
plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events join in the constant
rewriting of history and the amending of the daily truth. In fashion houses
someone will thump a table and say ‘boots are deﬁnitely in’: this is an
existential fact. A living theater that thinks it can stand aloof from anything
so trivial as fashion will wilt. In the theater, every form once born is mortal;
every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the
marks of all the inﬂuences that surround it. In this sense the theater is
relativity. Yet a great theater is not a fashion house; perpetual elements do
recur and certain ﬁrndamental issues underlie all dramatic activity. The
deadly trap is to divide the eternal truths from the superﬁcial variations;
this is a subtle form of snobbery and it is fatal. (Peter Brook, IheEmpty

Space, 16)

A. THE DEADLY TRAP

In this passage Brook cautions us that in designing spaces where human
relationships are vivid enough to be seen W, we must be careﬁil not to
idealize the human realities we seek to make visible. Good theater, where the invisible is
made visible, cannot overlook the contingent, even fashionable aspects of life without
losing touch with the lived experiences of the spectators in the audience. All human
relationships, including those between actors and audience, are between living, breathing
people who appear to one another by speaking with particular accents and tones of voice
and by acting with distinctive gestures and styles of behavior. These elements of “staging”

63

 

I

64

who we are and how we appear to one another are “mortal forms” that are yet tied to the
meaning of who we are and how we relate to one another. Both the invisible recurring
patterns of human relationships that rule our lives (“eternal truths,”) as well as their
“mortal forms” (“superﬁcial variations”) are necessary for the invisible to appear. They
cannot be divided. They are both the stuff of humans appearing to one another.

In designing democratic spaces, we cannot simply disregard the so-called
superﬁcial elements of human relationships or rise above them into an abstract world of
ideal relationships free from the inﬂuence of “fashions,” traditions, customs and
conventions. To do so is to lose touch with common sense and the world in which we live.
The recurrent patterns of behaviors that rule our lives can be made visible and appear only
in their contingent mortal forms, though these mortal forms must be reconceived if we are
ever to transcend our own experiences and come to recognize the inequalities in our own
ﬁves

The construction of a political space which “divides” the recurring appearances of
humans to one another from their contingent forms of staging, and “stands aloof from
anything so trivial as fashion,” is, as Brook suggests, “a form of snobbery and is fatal.”
The snobbery comes in when we think we can capture the invisible elements of human
relationships without taking into account those very contingent and changing forms of
human appearances. We need to keep them both together, without denouncing or
demeaning either.

In Chapter One I suggested that the ﬁrst ﬁrnction of democratic space is to make

vivid what is hidden in human relationships so that those inequalities that rule our lives can

65

become visible and remedied. In designing democratic spaces in which ﬂesh and blood
relationships are vivid enough to be seen we must not divide the recurring patterns of
human relationships from the particular patterns in which they are fashioned. Any political
space which fails to keep the eternal truths of recurring patterns that “rule our lives”
conjoined with the “superﬁcial variations” of human appearances will fail to make the
invisible visible. Dividing these leads us into the second danger of which I spoke in
Chapter One. By separating the eternal patterns from the individual perspectives, we lose
touch with a common perspective from which to judge conditions of visibility and risk
substituting an elite, private perspective for an objective one.

John Rawls’s political liberalism promises to construct a democratic space, “justice
as fairness,” out of the “fashionable” values inherent in contemporary western democracy,
but with an awareness of what recurs in just human relationships. His form of
constructivism attempts to reconceive the “settled” democratic values in the background
culture of western societies into a conception of the political domain’s just and democratic
organizing values and procedures.21 Within the political space of “justice as fairness”
Rawls thinks that he has distinguished, in a way that integrates without dividing,
individuals’ conceptions of the good (those “superﬁcial variations” and differences among
human appearances) and the “eternal truths” of what is just for all free and equal citizens

(the public political conception of “justice as fairness”). According to Rawls, “Justice as

21“We start, then by looking into the public culture itselfas a shared ﬁrnd of implicitly
recognized basic ideas and principles. We hope to formulate these ideas and principles
clearly enough to be combined into a political conception of justice congenial to our most
ﬁrmly held convictions.” John Rawls, BohticaLLiberaﬁsm, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993) 8.

t1

66

Fairnessz”
provides a publicly recognized point of view from which all citizens can examine
before one another whether their political and social institutions are just. It enables
them to do this by citing what are publicly recognized among them as valid and
suﬁicient reasons singled out by that conception itself. Society’s main institutions
and how they ﬁt together can be assessed in the same way by each citizen,
whatever that citizen’s social position or more particular interests. (John Rawls,

2].. ”.1 l 9)

For Rawls, an adequate liberal account of stability is the only way to defend human
differences, “superﬁcial variations,” (the differences that make a difference, Rawls calls,
“reasonable pluralism”) within a political unity.22 Thus, to determine how successﬁrlly
Rawls’s design of democratic space provides for the vivid appearances of inequalities in
human relationships, we need to consider his solution to the problem of political stability
and how well he keeps the “eternal truths” of just human relationships tied to those

“superﬁcial variations” of individual lives.

B. RAWLS’S TWO PROBLEMS OF POLITICAL STABILITY.

Rawls has quite a variety of things to say about stability. In AThem;L9_f‘_.[us_ti_c_e23

 

22“Justice as fairness aims at uncovering a public basis of justiﬁcation on questions of
political justice given the fact of reasonable pluralism. Since justiﬁcation is addressed to
others, it proceeds ﬁ'om what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared
fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from
them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgement, this
agreement being stable in virtue of its gaining the support of an overlapping consensus of
reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (John Rawls, Wan, 100-101).

23John Rawls, Wang; (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1971.

67

he talks about “the problem of stability” and about two kinds of instability (TJ, 336), one
stemming from the problem of isolation and other from the problem of assurance. He also
talks about the “stability of social cooperation” (TJ, 138) and “the stability of a conception
of justice” (TJ , 498). He speaks of “inherent stability as a consequence of psychological
laws” (TJ, 498), and relative stability of justice as fairness compared to other conceptions
(TJ, 496). In Wm he tells us that the problem of stability has caused him to
signiﬁcantly revise certain parts of Them - that the account of stability in lhmgy is a
serious problem (PL, xvii). He talks about “the question of stability” yet says it involves
two questions. The ﬁrst question, whether people will support the well-ordered society, is
answered by “setting out a moral psychology,” while the second question, whether people
will support the political conception of justice, is answered by “the idea of an overlapping
consensus” (PL, 141).

To focus my review of Rawls’s position on stability, I ﬁrst identify and distinguish
two distinct problems of political stability with which Rawls concerns himself. I will refer
to these two problems as (1) the problem of political stability resolved by proper
motivation and embodied in virtues of citizenship, and (2) the problem of political stability
resolved by a political conception that is the subject of an overlapping consensus. Both of
these problems deal with securing the kind of social cooperation that Rawls feels is needed
for a stable democratic political scheme, though they address two diﬁ‘erent aspects of that
cooperation.

Rawls’s concern for stability in Theory was whether the well-ordered society

organized around the conception of justice as fairness would “engender in human beings

“x K

68

the requisite desire to act upon it” (TJ, 455). In Them the stability of the well-ordered
society, though desirable for the feasibility of justice as fairness - whether people would be
motivated to accept its scheme of justice - is not decisive for its justiﬁcation or legitimacy
(TJ, 45 5). Justice as fairness is justiﬁed on the basis of rational decisions made by persons
in the original position, not on whether it is a stable political domain. This is what Rawls
means by the “two stages of the exposition of justice as faimess.”2‘ The construction and
justiﬁcation of the well-ordered society is done in the ﬁrst stage. Stability becomes an
issue only in the second stage. Whether justice as fairness is stable depends on whether
people living within the well—ordered society will be appropriately motivated to accept the
normative demands of its principles of justice. This problem of stability involves the
appropriate motivation of citizens to abide by justice as fairness.25 The problem of stability
in Theory is whether the scheme created by justice as fairness will result in the proper

form of social cooperation among citizens - a cooperation insured more by individual

 

2"See John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New
W, 642 (May 1989) 233-255, and John Rawls,11ol_iti_oal_Li_b_eralism, 64 f,
133 f., 140 f.

25Sometime Rawls will talk about the stability of social cooperation and sometimes
about the “stability of a moral conception of justice.” In Him both mean the same
thing. Consider: “The stability of a conception depends upon a balance of motives: the
sense of justice that it cultivates and the aims that it encourages must normally win out
against propensities toward injustice” (John Rawls, W, 454). Thus, the
notion of “stability of a conception,” for Rawls, simply means that the conception in
question, were it to organize the basic structures of society would generate the
appropriate motives and actions to abide by its principles. Stephen Esquith, 1113mm
Spectacle, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) 177-180, also suggest that these two
ways of talking about motivation are Rawls’s accommodations to his audiences;
psychological motivation talk is addressed to the social scientists; stability of conception
talk is addressed to political philosophers. When we get to BoliﬂcalLiheLalism, however,
as we will see, Rawls means something different by stability of a political conception.

69

motivation and less by external forces of law and punishment.

The motivational stability of a well-ordered society concerns Rawls only after the
schema is set up, during the second stage, and appears as a sort of litmus test of how well
the construction went. Ifthe well-ordered society, conceptualized as “justice as fairness,”
and constructed on the basis of fundamental ideas in western society, does not engender
the support of members living within its domain, then, while it may be philosophically
justiﬁed, it is faulty and not deserving of our support.

By the time we get to W133, though Rawls does not give up his
concern for the motivational stability of “justice as fairness,” the problem of stability takes
on, as he says, a much more decisive role because of what he calls the fact of reasonable
pluralism. Ifit turns out that people with “opposing though reasonable comprehensive
doctrines” cannot afﬁrm the principles of a well-ordered society, that is, justify the
principles to themselves, then political stability will be unattainable, even if it can be shown
to generate the right kind of motivational stability. Here the concern for stability is no
longer simply a problem of showing how people will be appropriately motivated to go
along with the principles of justice, but now it is a problem of designing the well-ordered
society in such a way that its “citizens who afﬁrm reasonable although conﬂicting
comprehensive doctrines” will also reasonably aﬁrm the “public conception of justice.” If
its citizens do not so aﬂirm this conception, then, as Rawls says, the well-ordered society
“would not be liberal” (PL, 143).

Stability of the political conception of justice differs from motivational stability for

Rawls in that the stability of the conception is “on our minds from the outset” (PL, 141); it

\\\§

70

arises during the construction phase of the conception of the well-ordered society. Since
the requisite political conception must be able to be afﬁrmed from a variety of conﬂicting
yet reasonable points of view, it must be constructed with this kind of conceptual stability
in mind. Thus, while the motivational stability of justice as fairness is not decisive, Rawls
tells us that its conceptual stability is.26

This way of speaking may sound somewhat peculiar. How is it that a conception is
stable or unstable? For Rawls a conception is stable if it is appropriately “acceptable” to
citizens and “supported” (PL, 143) as the conception under which people are willing to
organize the society in which they live. Thus, stability of a conception is not a quality of
the conception itself but a quality of how that conception is held among the members who
are organized by it. It’s stable if it’s afﬁrmed by its members. But what does it mean to say
that a conception is aﬂirmed? Rawls is concerned that the conception he offers is
accepted as more than a simple modus vivendi. He wants the conception to be accepted
because it is the “right” conception. Rawls’s concern for conceptual stability is not simply
another way of talking about how citizens are motivated to accept the conception that

Rawls is advocating. There is a difference between how one justiﬁes a conception and the

 

26There might appear to be a degree of ambiguity here in Rawls. On the one hand he
continues to maintain that the justiﬁcation of justice as fairness is done in the ﬁrst stage of
constructing the well-ordered society and is modeled by the original position, while the
question of stability does not arise until the second stage. On the other hand he says that
the problem of stability has guided the construction of justice as fairness as a free standing
view. While the problem of stability for Rawls does not arise until the speciﬁc facts of
plurality are known, still the justiﬁcation of justice as fairness must be done in a such a
way to secure the sort of stability required in the second stage. As he says, “Unless it is so,
it is not a satisfactory political conception of justice and it must be in some way revised.”

(John Rawls BolitioaLLibotalism, 141)

71

motivation one has for accepting it.

Rawls sees the problem of conceptual stability arising out of what he calls the fact
of pluralism, whereas the problem of motivational stability arises within most political
conceptions under most historical conditions. Because of the contemporary conditions of
pluralism, the conceptual problem of political stability addresses the need to establish a
conception of the political domain that encompasses a plurality of views. On the other
hand the problem of motivational stability must be addressed by any political system
whether it applies within the conditions of pluralism or not.

This may explain why Rawls observes that the problem of stability has always been
a concern within political philosophy and yet has played very little role in the history of
moral philosophy (PL, xvii)” It is only relatively recently that moral philosophers have
begun their speculations with the assumption that some competing moral theories with
irreconcilable differences are equally reasonable. Rawls clearly accepts this assumption.
The differences between competing moral theories will not and cannot be ﬁrlly resolved
among reasonable persons. And Rawls’s concern with political stability now, as distinct
from the more limited concern in Ihegry with motivational stability, is to defend the basis
for political unity under the assumption of reasonable pluralism.

In Rawls’s introduction to Bohtjgalﬂhecalism, where he talks of the

 

27Brian Barry in his review essay on “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” (Ethjgs
105, 4 (July, 1995) 874-915) is puzzled by Rawls’s remark here. IfBarry is correct and
the problem of stability is for Rawls always a problem of motivation then Rawls’s remark
is puzzling. But I don't think the Rawlsian problem of stability can simply be
“rechristened” as the problem of order. Rawls is also concerned with the plurality of
appearances.

72
Enlightenment project, he says that his political liberalism has no ambitions to “replace
those comprehensive views nor to give them a true foundation.” Here Rawls claims that
he is not concerned with justifying any comprehensive - ﬁll] or partial - conception of the
good - Rather, he is concerned with the justiﬁcation of a political conception; that is, a
justiﬁcation of the meaning of the political domain for constitutional democracy, a domain
which he wants to found on grounds that bridge any and all comprehensive, reasonable
views of morality. Indeed, the primary project of Politigallhhemhsm is, according to
Rawls, to recast Justice as Fairness more ﬁrmly as “freestanding.”
This is the job of his constructivism so essential to his political liberalism. Where
Kant sought to found morality on grounds independent of conﬂicting religious views,
Rawls seeks to mark out a political domain on grounds independent of moral
(Comprehensive) views. And where Kant sought to construct moral norms which all
reliSious views could embrace, Rawls seeks to found a political domain that all
“reasonable” moral or metaphysical comprehensive views can embrace.

I asked above what does it mean to accept a political conception and how does this
“acceptance” differ from the question of motivation. We are now better prepared to
a“Swer that question. For Rawls, there are two ways that a political conception needs to
be JUStiﬁed in a pluralistic society, two ways that pluralism impinges upon the question of
just“flotation. First, under the condition of reasonable pluralism, the political conception
mu“ be justiﬁed independent of any comprehensive conception. Otherwise the political
domain favors one view and pluralism is threatened. Rawls presents Justice as Fairness as

mdePendent in this way by means of his constructivism and the procedure of the original

73
position. This is the ﬁrst stage for Rawls, a complete justiﬁcation (though not the only
justiﬁcation) of his political conception. This justiﬁcation appeals to those who seek to
found social unity independent of individual moral or religious values.

But, if “justice as fairness” was justiﬁed only in this way, then its stability would be
in jeopardy, depending on whether those who seek to found social unity on moral or
religious values afﬁrm it. Since reasonable pluralism holds, Rawls considers it insufﬁcient
for stability to justify a political conception as ﬁ'eestanding. Besides being freestanding,
which assures everyone that it does not favor anyone arbitrarily, it must also be part of an
overlapping consensus, which assures everyone that it will be abided by all. That is to say,
it must also be justiﬁable from the perspective of the many views which are part of the
reasonable pluralism. This second justiﬁcation, perhaps a better term is its “plural
JUStiﬁablity,” is what Rawls means in Poh'trgauiheﬂh'sm by the second question of

Stability, the stability of the political conception. Without being justiﬁable from these many
Views, the political conception may be legitimate and just, but it is not stable.

The problem of political stability of the conception is not, according to Rawls, the
problem of maintaining order or political unity. Rather it is a modern problem, following
ﬁ'Om the effects of the Enlightenment, of ﬁnding a way for practical reason to rise above
r 931 differences, but without abandoning those differences, and establish a basis for
Political unity.

This second problem of political stability is not a search for the proper motivation
0f accepting the principles of justice in order to put them in place. Rather, it is a search for

a re"isonable justiﬁcation of those principles from within the various reasonable

74

comprehensive conceptions.

Rawls sees political liberalism as the only way to both accept reasonable pluralism
and at the same time provide a ground for political unity. Given the “fact of reasonable
pluralism,” political unity or ﬁrll political stability will be secured only if: (1) we can
successﬁrlly separate the justiﬁcation of normative politics from ﬁrll or partial
comprehensive normative moralities (this is the work of political constructivism), (2) we
can show that this normative political domain is justiﬁable from the varieties of reasonable
comprehensive views (this give us a political stability that is secured by an overlapping
consensus), and (3) we can show that once in place this freestanding political scheme will
PI’Oduce the right kind of citizen who will go along with its principles of justice (this gives
US the proper kind of motivational stability).

For Rawls, the problem of political stability involves both motivational stability and
coIlceptual stability because his project is ecumenical, namely, to found political unity

Within a diversity of reasonable pluralism. Let’s begin with the problem of motivational
stability.

C. MOTIVATIONAL STABILITY AND THE VIRTUES OF CITIZENSHIP.
I said above that the problem of political stability in Theory is seen by Rawls
foremost as a psychological problem, where the issue of stability is whether justice as

fairHess will generate the proper inclinations and sentiments among its citizens to act

75

according to its principles.28 There he asks whether and how, within a society organized

around the principles of justice as fairness, cooperation in maintaining the just society can
be secured among its citizens. Whatever justiﬁcation he may claim to make on behalf of
the principles of justice as fairness ﬁom the original position, if the well-ordered society is
not able to generate the proper dispositional support among its citizens then, according to
Rawls, it is “seriously defective” and ought not warrant our support. Thus, while
psychological motivational stability is not decisive for the justiﬁcation of justice as
fairness, it is nevertheless decisive for its feasibility.

The problem of psychological stability arises for Rawls because, while the
Principles of justice are justiﬁed collectively, “acting fairly is not in general each man’s
best reply to the just conduct of his associates” (TJ, 497). In other words, while the
Principles of justice as fairness are justiﬁable ﬁ'om the standpoint of the original position,
that is, they are “collectively rational,” they may not be rational from the standpoint of the

indiVidual. Given one’s own life plan and the principles of instrumental rationality, the

illdividual’s rational choice may involve acting in a way contrary to the principles of justice

as fairness.29

 

 

28Consider: “To ensure stability men must have a sense of justice or a concern for those
Who would be disadvantaged by their defection, preferably both. When these sentiments
are ' to overrule the temptations to violate the rules, jusLschemesam
$131212” (John Rawls, W, 497, emphasis added). In fact, Rawls only talks of
1’ elative stability” in Theory. The idea is that “justice as fairness” is more stable,
iiSYChologically, than any other candidate for a public conception of justice. See section 76

29“It may be useful to recall that the problem of stability arises because a just scheme of
cgopel'ation may not be in equilibrium, much less stable. To be sure, from the standpoint
o t e original position, the principles of justice are collectively rational; everyone may

76
In other words, the problem of psychological stability arises, according to Rawls,
because of a gap between the exercise of collective rationality and the exercise of
individual rationality. People will rationally choose to organize social institutions
according to the principles of justice as fairness within the perspective of the original
position, but may, at the same time, rationally choose to act contrary to those principles

when taking their own individual self-interested perspective.

Thus, the problem of psychological stability, according to Rawls, has to do with
Whether the political sphere organized by justice as fairness provides for the development
of individual moral psychologies that will assure citizens’ support of its basic institutions.
The worry that Rawls has here and, therefore, the focus of his diagnosis of psychological

instability is a too feeble willingness among citizens acting from their own perspective to
Support the basic institutions of political liberalism, which they would choose in the
Original position with its appropriate veil of ignorance. What he wants is conﬁdence that
citizens, with ﬁrll awareness of who they are, will, for the most part, support liberal just

institutions, which they would choose as ideal citizens.

Psychological stability focuses on individuals’ sentiments and dispositions and

seeks to make sure that just institutions will be supported. The assumption here is, of

\

e"(Dem to improve his situation if all comply with these principles, at least 1n comparison
“nth What his prospects would be m the absence of any agreement. General egoism
r 3131‘ esents this no-agreement point. Nevertheless, from the perspective of any one man,
th ﬁrst person and free rider egoism would be still better. ..Just arrangements may not
e in equilibrium then because acting fairly rs not in general each man’s best reply to the
in“ c0nduct of his associates. To insure stability men must have a sense of justrce or a
coneel’n for those who would be disadvantaged by their defection, preferably both. When
" ‘Alliivli 31-11 ‘10-!00‘01‘ ,° 110-01 trrr‘h‘ a

”(John Rawls, Iheemﬂnsﬂee, 496-7, emphasis added).

77

course, that the institutions are just according to the principles of justice as fairness. The
question is whether individuals, acting as individuals within the well-ordered society, will
support these just institutions. Rawls argues that for the most part they will, and that we
need not worry about the liberal individual undermining the well-ordered society.
Psychological instability, according to Rawls, has two sources; the normally moral
and responsible citizen and the “special psychologies” of envy, intolerance and “self-
reproach leading to self-doubt.”

The special psychologies, as sources of instability, do not appear to Rawls to pose

a major threat to the stability of the well-ordered society. He claims that, most often, the
intolerant individual will eventually become tolerant the longer he is tolerated (TJ, 219).
And, the self-abasing individual will not likely, over time, be found in the well-ordered
society since all citizens live according to a rational life plan and “a rational individual is
aiWays to act so that he need never blame himself no matter how his plans ﬁnally work

out” (TJ, 422).

Rawls thinks the special psychology of envy will be a minimal source of instability
in the well-ordered society for two reasons. First, justice as fairness, being a contractual
conCeption, supports equal respect for, and the dignity of, all individuals. And, since in the
Weli-Ordered society “no one supposes that those who have a larger share are more
d“efﬁng from a moral point of view,” the basis for envy is diminished (TJ, 536). Rawls
r eminds us that envy is not resentment. In the well-ordered society if there is a difference

Of advantage it can only be based on the “principle of difference” where the least

adVillltaged are compensated. Secondly, the tendency in a well-ordered society is that

78
people “divide into so many non-comparing groups, the discrepancies between these
divisions not attracting the kind of attention which unsettles the lives of those less well

placed” (TJ, 537). Thus, there are few occasions where the less fortunate are likely to

experience their lesser fortune.

On the other hand, normal psychologies are potentially destablizing to the well-
ordered society in two ways. First, because actual social decisions are made by individuals
in isolation of one another, there is the “normal” tendency of moral agents to take
advantage of public provision especially if they don't get caught. This is the “free rider”
problem. Second, even if one is willing to support the basic institutions, there is the
“natur ”tendency to withhold support without some promise that for the most part all
Others are supporting it as well. This is the “assurance” problem (TJ, 267-68 and 336).

The solution to these “norm ” sources of psychological instability, according to
Rawls, is to set out acceptable ways within the well-ordered society that citizens will
Ultimately acquire the appropriate sense of justice by which they support both the basic
lUSt institutions as well as the enforcement of regulations that discourage free-riders and
defectors. Rawls, of course, claims that a society ordered by justice as fairness will
aPPI‘Opriately address these “normal” sources of psychological instability.

In Iheery, the argument he uses is based upon assuming the validity of certain
PSYChological conceptions of normal moral development as laid out by Piaget and
Kohlberg. There, Rawls’s talks of normal psychological development consisting of three
“tendencies”: ﬁrst, the individual’s development of basic moral sentiments of love and

trust toward parental authority ﬁgures (given favorable circumstances in “family”

 

79

institutions), what he calls the “morality of authority,” second the movement from family
to larger “associations” in which the sentiments of love and trust are extended to others
with whom they enter into free and relatively equal relationships, the “morality of
association,” and third the eventual recognition that it is the basic structure of society
which supports and conditions these “families” and “associations,” which leads to a sense
of justice and to a commitment to the “highest order principles” reﬂected in the basic
Structures of a just society, what he calls, the “morality of principles.”

When Rawls talks about the need for a ﬁrller account of these three principles of
moral psychology what he calls for among other things is a theory of learning and a theory
Of modeling and imitation (TJ, 495). It is easy to see how the concept of model (a

Standard, pattern or exemplar to be imitated) is central to all three stages.

Clearly in the morality of authority the concept of authority as model to be
imitated plays a central role. To be sure the parental authority ﬁgure cares for, loves, and
bUilds up the self-esteem of the child. In turn, the child comes to trust and love her
Parents. This trust and love are shown as the child “strives to be like them, assuming they

are indeed worthy of esteem and adhere to the precepts which they enjoin. They
exemplify, let us suppose, superior knowledge and power, and set forth appealing
e"(arrlples of what is demanded” (TJ, 465). The morality of authority is a primitive morality
ﬁ'om the child’s vantage point, not in its concept of authority as exemplar, but “because
for the most part it consists of a collection of (moral) precepts” (TJ, 466). Its prized
Virtues are “obedience, humility and ﬁdelity” to these authorities, and its leading vices are

“disobedience, self-will and temerity.” Its motivation is obedience and ﬁdelity to authority.

 

80
In the second stage of moral development the mode of presentation of moral
precepts changes though motivation as imitating authority seems to be retained. The
presentation of morality now becomes the common sense rules and moral standards
appropriate to one’s new found roles, but the authority for these new precepts presents
itself as “attractive and admirable persons.”30 The attachment “to our fellow associates
and then later to social arrangements generally” (which eventually secure the needed
PSYChological stability), are acquired “when others of longer standing membership do their
part and live up to the ideals of their station” (TJ, 470). With regularity of such
attachments mutual trust and bonds of ﬁiendship eventually develop, “thereby holding
them ever more securely to the scheme.” In due course “newer members of the association
reCognize moral exemplars, that is, persons who are in various ways admired and who
exitibit to a high degree the ideal corresponding to their position.” The virtues of this
morality of association are the “cooperative virtues” of fairness, ﬁdelity, trust, integrity
and irnpartiality. Its vices are “graspingness and unfairness, dishonesty and deceit,
Prejudice and bias” (TJ, 472).
When we ﬁnally get to the morality of principles, the bond of cooperation is based
“or on a “fellow feeling,” that is, not on an imitation nor the approval of our associates but
on dOing the right thing, on the tightness of the principles themselves. In this third stage of

m0!” a1 development “moral attitudes are no longer connected solely with the well-being

\

30“The same two psychological processes are present as before (in morality of
authority): other persons act with evident intention to afﬁrm our well-being and at the
Sarge time they exhibit qualities and ways of doing things that appeal to us and arouse the
eSH'e to model ourselves after them” (Ibid., 472).

81
and approval of particular individuals and groups, but are shaped mm
W. Our moral sentiments display an independence
from the accidental circumstances of our world, the meamngoﬂthiﬂndependmbeing
u 5; . 1' .~ .r: In ._ h . 'u'. u iior .. i .4 ..m- . ~ .. o ”(TJ,475,
emphasis added).

But while the principles themselves are chosen on the basis of their rational
justiﬁcation, the actual selection of those principles and our willingness to support them
(psychological stability) are based on trusting the model of citizenship in the well-ordered
society. The ideal citizen is one who chooses principles of justice within the constraints of
the original position. Citizens in the well-ordered society are willing to imitate that model.

Model as moral authority, authority as exemplar, and imitation as motivation play a
role not only in the ﬁrst stage and not only in the morality of association but also the
morality of principles, though there the authority ﬁgures are no longer parents, nor
association members, but the ideal (moral) citizen who takes a constrained but shared
perspective in choosing principles of justice.

In W Rawls abandons this psychological explanation in favor of a
“philosophical moral psychology.” In W he bases his conception of moral
motivation on an analysis of object-dependent, principle-dependent and conception-
dependent desires rather than on a prescriptive theory of psychological development. Still,

in Wm as well as in Theory, what ultimately secures motivational stability

82

within the well-ordered society is the appeal of an ideal of citizenship.31

Keeping in mind that the problem of motivational stability addresses the issue of
accounting for individuals’ moral motivation to act according to the principles of justice,
justice as fairness engenders the right kind of motivation because of the way it “connects
the desire to realize a political ideal of citizenship” with the citizens’ moral capacities (PL,
85). The scheme of justice as fairness achieves political stability, according to Rawls, not
only because its principles of justice serve to adjudicate conﬂicts between and among
citizens fairly and in a way that all can have conﬁdence, as any scheme (whether in a plural
society or not) must do, but also because the conception of justice as fairness serves to
“widely” educate its citizens on how they ought to regard themselves (a more proper form
of motivation for contemporary liberal societies).32

The ideal citizen chooses her principles of justice from the perspective of the
original position. The ideal citizen desires to act from these freely chosen principles. And
the ideal citizen recognizes that these principles “belong to and help to articulate” (PL, 84)
the political conception of a just society. This ideal of citizenship is woven into the entire
scheme of justice as fairness.

We said above that the question of motivational stability for Rawls is whether we

 

31In Bolitjcaluheralism, footnote 9 on page 143, Rawls indicates that his account in
111m, esp. chap. VIII. of part III, of the sort of stability secured by sufﬁcient motivation
of the appropriate kind acquired under just institutions, “suﬁces, for our purpose here, to
convey the main idea.” I do not think he rejects his 11mg argument for psychological
stability, though in Wham he develops it independent of the Piaget/Kohlberg
theory.

32See John Rawls, Buliticallaheralism, 71 f.

83

can reasonably expect the principles of justice as fairness to be acted upon by citizens
living within the domain of a society structured by it. It should be clear by now that the
concern of motivational stability for Rawls is a concern with showing that the scheme of
the well-ordered society regulates the instability that comes from isolated decision-making
through a minimal form of political education and formation of political virtues - what
Rawls calls “the wide role of political conception as educator” (PL, 86).

The well-ordered society, with its conception of citizens as free and equals, models
an ideal of citizenship and inculcates in its members the desire to imitate the cooperative
political virtues of the ideal citizen. This is Rawls’s answer to the second general approach
to the problem of political stability, which we identiﬁed in the introductory chapter as
“political education and development of political virtues.” Rawls’s approach to political
education and to the development of political virtues and habits is based on the notion of
imitating the ideal citizen.

The ideal citizen is one who, when concerned with public matters, can enter into
the original position whenever necessary. Thus, motivational stability is secured in the
well-ordered society by citizens who habitually enter the original position whenever they
ﬁnd themselves at odds with one another over the basic structures of society. The original
position is the model of the ideal citizen which, in the well-ordered society, we are all
motivated to imitate.

Ifthe original position is the model position that the ideal citizen takes when
confronted with conﬂicts, then the political virtues needed for a stable society according to

Rawls are based on those capabilities needed to ﬁinction in the original position. Thus, for

84

Rawls the political virtues of citizenship are:
l. The virtue of practical reason, with the following capacities:
a. Capacity for sense of justice.
b. Capacity for a conception of good.

0. Capacity for making judgements of thought and inference.
d. A determinate conception of the good.

This virtue of practical reason is required for the stability of any political
society. In addition, Rawls presents ﬁve other virtues of citizenship for
democratic plural societies which he envisions are organized around justice
as fairness, virtues needed by democratic citizens living under the
conditions of pluralism.

2. The virtue of reasonableness:
A “readiness to propose and discuss principles and standards as fair terms
of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that
others will likewise do so” (PL, 49), principles and standards which are
viewed as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justiﬁable to
them. The virtue of reasonableness is based on the desire to “cooperate
with others on terms all can accept.”

3. The virtue of reasonable disagreement:
Based on a recognition and acceptance of the “burdens of judgement” as
sources of diﬁiculty in reaching agreement in a plural society, the virtue of
reasonable disagreement is the willingness to limit public reason to those

areas of concern that can be expected to be justiﬁed by all reasonable

85

citizens, and the recognition that there are disagreements which cannot be
expected to be resolved and that public reason ought not to concern such
areas of disagreements (See PL, 54-58).

4. The virtue of cooperation:
A readiness to be cooperative members of society and to be recognized as
such (PL, 81). Rawls refers to this virtue as “the requisite capacities and
abilities to be normal and cooperating members of society over a complete
lifetime” (PL, 81).

5. The virtue of representation:
A readiness to conduct public discourse and deliberation in the original
position as a representative citizen and a desire to be the kind of citizen
who operates in the original position. Rawls talks about this in connection
with “reasonable moral psychology” and the “ideal of citizenship.” There
is also the corresponding duty of civility, the ability “to explain to one
another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies
they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of
public reason. This duty also involves a willingness to listen to others and a
fair mindedness in deciding when accommodations to their views should be
reasonably made” (PL, 217).

6. The virtue of fair-mindedness:
The willingness to abide by the procedures and the results of public

discourse as modeled in the original position (See PL, 122, 139, 194).

86

Notice, however, that securing motivational stability in this way does not help in
resolving the second and more troublesome problem of political stability. The procedure
for acquiring a public point of view that Rawls advocates and the original position as a
model of the exemplary public perspective that good democratic citizens should and will
tend to take in the well-ordered society leaves unresolved the potential conﬂict that a
citizen may face between her own perspective and the ideal public perspective.
Psychological stability accounts for individuals’ motivations to abandon their own
perspective in favor of the public view, but it does not account for how they are to accept
that public view over their own reasonable view. For the citizens of the well-ordered
society there may still be a split between exercising collective rationality as modeled by the
original position and the exercise of one’s own individual rationality. In other words, this
way of securing psychological stability says nothing about reasonable pluralism. We need
to turn to the second problem of stability.

The link between psychological stability and political stability based on a
conceptual consensus, according to Rawls, is made in the way the well-ordered society is
structured. Psychological stability depends on how that structure motivates citizens to
abide by its principles, principles which citizens already accept when they take the public
view. Political stability depends on how the structure is adopted in the ﬁrst place by

citizens who hold conﬂicting conceptions of value.

87

D. POLITICAL STABILITY AS CONCEPTUAL CONSENSUS.

In W Rawls claims to have shifted his focus from a “moral
doctrine of justice in general” which he developed in Lheory to a “strictly political
conception” - a shift begun, according to him, with his article, “Kantian Constructivism in
Moral Theory” in 1980. His reason for this shift, he says, is to “resolve a serious problem
internal to justice as fairness,” namely, its inability to give an adequate account of the
stability of a well—ordered society under the condition of reasonable pluralism.

According to Rawls, the well-ordered society of “justice as fairness” is presented
in Theory as a comprehensive or at least a partially comprehensive doctrine”, and, as
such, it is unable to assure acceptance and consensual agreement from among a diversity
of people who hold incompatible yet “reasonable” conceptions of moral, philosophical and
religious values. According to Rawls, only by limiting the conception of a well-ordered
society to the political is it possible to secure enough support from among citizens of a
plural society such as the United States. The main problem for political liberalism, then, is
to show how justice as fairness, as it is now recast (as a “freestanding political
conception”), can gain the requisite support. Political stability is possible only if it can be
shown how people living in the well-ordered society will be able to afﬁmr, on the basis of
each of their various conﬂicting yet reasonable doctrines, the public conception of justice

as fairness.

 

33“Although the distinction between a political conception of justice and a
comprehensive philosophical doctrine is not discussed in ﬁrm, once the question is
raised, it is clear I think that the text regards justice as fairness and utilitarianism as
comprehensive, or partially comprehensive, doctrines” (Ibid., xvi).

88

Because Rawls, in PoliticalLibﬂalism, takes the condition of reasonable pluralism
as deﬁnitive, recognizing legitimate and profound differences among citizens, what he calls
“the fact of reasonable pluralism,” his task, as he understands it, is to construct a
conception of the political domain that provides a common basis for continuing political
dialogue, not in spite of, but within the context of profound differences among its citizens.

To understand what Rawls wants to address in his formulation of the second
problem of political stability we need to keep in mind that this, so called, new problem of
stability arises because of his view of reasonable pluralism. According to Rawls,
reasonable pluralism forces upon us a dualism of perspectives that, in his view, cannot be
bridged. These two perspectives are essentially distinct not because of the limits of
philosophy or practical reason, but because of the “special nature of democratic political
culture” (PL, xxi). There are a multitude of reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the
public good. To say that these are all reasonable is to say that there is no ﬁnal and
convincing reason to choose any one comprehensive view over any other. This fact of
reasonable pluralism poses a problem of how to justify a public view, a view that can unify
our discourse regarding the public good.34

If we cannot justify anyone’s reasonable comprehensive view over another’s,
which, according to Rawls, we cannot do, then how can we justify the public view over

any one’s view, which we must be able to do? If we can't do that, we cannot have a stable

 

34There is also, apparently, within even the requirements of political liberalism, a
variety of reasonable political conceptions of the public good. Rawls favors “justice as
fairness” but admits of other possibilities, though I imagine that, for Rawls, one criterion
for choosing the appropriate political conception is how well it secures an overlapping
consensus.

89
scheme.
For Rawls, the only viable basis for political stability under this condition of

”3’ If no one political conception36 and

reasonable pluralism is an “overlapping consensus.
no single public perspective can be elements of an overlapping consensus among
reasonable views, then the Rawlsian approach to founding political unity in which
diﬂ'erences can be worked out is indefensible.

Before examining Rawls’s notion of an overlapping consensus, let me ﬁrst review
the general arrangement of his political liberalism to see how and where the notion of
overlapping consensus ﬁts into the problem of political stability.

Rawls talks of two stages in establishing political stability on the basis of a

conceptual consensus: The ﬁrst stage, “Political Constructivism,” represents the content of

 

35“Justice as fairness (political liberalism) aims at uncovering a public basis of
justiﬁcation on questions of political justice given the fact of reasonable pluralism. Since
the justiﬁcation is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be held in
common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political
culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and
reasoned agreement in judgement, this agreement being stable in virtue of its gaining the
support of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (John Rawls,

RertrcalLibsralism, 100-101)-

3(”This idea of a political conception of the political domain is sometimes conﬁrsing. See
Samuel Scuﬂler’s discussion of Rawls’s meaning of “a political conception of justice” in
“The Appeal of Political Liberalism,” Ethics, 105.] (October, 1994) 4 ff.. A “political
conception” is not the same as “a conception of the political.” Rawls wants to distinguish
the notion of a political conception of the political from the idea of a moral or
metaphysical conception of the political, what he calls, a comprehensive or partially
comprehensive conception of the political, so he can argue that among various reasonable
(ﬁrll or partial) conceptions of the political, there can be an element that is overlapping,
namely, a political conception of the political. Thus, for Rawls, there needs to be at least
one political conception of the political domain that overlaps, since it is the overlapping of
such a conception on which Rawls wants to establish political stability.

90

a conception of the political which could and would become an overlapping consensus; the
second stage, is the demonstration of how this free standing conception can ﬁt into the
various reasonable comprehensive conceptions. That is, the second stage is the production

of this free standing conception as an overlapping consensus.

First: Rawls proposes a conception of the political domain, the content of which he
calls “justice as fairness,” which he argues is “ﬁ'eestanding” and not dependent for its
legitimacy on any moral doctrine.

Rawls wants to show that his proposal for organizing society around justice as
fairness is not simply culled from some preconceived ideal he has, nor is it part of some
longstanding moral doctrine that, while reasonable, would be unconvincing according to
the “burdens of judgement” when measured against alternative proposals.” He wants to
convince us that his proposal for structuring the political domain is preferable to any other
candidates, and he thinks that he can do so only if he can show that his conception of the
political is constructed independently of any comprehensive doctrine. This is the role of his

political constructivism. Given the fact of reasonable pluralism, Rawls considers political

 

37Rawls uses the notion of “burdens of judgement” to explain how reasonable yet
unresolvable disagreements can exist between equally reasonable persons. “The idea of
reasonable disagreement involves an account of the sources, or causes, of disagreements
between reasonable persons so deﬁned. These sources I refer to as the burdens of
judgement. The account of these burdens must be such that it is fully compatible with, and
so does not impugn, the reasonableness of those who disagree” (John Rawls, Political

Liberalism, 55).

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liberalism as the only possibility for getting to an overlapping consensus.38

Rawls constructs this conception by a method which he calls “political
constructivism” which is modeled by the “original position” from what he calls basic ideas
within a constitutional democracy. These basic ideas are, (1) “society as a fair system of
cooperation over time,” (2) the idea of “citizens as free and equal persons,” and (3) the
idea of a “well-ordered society.”

Rawls characterizes his form of political constructivism as having four distinctive
features; (1) a procedure of construction, the original position, which will produce
(construct) the content of a political (not metaphysical or comprehensive moral)
conception of justice, the order of principles of political justice; (2) a conception of
practical reason, including the principles of practical reason and judgement, which
provides the relevant norms for devising the proper procedure designed to produce the
principles of justice; (3) a political conception of persons as having minimal moral powers
and being free and equal citizens, and of society as a fair system of social cooperation over
time; and (4) a conception of objectivity as reasonableness (v. truth) which provides the

normative and public criterion for sound political judgements.”

 

3"“The full signiﬁcance of a constructivist political conception lies in its connection
with the fact of reasonable pluralism and the need for a democratic society to secure the
possibility of an overlapping consensus on its fundamental political values. The reason
such a conception may be the focus of an overlapping consensus of comprehensive
doctrines is that it develops the principles of justice from public and shared ideas of society
as a fair system of cooperation and of citizens as ﬁee and equal by using the principle of
their common practical reason” (Ibid., 90). The “development of principles” is what Rawls
means by the political construction of them.

39See John Rawls, MW 93 ff.

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The procedure of construction is modeled by the original position and the veil of
ignorance. Rawls tells us that this procedure is not itself constructed but simply “laid out.”
It is “conjectured” that the original position imposes reasonable conditions “on the parties,
who as rational representatives are to select public principles of justice for the basic
structures of society” (PL, 103). Rawls claims that this procedure, as he has laid it out,
correctly captures the conditions under which principles of justice ought to be determined
in plural democratic cultures. The basic idea of the original position is that it speciﬁes the
conditions of “reciprocal advantage” (PL, 22) or “fair terms of social cooperation” under
which citizens in plural democratic cultures cooperate in establishing the political domain
of democratic plural society. “In particular these conditions must situate free and equal
persons fairly and must not allow some persons greater bargaining advantages than others.
Further such things as threats of force and coercion, deception and fraud must be
excluded” (PL, 23).

Rawls thinks that this reciprocal advantage is best captured as a “point of view” in
which citizens are ignorant of their own personal contingent circumstances and are
“symmetrically situated.” The notion of “the veil of ignorance” is meant to effect this
symmetry. The parties in the original position (this is the way Rawls talks about citizens as
they are stripped down in the original position, as distinct ﬁom citizens of the well-ordered
society who have ﬁrll awareness of their own perspective) are not aware of their particular
social position, nor the particular doctrines which they may hold in “ordinary life,” nor
about their race, ethnicity, gender, etc.

The basic characteristics of parties in the original position behind this veil of

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ignorance are that they are free and equal citizens with moral and reasoning powers who
are situated in a society as a fair system of cooperation. This is what Rawls means when
he says that parties in the original position represent citizens in the well-ordered society.
On the other hand, the original position with its veil, though not a particular point of view,
does represent a speciﬁc point of view. Though it is an abstraction, it is not, according to
Rawls, a view from nowhere. It is the public point of view in a well-ordered society. And,
as a public point of view, it is “objective.”

Here Rawls’s conception of objectivity as reasonable rather than truthful is critical
to his political constructivism if it is ever to produce a conception of the political that does
not rely on any particular comprehensive doctrine. The distinguishing mark of the idea of
objectivity for political constructivism is how it speciﬁes what counts as a correct
judgement made from its point of view - the public point of view. The distinction between
reasonable and rational here also becomes most critical. “(T)he reasonable point of view is
public in ways the rational is not” (PL, 114). Political constructivism sees correct political
judgements as reasonable, that is, “supported by the preponderance of reasons speciﬁed by
the principles of right and justice issuing from a procedure (the original position) that
correctly formulates the principles of practical reason in union with the appropriate
conceptions of society and person” (PL, 111).

The point of these four elements of Rawlsian constructivism is to show that a
political conception of justice can be established in a free standing way, without founding
it on any particular comprehensive doctrine but solely on the basis of practical reason and

the basic conceptions of person and society that Rawls says are part of the background

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culture.

The second stage, according to Rawls, in securing the needed political stability for
the well-ordered society is to show how the content of the conception of justice as fairness
can be an object of a consensus among citizens who hold differing but reasonable
doctrines.4o Once Rawls establishes in the ﬁrst stage the well-ordered society as
freestanding, the question of stability is resolved by then showing that the conception of
justice as fairness can secure an “overlapping consensus.”

Rawls claims that his conception of political society can be endorsed by any and all
“reasonable doctrines,” each from their own point of view. This hypothetical mutual
endorsement constitutes, according to Rawls an overlapping consensus among such
reasonable doctrines. Rawls argues that since justice as fairness is ﬁ'eestanding, it can be
endorsed by any reasonable more comprehensive doctrines even within the conﬁnes of
those doctrines. An overlapping consensus would exist when people afﬁrm, and justify on
the basis of their own views, a common political conception for organizing their public
institutions. It is overlapping because the reasons they have for supporting it may be
different from one another. Indeed, political stability is best assured when their reasons for

supporting the political conception are rooted in their own comprehensive views, and not

 

4o“Political constructivism also holds that if a conception of justice is correctly founded
on correctly stated principles and conceptions of practical reason, then that conception of
justice is reasonable for a constitutional regime. Further, if that conception can be the
focus of an overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines, then for political purposes, this
sufﬁces to establish a public basis of justiﬁcation” (John Rawls, MW 126).

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simply freestanding.

But this consensus need not be an actual agreement regarding the common
political conception. “Only a political conception of justice that all citizens might be
reasonably expected to endorse can serve as a basis of public reason and justiﬁcation” (PL,
137). Remember that for Rawls no one of the reasonable comprehensive views can
provide the appropriate stability. Thus, Rawls wants to claim that if there is to be any basis
for public reason and justiﬁcation it must be a “conceptual political stability,” that is, a
hypothetical stability based on a concept that all citizens who are reasonable could or
might endorse. Putting aside the question of whether all reasonable citizens will ever
actually endorse a certain single (political) conception of political society from within their
own doctrines - whether an overlapping consensus is feasible - how does a conceptual
consensus provide political stability, according to Rawls? In other words, assuming all
reasonable citizens can, in their own way, justify the same political conception of society,
how does this assure us that the well-ordered society will be stable? Why is such a
conceptual consensus necessary for political stability and social unity?

Rawls claims “that an agreement on a political conception of justice is to no effect
without a companion agreement on guidelines of public enquiry and rules for assessing
evidence”(PL, 139). Thus, the overlapping consensus on the conception of the political
includes the speciﬁcation of guidelines and criteria for public reasoning and discourse.
Citizens with their duty of civility are willing to limit their basic political conﬂicts to these,
not because of some prior agreement to limit the agenda (for example, political

compromise), but because of their own assent to the conception of the political domain

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which they share with others in an “overlapping consensus.” Their own afﬁrmation of this
conception and the recognition that others afﬁrm it as well, according to Rawls, leads to
acceptance of the limits of public reason and therefore to an overriding stability among
reasonable citizens.

The idea of an overlapping consensus, thus, has two roles in Rawlsian political
liberalism. It serves as a basis for social unity in contemporary plural societies, and it
provides the content of public reason on the basis of which conﬂicts can be resolved. For
Rawls, legitimate political unity within contemporary political culture exists only under
three conditions. The fact of reasonable pluralism means that there are legitimate and
unresolvable differences of conceptions of the good. The requirements of political stability
within a reasonable pluralism mean that no one or subgroup of these comprehensive
conceptions can be arbitrarily favored over another. And third, political unity requires a
normative basis for resolving conﬂicts of political judgements. An overlapping consensus
on the conception of the political domain will (1) respect the fact of reasonable pluralism
by leaving those conceptions intact, (2) secure the necessary stability by (a) not favoring
any one or group of reasonable views and (b) providing the necessary common basis for
public reason and deliberation regarding different and conﬂicting views of the public good.
Once the overlapping consensus is established, public reason can be conducted on its basis
and conﬂicts resolved in a reasonable manner.

For Rawls the overlapping consensus is “justice as fairness” only now “justiﬁed”
from a plurality of perspectives. The legitimacy or justiﬁcation of justice as fairness is

established using political constructivism with its original position. But given the fact of

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reasonable pluralism, justice as fairness cannot be left simply as freestanding. It must also
be able to be “justiﬁed” in a second way, on the basis of each of the reasonable doctrines.
When this is done, justice as fairness becomes the content of an overlapping consensus. In

this way pluralism is defended, even encouraged, and stability secured.

E. THE MEANING OF RAWLSIAN POLITICAL STABILITY.

Rawls considers the contemporary condition of pluralism as deﬁnitive for his
political liberalism. Recognizing legitimate and profound differences among citizens,
differences which cannot be reasonably adjudicated (what he calls “the fact of reasonable
pluralism”), he faces head on the problem of constructing a conception of the political
domain which can provide a common basis for continuing political dialogue without
separating out such difference. His concern in ﬁnding a common basis of unity is to
protect and secure those differences, but to ﬁnd an acceptable way to adjudicate them
when they become destructive and destablizing.

Rawls’s solution to the problem of stability under the condition of pluralism is his
notion of an “overlapping consensus.” Political stability requires the proper motivational
virtues among citizens of any polity. But, according to Rawls, polities which exist under
the condition of pluralism also require another kind of stability. Rawls wants to argue that
full political stability will be secured in a plural society only if a single conception of the
political domain can be shared by all reasonable doctrines, that is, when and if a legitimate,
freestanding conception of the political domain can likewise be the object of an

overlapping consensus. Thus, the Rawlsian solution to the problem of stability ﬁxes on

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three elements; (1) the content of his conception of “justice as fairness,” (2) his
construction of this conception as freestanding, and (3) a conceptual consensus, among a
plurality of reasonable perspectives, that “justice as fairness” is a reasonable political
conception for organizing western democratic societies.

To evaluate Rawls’s solution to the problem of stability is to ask, (1) whether
“justice as fairness” is an adequate conception of stable democratic political space,
particularly as we have characterized such spaces in Chapter One, and (2) how the
construction of this conception according to the model of the original position secures
plural acceptance among a diverse and reasonable democratic citizenry.

We began this examination of Rawls’s solution to the problem of stability by
asking whether his conception of political space makes human relationships vivid enough
to spot the inequalities between them and provides conditions for the remedy of those
inequalities. From Brook, we took heed of a warning that the visibility of human
relationships requires us to not divide the demands for justice and equality in human
relationships from the variations that exist between human beings as they actually appear
to one another. We noted, then, the promise of the Rawlsian approach to construct a
democratic space out of the recurring differences among human beings. Has he done it in a
way that avoids the deadly trap of which Brook warns us; the deadly trap of dividing the
“eternal truths” of equal human relationships from the trivial variations among humans
within those relationships?

Rawls’s political liberalism began with the assumption that there is no adequate

and acceptable way to adjudicate fundamental moral conﬂicts. He believes that the only

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way to secure political stability is to rise above them to a level where an overlapping
consensus can be constructed from the “fundamental ideas of a democratic society.” He
concludes that the only way for pe0ple with irreconcilable differences to live with one
another peaceably and with justice is to enter a space deﬁned and ruled by an “over
arching agreement” of its participants.“

His approach to the problem of stability begins with a recognition of the legitimacy
of irreconcilable disagreements, (the “fact of reasonable pluralism”), proceeds by veiling
those differences and setting up conditions for a dialogue that rises above them (the
original position and its veil of ignorance), and ends up by constructing a political space in
which there is an assured overlapping consensus on a conception of the political. Because
he wants to secure this stability by means of an overlapping consensus, he seems
compelled to ﬁnd a way to arch over irreconcilable differences. The solution to the
problem of stability for Rawls is to establish a space that is secured by a conceptual
agreement on the basic and fundamental structures of public life.

But how vivid are human relationships, and particularly the inequalities that rule
our lives, in spaces where differences that seem to matter most, those that are
irreconcilable, are veiled and then arched over? By constructing a common political space

on such an overlapping consensus of the kind that Rawls envisions, might we not be

 

“See once again, “Justice as fairness aims at uncovering a public basis of justiﬁcation
on questions of political justice given the fact of reasonable pluralism. Since the
justiﬁcation is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be held in common; so
we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope
of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement
in judgement, this agreement being stable in virtue of its gaining the support of an
overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Ibid., 100-101).

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ignoring the differences that matter most? By recognizing and then “veiling” differences
are we not running the risk of exacerbating them to such an extent that credibility of the
public point of view is itself questionable?

The original position secures legitimacy in the sense of a harmonious agreement
between individuals - all individuals arriving at the same rational decision regarding the
principles of justice. Unanimous agreement of this ﬁrst kind, legitimacy of the political
conception as ﬁ'eestanding, is assured by the original position since it is a “mutually
disinterested rationality” (TJ, 142-3) and “everyone is represented equally” by anyone who
enters it. “The content of justice must be discovered by reason: that is by solving the
agreement problem posed by the original position” (PL, 273/274).

But Rawls wants his conception of the political to also be a product of another
unanimous agreement, an overlapping consensus among all reasonable citizens the basis of
their own “superﬁcial variation” of a point of view. Rawls seems to think that a
precondition for an agreement of the second kind, an overlapping consensus which secures
the kind of stability he is concerned with, is an agreement of the ﬁrst kind, a freestanding
justiﬁcation of the political conception. Thus, Rawls addresses the problem of stability by
deﬁning a procedure - the original position - which, as an impartial point of view, also
models the construction of the consensus that will provide the stability in political
discourse he wants. “When citizens share a reasonable political conception of justice, they
share common ground on which public discussion of fundamental questions can proceed”
(PL, 115).

Rawls presents the original position as an objective point of view, a “common

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sense” that enables those with irreconcilable conﬂicts to recognize the difference between
their own point of view and a point of view that “establishes a public framework,” the
public point of view. As reasonable citizens we will always choose, according to Rawls,
the public point of view over our own when there are certain questions of political
differences; the standpoint of the original position must always be preferred over our own
in the political domain. But the question is, is the public point of view, established by
Rawls’s method - a method that “veils” and overarches differences even though it is
constructed from “shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture” -
credible to those individual, “superﬁcial” points of view that are irreconcilable and arched
over?

Before answering this question, in the next chapter I want to consider an
alternative conception of political space developed by Hannah Arendt. Unlike Rawls,
Arendt regards the problem of stability as a problem of perception. Also, unlike Rawls,
she tries to establish the objectivity of human relationships not on a single point of view,
but on a plurality of positions that are tied together by a common sense of the “eternal
truths” of human freedom. The juxtaposition of these two conceptions will allow us to

accent the kind of democratic space which we envisioned in Chapters One and Two.

Chapter IV

HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF POLITICAL SPACE.

The Rough Theater is close to the people: it is usually distinguished by
the absence of what is called style. Style needs leisure: putting over
something in rough conditions is like a revolution, for anything that comes
to hand can be turned into a weapon. The Rough Theater doesn't pick and
choose: if the audience is restive, then it is obviously more important to
holler at the trouble makers - or improvise a gag - than to try to preserve
the style of the scene. In the luxury of high class theater, everything can be
all of a piece: in a rough theater a bucket will be banged for a battle, ﬂour
used to show faces white with fear. The arsenal is limitless: The popular
theater, freed of unity of style, actually speaks a very sophisticated and
stylish language: a popular audience usually has no difﬁculty in accepting
inconsistencies of accent and dress, or in darting between mime and
dialogue, realism and suggestion. They follow the line of story, unaware in
fact that somewhere there is a set of standards which are being broken.

(Peter Brook, W, 66-67)

A. DEMOCRATIC SPACES: INVENTIVE AND IMPROVISATIONAL.

In this passage Brook distinguishes “rough” theater, or popular theater, theater of

the people, from “high class” theater. High class theater, guided by a single style

(everything is all of one piece) that requires the luxury of leisure, is detached from the

demands and urgency of its audiences. Singleness of style here means a unity of

performance or theatrical method that requires consistency and harmony. Everything is

“all of a piece.” Even the audiences of high class theater are selected according to their

confomrity to this “style” often by means of high-priced entry tickets and minimally by the

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103

social conventions of theater-goer’s dress and demeanor.

Rough theater, on the other hand, is close to the people. It doesn't pick and choose
its audiences, but takes the play “to the villages” where people live. In rough theater the
audience is much more directly involved in determining what appears on stage or how it is
presented. If they balk at what appears, (in rough theater that can easily happen), the
actors and stage hands react rather than stay with the pre-written, authored script.

Rough, popular theater is revolutionary, inventive and improvisational:
revolutionary because the audience has a “voice”, inventive because the “arsenal” of the
performers is limitless, improvisational because, ﬁ'eed from the consistency of style, it is
able to comprise a multitude of inconsistencies and “superﬁcial variations.” In fact life is
ﬁll] of inconsistencies, and the audiences of rough theater have little difﬁculty in accepting
them. Indeed the audiences of rough theater are quite sophisticated in their abilities to
synthesize these inconsistencies; to “dart between mime and dialogue,” between parody
and parley, between the farcical and the reasonable; and “between realism and
suggestion,” between what is vulgar and what is holy, between the invisible and its
superﬁcial variations, between tragedy and comedy.

If holy theater is concerned with making the hidden impulses of human beings
visible, rough theater reminds us that these eternal truths are not found in heaven, but on
earth, in ordinary human activity. The invisible powers that rule our lives and deﬁne our
relationships are hidden, not because they are other worldly, but because they are found
only in the mundane, everyday performances of human beings, in their common words and

deeds. Good theater deals with those hidden realities that are close to the people, that lie

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in the performances between human beings.

Rough theater looks for what is hidden in the different styles of dress and accents
of people, and for this reason relies on the inconsistencies of the accents, dress and
demeanor of its audiences. The restive voices of the audience, these “performances of the
spectators,” are indispensable even to the performances of the actors on stage. Rough
theater is the “theater of noise,” (ES, 68) where the spectators are even more responsible
than the actors for what appears on the stage and in the play.

Rough theater is not bound to established standards of staging, standards of accent
and dress. Indeed, the audiences of rough theater may not even be aware of these
standards let alone that the standards are being broken. In rough theater, the luxury of
leisure which is necessary for such standards to be even seen and applied is uncommon.

Democratic spaces are like rough theater. They do not pick and choose who enters
on the basis of accents and dress, but take the “play of politics” to where the people live.
The spectators in democratic spaces have a voice in what appears and how it appears, and
the actor-citizens pay attention and make appropriate responses. Indeed in democratic
spaces spectator-citizens are noisy, often restive and reluctant to accept the established
style simply because it is “established.”

Life is ﬁll] of incongruities and inconsistencies and if the performances on the
“political stage” fail to reveal these, particularly because of its unity of style, then the
spectator-citizens take responsibility and balk. They too must be seen and heard, if the
invisible inequalities that rule their lives are to be made visible and remedied.

Freed from demands of a unanimity or consensus of style, democratic spaces are

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revolutionary, inventive and improvisational. In democratic spaces human relationships,
and the way invisible inequalities rule our lives (the story line of the play), those eternal,
recurring truths of human relationships, depend upon the “audience” and how the actual
inequalities lie in between the lives of citizens.

These inequalities are most vivid in democratic spaces where inconsistencies of
accent and dress are not arched over by a unanimity of form, shape and appearance, but
are openly displayed by darting between them. The inconsistencies of life lie between the
“mime and dialogue” of human relationships; between relationships of parody (of
imitation, reproduction, modeling, authority, mastery and control) and relationships of
parley (of exchange, transactions, conventions and calculations), between relationships
built on the farcical (impulsive, spontaneous and unpredictable, eccentric, whimsical,
erratic, even insigniﬁcant and trivial) and relationships built on the reasonable (sensible,
economical, legitimate, coherent and consistent, dependable and steady). They lie between
“realism and suggestion,” between vulgar relationships (relationships that are indecent,
malicious, repulsive, ﬁightful and obscene) and sacred relationships (relationships that are
noble, virtuous, inspiring, handsome and unselﬁsh), between the tangible ﬂesh of human
beings and their imperceptible spirits, between tragedy and comedy.

In Chapter Two I argued that political stability is a function not of deliberative
skills or virtues of citizens, but of intersubjective relationships by which citizens appear to
one another as citizens. There I suggested that political stability is a quality of the spaces
that exist “in between people” rather than the consequence of a space in which citizens are

organized to appear symmetrically. The problem of designing democratic spaces is not one

106

of designing how a multitude of citizens can appear equally to an observer, but of
designing how a multitude can appear in all their diversity to one another. Stability, we
said, is a problem of visibility, not a problem of order and symmetry.

I suggested that in designing democratic spaces we need to ﬁrst pay attention to
those conditions that make human relationships most vivid. I proposed then that the
problem of democratic participation is not resolved by designing spaces that assure only
equal, uniform, “stylized” appearances among diverse people, but rather by designing
spaces where the perception of diversity is assured.

One of the problems, perhaps the major problem, with using a metaphor of
theatrical space to illustrate the kind of democratic space we advocate is that the
relationship between actors and spectators appears to be one of active participants and
passive observers. As a metaphor for democratic space, this suggests that the only
participants in democratic politics are the actor-citizens and that a stage is the only place
where people can make their appearances in public.

But, in Chapter Two I also talked about how the participation of both actor-
citizens and spectator-citizens is essential if democratic space (which lies in between actors
and spectators) is to make visible inequalities in human relationships and provide
conditions for their remedies. I talked about the credibility that the spectators, those to
whom these invisibilities appear, must give to the performers, those who make visible
these inequalities. This is still somewhat of a passive understanding of citizenship where
the actor-citizens seem do all the “work” of politics and the spectator-citizens either

conﬁrm their work or not. With the notion of rough theater, Brook suggests to us a way

107

of making clearer the kind of relationships needed between the spectator-citizen and the
actor-citizen.

Thus, I want to expand my earlier interpretation of the metaphorical meaning of
theatrical space. In Chapter One I indicated that the two places where citizens make their
political appearances are, as actors on stage and as spectators in the audience. Now I want
to suggest that there are two places where every citizen appears, as actor-citizen and as
spectator-citizen. Each citizen has two parts to play in democratic spaces, as actors by
which they perform and make visible the invisible inequalities that rule their lives, and as
spectators by which they identify, conﬁrm and begin to remedy these inequalities.
Democratic participation is not simply found in the role of citizen as actor, but also in the
role of citizen as spectator.

In the last chapter we have seen that for Rawls, political stability is maintained in
two ways: ﬁrst, by proper motivation of citizens to support the well-ordered society not
out of fear nor a modus vivendi, but out of a desire for justice (this desire for justice
outweighs the pursuit of one’s own good, even when irreconcilable conﬂicts occur);
second, by an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice that ﬁts into (is part of)
citizens’ reasonable, even though mutually irreconcilable, conceptions of the good.

Rawlsian stability for plural democratic societies is ultimately maintained by a
“social contract,” a single agreement regarding a conception of political space. The
problem of stability that concerned Rawls was how to secure this unanimity. For Rawls,
the only credible basis for arriving at the kind of unanimity required for the kind of

stability he seeks is “a publicly recognized point of view from which all citizens can

108

examine before one another whether their political and social institutions are just” (PL, 9),
a point of view modeled by the original position.

We ended our review of Rawls asking whether, in his attempt to keep the eternal,
invisible truths of equal justice for all tied to the earthly experiences of human diversity,
his ideal public perspective is so far above the plurality of individuals and its language so
special that the political space it generates can adequately make vivid the invisible
differences and inequalities that are found in the way humans appear to one another.

In this chapter I want to present a conception of political space developed by
Hannah Arendt which offers an alternative to the Rawlsian approach of preserving
plurality while making vivid the “eternal truths” of human appearances.

Arendt may seem an unlikely resource in our search for stable democratic political
spaces, especially with her theory of action and her conception of freedom as unbounded,
unpredictable and irreversible action. Political stability based on human action would seem
to be highly precarious. But it is precisely the fragility of human action and Arendt’s
attempts to found political space on it which makes her approach so fascinating. Arendt’s
understanding of the political as the only place wherein free human action can be made
permanent by means of human judgement and memory and her criticism of traditional
political theory for its failure to found a permanent basis for free and creative human
action, together with her commitment to sustaining human plurality within political space,
suggests the promise of accommodating differences in a way that does not require the
most profound differences to be left “behind a veil.”

Freed ﬁ'om the demands of consistency and confomrity that a unity of style, a

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uniformity of agreement for a political conception requires, Arendtian political space
promises to be closer to the people, and to provide a space in which a greater diversity of
citizens have a more directive, participatory voice. Arendtian political space promises to
make room for both the performances of the actors on stage and the performances of the
spectators in the audience.

Our question for Arendt is whether her drarnaturgical conception of political space
and the stability of political action adequately preserves human plurality or whether it
requires a gradation of democratic participation (and, thus, a gradation of political worth),
between “actors” and “spectators.” IfArendt’s conception of democratic space is akin to
rough theater, then perhaps she does offer a viable alternative to Rawls that is worthy of
exploring in greater depth. But if her emphasis on the actor-citizen results in her excluding
the participation of spectator-citizens, then the sort of democratic space and political
action she designs is indeed elitist. The question is how Arendt conceives of political
appearance and performance.

We begin with her conception of the political domain, particularly as she
distinguishes it from the social sphere of human activity. Remember that for Rawls the
basic structure of society which includes economic, political and social institutions is the
proper subject of a political conception. For Arendt, the content of the political domain is

not so clear.

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B. ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF TRADITIONAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Before we consider Arendt’s design of political space, however, I want to brieﬂy
lay out her critique of traditional political thought, particularly its failure to make what she
considers critical distinctions. By drawing out these distinctions, as she makes them, we
will be able to provide a clearer context in which she develops her somewhat unorthodox
views.

Arendt’s conception of political space is inspired by three closely related notions
which place her in critical opposition to traditional political philosophy; ﬁrst that political
activity will be properly conceptualized when it is seen as meaningful and valuable for its
own sake, and not merely instrumental; second, that political activity is a human activity
occurring between human beings, not something performed by or for individuals, nor
something done to another; third that normative criteria for political activity cannot be
“imported” ﬁom outside the political realm (from metaphysical or moral theories), but
must be developed from within.

A brief discussion of these three notions will provide a context for understanding
Arendt’s conception of political space, its problems of stability and her solutions. In this
discussion I will show how Arendt distinguishes political activity from instrumental,
philosophic and moral and how she attempts to reappraise the signiﬁcance of political

activity for post modern societies.

11 1

1. W.

In W Arendt’s revaluing of political activity begins with a
critique of the traditional understanding of human activity in the world, what she calls the
“vitae activa,” “human life insofar as it is actively engaged in doing something?“ In the
history of western thought from Plato onward the vitae activa has for the most part been
valued as a stepcth to the more ennobled “vitae contemplativa” of the philosopher and
mystic. According to Arendt, the effect of this historical relationship has been a
devaluation of doing things in the world, one that has yet to be corrected.43 Thus, before
political activity can be seen in the most vivid light, the concept of human activity and its
relationship to contemplation must ﬁrst be examined.

Arendt sees genuine political life as all but lost in the modern world. She blames
this on the traditional philosophical conception of the political domain. Indeed, her critique
of the history of political thought from Socrates to Hegel is a scathing condemnation of
the conception of the polis as, in its positive construction, an instrument for the support of

the philosophic life, a life of contemplation and striving for etemality, the so-called “higher

 

42Hannah Arendt, W (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1958)22.

43She claims that the works of Marx and Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre and Heidegger, have
all failed to adequately value human action. Even Jaspers, whom she credits as the only
philosopher to protest against solitude and who fought to keep reason between men rather
than let it retreat to within man, “neither entirely within nor necessarily above,” a
conception of reason which Arendt considers essential to the re-valuation of human
action, has nevertheless failed to adequately expose the basis of the active life. See her
lecture to the American Political Science Association, 1954, “Concern With Politics in
Recent European Philosophical Thought” in Hannah Arendt, W
1939-1254 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993) 428-447.

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things” of life. The polis has become not much more than a means to enable the

philosopher to engage in his noble activity and is valued for its service to those ends.
Traditional political philosophy, therefore tends to derive the political side of
human life from necessity which compels the human animal to live together with
others, rather than from the human capacity to act, and it tends to conclude with a
theory about the conditions that would best suit the needs of the unfortunate

human condition of plurality and best enable the philosopher, at least, to live
undisturbed by it. (Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European

Philosophical Thought,”Esay_smﬂnderstanding, 428)

For Arendt, the problem with this conception is that it makes the political a mere
instrumental device, albeit necessary for human living, but human living of a certain kind,
namely, philosophical, religious, otherworldly living.

There are two issues involved in this part of her critique: ﬁrst, the traditional
placement of the political at the speciﬁc service of the contemplative life; and second, the
more sweeping instrumental conception of the political as a means to any end. Arendt sees
both of these as mistakes woven together into the fallacious traditional conception of the
political.

The history of philosophy has shown us that there is no undisputed ideal
conception of human reality which can provide meaning and value to all that we do, or
ought to do as human beings. Thus, for Arendt the meanings and values of what we do are
to be located in their own performances. Political activity, insofar as it is meaningful and
valuable, does not exist simply to provide stability for human ﬂourishing, whether that
“ﬂourishing” is seen as philosophical contemplation or a set of individualized goods that

satisfy needs or capacities required for “full” human living. Rather, for Arendt, the

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political exists for the sake of its own activities as a space for proper authentic political
action. And when we act in such spaces, we do so freely and without any compelling
necessity to attain some end outside the act itself.

The point to be made here is that, for Arendt, any instrumentalist conception of
politics, whether it is in service to the more lowly purpose of securing “wealth or
property” or the more esteemed goal of “divine contemplation and truth seeking,” or
anything in between these, is mistaken. A conception of political activity as, say, in service
to the “truly and ﬁrlly human,” the ideal human nature, is discredited, according to Arendt,
not simply because there is no widely acceptable conception of the ideal of human nature,
which there isn’t, but because the ﬁrndamental meaning of political activity is not
instrumentalist. While contemporary political philosophy has purged the political of its
traditional otherworldly perspective (the philosopher’s contemplative gaze upon the
eternal) it continues to conceptualize the political as instrumental, only now in service to
philosophic solitude or rational thought; “the philosopher no longer turns from the world
of deceptive perishability to another world of eternal truth, but turns away from both and
withdraws into himself” (HC, 293). The tendency in western political philosophy still
today is to conceptualize the political as a thin instrumental structure of society which
provides the least amount of order or stability necessary for more meaningful and
substantive human activities related to attaining one’s own personal goals and realizing
one’s own life plan.

With the beginning of modernity, the hierarchial order between the vitae activa and

the vitae contemplativa has begun to reverse itself. But this reversal is deﬁcient according

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to Arendt.“ Contemporary philosophy continues to give an inadequate accounting of the
vitae activa. To properly reverse the hierarchical order is not to turn it upside down.
Arendt is not asking that the philosopher or mystic be placed in service to politics. Neither
the vitae activa nor the vitae contemplativa should be placed in service to the other, but
each must ﬁnd its own meaning and value. Ifit can be shown that the pursuit of politics
carries its own worth, then the hierarchical grip of Instrumentalism on human activity will
be broken. To do that, however, will require a re—conceptualization of politics going back
to pre-Socratic thought."5

The challenge, then, according to Arendt is not merely to propose a new and better
way to value politics, but to propose a new and different way of conceptualizing what the
political is all about. Given her conﬁdence in the intrinsic value of political activity, the
ﬁrst question she addresses is whether there are some things that we do which are done
for their own sake or whether all meaningful human activities are undertaken for some
purpose other than their own doing.

If all human action is instrumental in this broad sense of instrumentality, what is to

 

44“The reversal of the modern age consisted then not in raising doing to the rank of
contemplating as the highest state of which human beings are capable...” Rather, “the
ﬁrndamental experience behind the reversal of contemplation and action was precisely that
man’s thirst for knowledge could be assuaged only after he had put his trust into the
ingenuity of his hands. In order to be certain, one had to make sure, and in order to
know one had to do.” (Arendt, W911, 290). Belief in the uniformity and
singularity of truth remains steadfast within contemporary philosophical search, only now
truth is gotten at differently, namely, by ﬁrst being “made.” This is the legacy of
Descartes.

45“The ancient and Christian solution had been to consider this whole realm as
essentially instrumental, as existing for the sake of something else” (Arendt, Essaysjn

Understanding, 430)-

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prevent the ultimate triumph of utilitarianism?46 If it is not, then what sorts of things are
done for their own sake? Arendt’s reconception of political activity as intrinsically

valuable is her response to liberating human activity from the vise of Instrumentalism.

2. WWW

For Arendt the “decisive problem” in political theory is to conceive of political
activity in such a way that human plurality is the singular human condition under which
political activity is carried out."7

Certain conceptions of plurality, however, may entice us into a solitude that does
not allow for political activity as Arendt conceives it. Arendt’s notion of human plurality
represents not simply the varieties and differences of individual choices, beliefs and values,
differences of life plans and conceptions of the good, but rather all the variations and
differences between human beings. The fact of pluralism is not the fact of plurality. If we
mean by plurality simply a variety of philosophical or religious life views or conceptions,
we have not captured the central condition of political action - “the fact that men not Man,
live on the earth and inhabit the world” (HC, 7).

Plurality for Arendt is not a multiplicity of a singular form; nor a duplication of the

same idealized human form, only with “inner” variations. Nor is plurality mere

 

“The issue at stake is, of course, not instrumentality, the use of means to achieve an
end, as such, but rather the generalization of the fabrication experience in which useﬁrlness
and utility are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men” (Arendt,

IheHurnarLQQnditiQn, 157)-

‘7“. . . plurality is speciﬁcally the condition - not only the W, but the
conditismemuam - of all political life” (Ibid., 7).

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individuality of members of a species. Nor is it an abstraction somewhere between
individuality and universality, whereby we might group people according to some identity
or community. Rather, plurality, according to Arendt, is the fact that each human being is
both distinct from and yet equal to every other human being.
If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who
came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will
come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from
any other who is, was or will be, they would need neither speech nor action to
make themselves understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immediate,

identical needs and wants would be enough. (Arendt, The Human Condition, 175-
76)

There is nothing repeated nor repeatable within the plurality of human beings. As members
of a species, yes. As rational beings, yes. But not as variations of a plurality.

Arendt considers the condition of plurality to be decisive for political activity.
Because each human being is distinct and equal, political activity must be something that is
done between human beings, and not merely by human beings, and in the space between
them. Political activity not only requires the presence of others, as most human activities
do, but requires the simultaneous present activity of others as well. Thus political activity
is not something one does by oneself nor with oneself. It is something done not only in
public and within a public, but with a public as well, as in, say, theater or any “performing”
art. Political activity is not simply being engaged in doing a public good, in securing a
public end or goal. Political activity is rather doing those things that can only be done with

others.

This condition of plurality under which political action is possible is, according to

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Arendt, not a historical phenomenon that depends upon conditions of toleration or cultural
diversity, but is a fact wherever “men, not Man live on earth and inhabit the world.” The
condition of plurality was as applicable in ancient Rome as it was during the French
revolution, and as it is today. In this way human plurality is not the same as “pluralism.”

Arendt’s second critique of traditional political philosophy exposes its failure to
conceptualize human plurality in such a way that what goes on “between men” is taken
much more seriously, and given much more attention than what goes on within “man.”
And, if political activity is indeed activity between human beings, then this inability to
capture the meaning of plurality is decisive.

According to Arendt, the reason for this failure is that modern conceptions of
political activity are based on a model of philosophical thinking, a model of “ideal
dialogue,” where one “deliberates” with oneselfin solitude according to the procedures of
rational deliberation, rather than a model of “action,” a model of human “activity that goes
on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, (and which)
corresponds to the human condition of plurality” (HC, 7). Traditional conceptions of
politics, based upon an idealization of the human being in the singular, have placed the
capacity for political action not “between men,” where it needs to be given the fact of
plurality, but within men, where political acts are nothing other than a duplicity - a
continual repetition of the selfsame procedure of rational deliberation. Such conceptions,

while they may be adequate for philosophy, are insufﬁcient for the political.“

 

““It lies in the nature of philosophy to deal with man in the singular, whereas politics
could not even be conceived of if men did not exist in the plural. Or to put it another way:
the experiences of the philosopher - insofar as he is a philosopher - are with solitude, while

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The ﬂaw within these traditional conceptions of the political, according to Arendt,
is that the ﬁrst political act, the foundation or construction of political space itself, is done
by “Man” in his singularity rather than “men” in their plurality. The thinker-philosopher
carries on an imaginary dialogue with an imaginary citizen-representative to deliberate
about the principles under which society is to be structured. These “dialogues” are begun
and brought to completion in a solitary perspective that ultimately eliminates the condition
of plurality.

According to Arendt, the foundational political act is not a contract, nor a promise
to abide by a contract, but a mutual act in words and deeds, whether a contract is ever
made or not. Nor is the work of constructing political spaces under the condition of
plurality something that belongs to a privileged few who are expert in styles of rationality,
executing laws, applying rules or managing others, but is the proper activity of every

distinct human being.

 

Finally, Arendt’s conception of political activity as performative action under the
condition of plurality forces a reconceptualization of the traditional relationships between
morality and politics. Ifthe value of political action is in its performance and not in the
accomplishment of certain ends, then motivation and intent as well as aims and

consequences cannot provide criteria for their moral worth. And, if political action is

 

for man - insofar as he is political - solitude is an essential but nevertheless marginal

exverience” (Arendt, W, 443).

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incapable of being done by isolated individuals, but instead requires the present-activity of
others, if the condition of plurality requires us to conceive of political action as what goes
on in the space between human beings, then moral responsibility, praise, culpability and
correct political action cannot be characteristics or qualities of a single actor or her own
individual doings. Moral right, praise, blame and responsibility, as well as justice, virtue
and good apply in the political realm in an altogether different way than these have been
understood in traditional political theory.

The traditional conception of the moral foundation of politics is based upon an
instrumental understanding of politics that Arendt rejects. For Arendt, political “action can
only be judged by the criterion of greatnoss . . .” and greatness, “or the speciﬁc meaning
of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its
achievement” (HC, 205-06).49 To apply normative standards that lie outside the
perforrnative value of an action and in their consequence or intended results, as traditional
political theory would have it, is to force political activity into a means-end category.

But more than this, the normative standards of traditional political theory rest upon
a faulty conception of political activity, namely as human activities performed by
individuals rather than between them under the conditions of human plurality.

Traditional conceptions of morality establish a “rule,” a moral law, which norms
the behavior of individuals. This moral law, founded upon the principle of

universalizability - a moral rule is said to be right and binding for an individual if it is

 

49See also Ihoﬂumanﬁonditjon, section 21, “Instrumentality and homo faber,” 153-
159. There Arendt discusses the identiﬁcation of means-end category with the moral
theory of utilitarianism.

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binding for all individuals given the same conditions of acting - submits all political actions
to one procedure of valuation. An act is right or good if it falls under the law, if it is
universalizable. Traditional moral theory locates the meaning and value of human actions
not in their performance, but in a procedural formula or form, in their universalizability - in
whether a human action signiﬁes a Singleness of form, capable of being performed by
everyone.

But, according to Arendt, this use of the principle of universalizability in
establishing norms of all human activity does violence to the condition of plurality. In
political actions there are no “norm ” standards, no norms. Since all humans are distinct
and equal, no political action is repeatable. To “norm” human actions performed between
human beings is to make such actions indistinct and essentially the same regardless of the
actors. To norm human actions is to value the human action not in its performance by a
human actor, but in its being an act completed and isolated, disconnected from the human
relationships in which it is performed, as if frozen in motion.

In politics we can never know beforehand what is the right thing to do, not
because our knowledge is limited and temporally conditioned, but because political action
is a process, not something achieved or accomplished. It is always ongoing, even after the
actor stops acting. And, because political activity involves a plurality of actors who, by
their co-acting, in a sense take on the action as their own, it is not an act belonging to a
single actor. Political actions as performances within a web of human relationships are,
thus, quite fragile and unstable - once begun they are no longer under the control of their

initiators and can be readily altered by other actors.

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Normative morality attempts to escape the fragility and instability of such human
action, by turning it into “normal behavior,” typical things done by human beings. In our
fear of the power and strength of free human action, its boundlessness and its
irreversibility, both of which follow from the condition of plurality, we sedate it with a
morality of norms, and end up turning human freedom into self-sovereignty. Normative
morality instrumentalizes human action by extorting its meaning not ﬁ'om its performance,
but from either the mind of its actor (motivation) or from its accomplished consequences
(purpose). The ordinary standards of morality both rrris-value and devalue human actions
performed between human beings under the condition of plurality.

But in criticizing the traditional normative basis of politics, Arendt is not
suggesting there is no way to “measure” the value of political action. We do need to
address our fears regarding the ﬁ'ailty and instability of human action, particularly if we
want to provide a stable political space in which free human action can occur. There are
guiding principles for genuine political human activity, human activity that preserves the
ﬁ'eedom and equality of human beings rather than destroys it. But these guiding principles
are themselves fragile and vulnerable since they too are conditioned by plurality. For

,’ CC

Arendt the ﬁnal measures of genuine political action are “forgiveness, promise,” and
“trust.” And, since these principles rise ﬁ'om within political action itself, they “establish a
diametrically different moral code than the philosophical standards of moral law and rule”
(HC, 237).

Arendt’s attempt to reconceptualize the political domain seems also driven by a

desire to construct a political space that is both egalitarian and available to all, as she says,

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“within the range of every human being” (HC, 5).

If all human activity, and particularly political activity, is conceived as instrumental
in the broad sense identiﬁed above, then political activity can never be assuredly within the
range of ordinary human capabilities. Instrumental acts require and demand specialized
skills of deliberation, such as the capacity and willingness to form rational goals and plans
and the ability to calculate means-end relationships, that may not be within the range and
capacity of everyone. Nor is it clear that skills at forming life plans and attaining one’s
goals should be required for political participation.

According to Arendt, the challenge we face in creating democratic political spaces
wherein citizens are equally engaged in political activity cannot be met by an analysis of
human activity in isolation from its performance and its actors. Only by starting with what
goes on in the space between human beings, and building public political realms from that
foundation, can a plural democracy be established. Otherwise, political activity will be
conditioned by some predetermined set of rules rather than the contingent existence of a
given plurality of human beings.

Finally, within Arendt’s approach, the stable foundation of democratic political
space lies in the kinds of political activity of its citizens rather than some idealized or even
actual moral agreement. In a polity constituted by the actions of a plurality rather than by a
set of justiﬁed principles or institutions, what stabilizes the political space in which the
fragility and unpredictability of human actions occur is the performance of words and
deeds that are remembered.

Keeping in mind these three critical points by which Arendt distinguishes herself

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from traditional political thinking, let us now turn to her conception of political space and

how it differs from private and other public spaces.

C. THE ARENDTIAN CONCEPTION OF POLITICAL SPACE.

1. W.

In deﬁning the boundaries of political space Arendt ﬁrst draws a distinct line
between the public and private realms of human living. To appear in public, to have a
publicity, is to be seen and heard by others; the greatest publicity being heard and seen by
everyone. What deﬁnes publicity is not simply appearance, but simultaneous appearance in
a multiplicity of perspectives. There is no public space without the presence of a multitude
of others who see and hear50 - without “the simultaneous presence of innumerable
perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself’ (HC, 57).

What is in the public realm, what is real, is what appears to others. On the other
hand, what is experienced by me alone, privately, is in a sense unreal. The private is
without publicity, though not without signiﬁcance. To be sure, what I alone experience
may be intensely felt. But the degree to which I am unable to bring what it is that I am
experiencing into public awareness, to that degree the objectivity of my experiences is

questionable. Only what appears publicly, what is seen and heard by others as well as me,

 

”This “multitude of perspectives” is not quite the same thing as the condition of
plurality. What is required here for publicity is a multitude of perspectives within which
something common appears, an intersubjective grounding of reality as appearance. This
intersubjectivity, the presence of a multitude of others who hear and see the same thing, is
more akin to the condition of worldliness. The condition of plurality, on the other hand,
has to do with the nature of these plural subjects.

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is real. What cannot be manifested, made visible or audible to others, is non-public or
“privative.”51

Arendt is not denying the existence nor the signiﬁcance of private experiences. Her
use of the notion of reality is in distinction from personal or subjective. She gives two
illustrations of private experiences to show what she means by the publicity condition of
appearance to others, the intensity of pain, and the intimacy of love. In the ﬁrst illustration,
a private experience of great bodily pain is incapable of being brought into the public
realm. It is incommunicable, “unable to be transformed into a shape ﬁt for public
appearance.” Her second illustration is an example of a private experience which, were it
to be transformed for public appearance would be “killed or rather extinguished.” Intimate
love cannot tolerate being seen and heard by others. It cannot be under a public gaze
without itself being perverted and eventually altered into something it is not. Even when
love is spoken of or displayed, as in, for example, the novel, it can only be so when the

lovers are being spied upon. They must remain unaware that they are being seen or heard.

Otherwise, what they are doing is not making love, but performing for the reader. Both of

 

51The condition of appearing to a multiplicity of others does not mean that the private
things we do, do not attest to the presence of others. If we mean by private,
something having to do only with one’s self, and without “testifying” to the presence of
any other human being, i.e., in total exclusion of others, then according to Arendt, no
human activity is private. “No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s
wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testiﬁes to the presence
of other human beings” (Arendt, Wu, 22). All human activities, whether
private or public, are conditioned by the presence of others, and are done in an
environment of being together with other humans. But, when an activity “appears” in a
multitude of perspectives, it is transformed so to speak, into a public world. The
characteristic of simply being together, a characteristic of all species of beings, is not
germane to the distinction between private and public that Arendt makes. It is only in the
coupling of appearance with the presence of others that a public space is constituted.

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these types of experiences are so subjective and so withdrawn from the world of others
that they can only survive in the private realms.

But being seen and heard by others is not itself sufficient to bring about a public
space. The “simultaneous perspectives” must be perspectives on something, on the same
thing that all see and hear. Otherwise, the public is nothing more that a set of unrelated
perspectives. What appears in public, what is seen and heard by a multitude, what is
common between human beings, is what “gathers” the multitude together.

For Arendt there are two general sorts of things that are common between human
beings; the world - not nature, but the human-made world of things and objects, such as
houses, streets, towns - and political acts, human action and speech, which goes on
directly between human beings without any interrnediation. We will look at the distinction
between these two sorts of things more closely when we get to the diﬂ‘erence between
political space and non-political public space. At this point we are focusing on the public
and private distinction. And here the important point is that the public realm consists of
what lies in the space between human beings and by which they are directly gathered,
related and separated ﬁom one another.

This ﬁeld of things in between us, the common world of objects and human deeds,
whereby we are gathered, related and separated, is what appears in the innumerable
perspectives of the multitude of people. Only the world and people acting in it are public.
When we are in the world we are there only as we appear under the gaze of simultaneous
perspectives.

Our private selves, being unﬁt to be under the gaze of others’ perspectives are not

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in the world. To be private is not to appear. “Whatever be (private man) does remains
without significance and consequence to others, and what matters to him is without
interest to others . . . as though he did not exist” (HC, 58). In private realms there is
nothing common, no in between human beings. Each private household or family is neither
seen nor heard. To be private is to be unrelated, unconnected. It is to be unreal.

But to say that whatever is common is public is not to say that the private has no
relationship to the public. Though the private lies outside or beyond that which is
common, it nevertheless borders the public realm. Indeed, for Arendt, the private is a
precondition for the public. The private realm, while lacking reality by not appearing in the
multitude of perspectives, still is that “hidden place” from which one enters the public
realm. Indeed, though the public realm is much more momentous for Arendt, the private
realm is nevertheless indispensable for public spaces in two ways: (1) it is only in the
private realm that the human being has any location from which to enter the public realm,
and (2) it is within the interior of private spaces that the basic conditions of biological life
are met, a precondition for the work of world-making as well as for political action.

Human beings bound by the conditions of biology are driven to satisfy demands for
sustenance (the needs of food, air, etc), the demands for care and safety (the needs of
health and protection), and the demands for continuation as a species (the drives of
reproduction and nurturing of offspring). All of these private activities happen out of
necessity. We do what is necessary to live.

In the private sphere, inequality abounds. The needs, demands and necessities of

biological life vary signiﬁcantly from individual to individual. LikewiSe the capabilities of

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individuals and households in securing these needs vary signiﬁcantly.

For Arendt, the private sphere is marked by the continual activity of consumption.
We labor to meet the necessities of life, all of which are never ending as long as life is
ongoing. The biological processes of consumption and reproduction, by which each
human being sustains its life and the life of the species, are not and never can be shared
between one another. They are private, not because they are done outside the presence of
others, which they are not, but because they are activities related to the maintenance of
each life and not to what is common between human beings.52

It is as if public life is what goes on in the spaces between a set of private sub-
realms. The public realm is formed when we “leave” our private realms and appear not
only to others but in between others. Generally, according to Arendt, private human
activities are those things done by human beings which correspond to the condition of
biological, physiological life itself; whereas public activities are those things done new
human beings, and correspond to either the conditions of worldliness (the activities of
world making, of making worldly objects by which we are related to and separated from
one another) or the conditions of plurality (the activities of human action and speech by
which we relate to and separate ourselves from one another directly and without

mediation).

 

52“Nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more
securely shielded against the visibility and audibility of the public realm than what goes on
within the conﬁnes of the body, its pleasures and its pains, its laboring and consuming”

(Arendt, Iheﬂurnarrﬁonditicn, 112)

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To recognize that human beings do not or cannot live outside the company of
others is to recognize the social condition of human living. But, in this regard human
beings are no different from any other species. This “fact of sociality,” the recognition of
shared concerns for private interests, is hardly enough to account for a public space let
alone the political realm. This notion of “shared concerns for private interests” is not a
concern for something that lies between one another, but for the private interests that each
human being has in regard to sustaining her own life. That each of us has such interests is
the basis for society but not, according to Arendt, the basis for the political realm.

Modern mass society began when shared concerns for private interests and
necessities of life, individual and household private activities, took on a public signiﬁcance.
The social movement, the public concern for private interests, resulted in, what Arendt
perceived, as a radical transformation of both the public and private realms. The placement
of shared private concerns into the public arena changed both the public and the private
spheres: the public realm became concerned, now almost exclusively, with the
administration of such private matters; the private realm became, now almost totally,
under the gaze of the public.

When the public is organized solely around the concerns of private interests, the
conditions of plurality, distinctness of identity together with equality, are no longer
present. Society is not concerned with individual unique and creative human activity but
standardized behavior, a pattern of human activity that can be statistically described and

deﬁned. Human behavior as distinct from human activity, is nothing other than a

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conception of human activity formed from a composite of a multitude of people, each of
which acts out of identical private interests. This common behavior is the “leveling
factor,” the demand that all members of a society act as if they belong to one large
household with a single-minded interest in meeting the demands of life’s necessities, that is
required if private interests are ever to be addressed by the public.

The problem here, for Arendt, is not that there is a social sphere”, but that the
social sphere is taken to be identical with the political sphere. Ifthe concern of the private
is the only thing that assumes or ought to assume public signiﬁcance and value, then there
is no sacred space where, liberated of life’s necessities, we can meet one another as free
and equal individuals. The possibility of political action is gone. When society “displaces”
genuine political space, “the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life minothing
else assumes public signiﬁcance” (HC, 46; emphasis added). If the relationships between
human beings are nothing other than exchanges based on private interests of sustaining
life, then freedom and individuality, distinction and originality are transformed into less
than what they are. Then, freedom becomes nothing other than self-regulation or self-
dornination according to a norm. Individuality becomes nothing other than the capacity to
satisfy one’s own human needs. Distinction becomes nothing other than separation and
solitude. And originality becomes nothing other than a particular member in a social
group.

What is at issue here for Arendt is the conceptualization of political space by

 

53There is no doubt that Arendt writes disparagingly about the social sphere. However,
as I read her, her critique of the social is based more on its “con-ﬁrsion” with the political
than on its existence or historical emergence.

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theorists. According to Arendt, if we accept social space - where the necessities of life
take on public signiﬁcance, and where the human activity of consumption predominates -
as even a subdivision of the political, there will be, indeed there needs be, an eventual
erosion of genuine political activity. Because of the demands of the processes of
consumption, public concerns will be dominated by self interests and the manipulation of
resources to satisfy ever growing consumer requirements. The problem with modern
political theory, according to Arendt, is its failure to perceive the deep gulf between the
political realm and the social realm (HC, 33). And this failure has led modern societies to
lose touch with what is “common in between human beings.” As a result of the
“socialization of mankind,” the “emancipation of labor,” which is accomplished when
private life-sustaining labor-activities take on public signiﬁcance, rather than emancipating
us, has forced all human activity, including political activity, “under the yoke of necessity.”
“(E)ventually no object of the world will be safe ﬁ'om consumption and annihilation
through consumption” (HC, 133).

The rather uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the triumph the modern world

has achieved over necessity is due to the emancipation of labor, that is, to the fact

that the animal Iaborans was permitted to occupy the public realm; and yet as long

as the animal Iaborans remains in moseseionoﬂt, there can be no true public
realm, but only private activities displayed in the open. (Arendt, IheHnman

Condition, 134)

If our conception of the political realm fails to adequately differentiate the political
from the social, then our political theory will be unable to make room for egalitarian
actions of free human beings. The public political sphere is to be restricted from entering

the private sphere not because private property ought to reign supreme, but because, the

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public realm will cease to be public without the private realm as the unique location of
human birth, life, and death in the world. The private is to be properly restricted from
entering the political not because private activity is insigniﬁcant, but because the political
realm is the only sacred place where we are freed of life’s necessities and where we can
meet one another as free, unique individuals.

To equate “political” with “social,” or to conceive of political action as the public
activity of organizing the basic structures of society is to eventually deﬁne the
relationships between human beings as nothing other than an exchange of private interests

and to ultimately limit the life of human beings to nothing more than survival activity.

3. Wm.

Earlier I identiﬁed Arendt’s conception of the public realm as the “space of
appearance.” For Arendt, there are two general sorts of public spaces: those spaces which
are the result of the “work of human hands,” the public realm of the world and “man made
products,” and those spaces which arise directly out of human beings acting together, the
sharing of words and deeds, the public realm of the polis (HC, 195). And though these are
distinct public spaces, the possibility for either requires a “space of appearance,” which
comes into being only when humans gather together in action and speech. In that regard

the entire public realm, the artiﬁcially constructed world of objects as well as the web54 of

 

s“Here Arendt reserves the term “world” to the human artiﬁce, the human made world
of objects and things, into which we are born and from which we die, as distinct ﬁ'om 1)
nature, the earth and its environs as given to human kind, and 2) the web of human affairs
and relationships, which are the things that go on directly between human beings, “human
action and speech.” It is in the web of human affairs where she locates political activity.

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human affairs, “ultimately resides on action and speech”(HC, 200). To understand what it
is that Arendt conceptualizes as political action and the role that speech and action play in
the political realm, we ﬁrst examine the public space of world making and how it is
distinguished from the political.

While the activity of “labor” secures the biological necessities of human life and is
characterized by consumption, the activity of “work” is characterized by production and
the making of things. By “work activity” we construct and maintain the world in which we
live, and move. We construct an “artiﬁcial” world of things, mostly use objects”, which
provides durability, stability, and permanency for human life, a world into which one is
born, in which one lives, and from which one (lies.56

The world, as distinct ﬁom nature, is a result of the human activity of “work,”
actions performed upon things taken from nature. Even the so called “natural things”
taken from nature are themselves products of human hands, being objectiﬁed raw
materials out of which are made durable objects, objects which outlast the making process.

This world is “meant to outlast and transcend” each individual human life. Indeed,
such a world is necessary for even the conceptualization of an individual human life, as

well as for the fact of individual lives. A human life is designated as what lies between her

 

”Arendt also includes art objects as things contained in the “world”, which have even a
greater permanency than most use objects. See Arendt, Iheﬂumanﬂondiﬁon, 167-173.

’“‘Without taking things out of nature’s hands and consuming them, and without
defending himself against the natural processes of growth and decay, the animal laborans
could never survive. But without being at home in the midst of things whose durability
makes them ﬁt for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct
contrast to life, their life would never be human” (Ibid., 135). Also see 97.

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birth into the world and her death out of the world. This worldliness, and its character of
permanence, provides the conditions for human freedom and individuality.” Without a
world which lasts longer than any one life, there would be no way to identify that life.
Something more permanent than individual members of the human species is a
precondition for locating the beginning and the end of a human life. It is this permanence
and durability of the world of objects, what Arendt calls, worldliness, that conditions the
activity of human work.

While the world, as the product of work activity, lies between human beings, the
activity of work or fabrication itself involves the subjective process of reiﬁcation - a
process whereby a given material, already a product of human hands when it is “taken
from nature,” is formed according to a preceding (given) model, the idea or plan of the
“worker.” Work, by which we build our world, is an activity done by individuals in
isolation. That is to say, the activity itself, is done in the presence of others, but not
between others. This isolation is a requisite for the reiﬁcation needed in the work process.
Only individuals perform work. And so long as the worker is engaged in work, he acts in
isolation. “Only when he stops working and his product is ﬁnished can he abandon his
isolation” (HC, 162).

Though isolated activity, work, nevertheless, properly belongs to the public realm,

because it is related to the construction and maintenance of the common world in the

 

57“From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human
life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that- in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying
that the same man can never enter the same stream- men, their ever-changing nature
notwithstanding,._ 'er ' r' ‘r r ‘ 011 o r' ‘.-. 0 0 1'

WW” (Ibid., 137, emphaSis added).

134

space of appearance that is in between humans.58 This common world lies both between
human beings and nature and between human beings themselves who construct it. It is
only because of this common world that nature, as well as other humans have any
objectivity. “Without a world between men and nature, there is eternal movement but no
objectivity” (HC, 137). What makes it possible for us to be seen and heard by others, is
the world by means of which we are gathered together, related and separated. Objectivity
requires some form of mediation between subject and object. The world is that mediation.
Because the work activity of building the world, that is, “working for others” (as
distinct from the activity of labor by which we “labor for ourselves”), is done in isolation
from others, the relationships that exist between the worker and others in this public
space, the space designated as the world, are deﬁned by the “marketplace.”59 What goes
on between humans is this public space is mediated by the products of work that comprise

the world of use objects.60 What is under the gaze of others in this public space is the

 

58“Unlike the animal laborans, whose social life is worldless, and herdlike and who
therefore is incapable of building or inhabiting a public, worldly realm, homo faber is fully
capable of having a public realm of his own, even though it may not be a political realm,
properly speaking. His public realm is the exchange market, where he can show the ‘
products of his hand and receive the esteem which is due him” (Ibid., 160).

59As we will see, while this is clearly a public realm that lies between human beings, it is
not properly the political realm. The political is what goes on between humans without
mediating objects and things, but directly. “Unlike the animal laborans, whose social life
is worldless, and herdlike and who therefore is incapable of building or inhabiting a public,
worldly realm, homo faber is fully capable of having a public realm of his own, even
though it may not be a political realm, properly speaking. His public realm is the exchange
market, where he can show the products of his hand and receive the esteem which is due
him” (Ibid., 160).
60Arendt here gives an analysis of the notions of “exchange objects,” “use objects,”
their difference and relationship to one another and their relation to “value,” an analysis

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world of use objects, which includes both the products of fabrication and the “workers,”
human beings as fabricators.

According to Arendt, the most signiﬁcant feature of the activity of work as the
process of world making is its “instrumentality.” That is to say, the making of permanent
and durable things in and for the world, in distinction from labor activity, involves human
purposeful efforts and end products. This activity is not done for its own sake, but for the
product which it is designed to produce. There is a deﬁnite end to the work activity itself
as well as a concrete end product that endures aﬁer the work process itself is ended.

No so with labor activity. The labor process has no end but is ongoing, continually
repeated. And it is not done for the sake of producing a product for consumption, but is
done as a means of consumption. Labor activity is part of the activity of consumption.
And consumption for continual biological living is something that ends only at the death of
the consumer.61

This notion of instrumentality is essential in understanding the world of objects and

 

which we need not present for our purposes. However, since I gloss the distinction
between use objects and exchange objects, consider the following: “In this process from
isolated craftsmanship to manufacturing for the exchange market, the ﬁnished end product
changes its quality somewhat but not altogether. Durability, which alone determines if a
thing can exist as a thing and endure in the world as a distinct entity, remains the supreme
criteria, although it no longer makes a thing ﬁt for us but rather ﬁt to ‘be stored up
beforehand’ for future exchange” (Ibid., 163).

61“. . . unlike working, whose end has come when the object is ﬁnished, ready to be

added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is
prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and
trouble” comes only with the death of this organism. . . . labor and consumption are but
two stages of the ever recurring cycle of biological life. The cycle needs to be sustained
through consumption, and the activity which provides the means of consumption is
laboring” (Ibid., 98-99).

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things, of understanding the public realm as common world. Everything which falls under
the inﬂuence of instrumentality is valued as a means to an end. Everything! “During the
work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and useﬁrlness for the desired
end, and for nothing else” (HC, 153). The end justiﬁes the means. And, while the products
of work-activity are always ends of the work activity, they are never ends in themselves.
As soon as an object is constructed for the world, it becomes a means for human use in the
world. The principle of utility or useﬁrlness is the sole criterion by which work activity as
well as its products are determined to be meaningful. According to the principle of utility
all ends become means-to-an-end. Indeed in the world of useful objects everything
becomes a means, even the producer of the objects, the human maker.

Within this sort of public space, there is, and can be no “end in itself,” other than
what one might arbitrarily assign.62 The notion of an “end in itself” within the context of a
world of use objects makes no sense. Even if “man the user” is said to be “the” end in
itself, such a conception still values the human being instrumentally. To say all other things
exist for the sake of “man the user” is to say that “man exists as user.” In other words,
human activities are meaningful only when something is used. Thus, even if “man as user”
is the “designated” end in itself, still, within the common world of use objects, the only
values we can get are values that are thoroughly instrumental. To conceive of anything as

an “end in itself” is to conceive of it in the context of fabrication (and fabrication’s

 

62“Within the category of means and end, and among the experiences of instrumentality
which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the
chain of means and end and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means,
except to declare that one thing or another is “an end in itself” (Ibid., 154).

137

principle of instrumentality). In the world of objects, meaning is use, either as means or
end.

For Arendt, the other mistake of modern political philosophy (the ﬁrst nristake was
to take the social for the public) is that it takes the political realm as coextensive with the
public realm of world making.

The problem with inscribing the entire public world within the activity of work is
that meaning can never be derived from mere instrumentality. In the world of work
everything is a means for something else. The problem with conceptualizing the political
world as coextensive with the fabricated world, is that homo faber, the maker of the
world, as instrumentizer par excellence - the one whose meaning is user, and who uses
everything - then rules (as user) over all the world, including the world of human affairs.

This feature of a thoroughgoing instrumentality which characterizes the world of
things, points out the incapacity of homo faber to do anything for its own sake.
Instrumentality as means-end reasoning is incapable of providing a conceptual framework
whereby we can understand anything as valuable in itself. Notwithstanding the Kantian
attempt at making “man the measure of all things,” an end in itself, as an end in itself the
human is still conceptualized within the means-end world of meaning, namely, as the user
par excellence. For homo faber all meaning is use, and to conceive of the human being as
an end in itself, is to conceive of the human within the world of instrumentality.

Arendt’s critique here points to the modern inability of making a distinction
between meaning as that “for the sake of” which something is what it is, and purpose (or

use) as that which exists “in order to” accomplish or attain something else. Because of a

138

failure to make this distinction, we too often inappropriately substitute utility (purpose,
end) for meaning.63 The problem with doing so, is that meaning is never stable, but always
subject to the fabrication process, that is, to a process of eventually degrading all things,
even human beings, into means. You can't stop that sort of instrumental valuing by ﬁat.

The problem, for Arendt, is not with the notion of instrumentality but arises when
instrumental rationality of homo faber is allowed to dominate the world of human affairs,
deﬁning what and how it is that people enter into the public political world.
Conceptualizing the political as coextensive with or even containing the public world of
work-activity leads to a confusion between two publics, the non-political (work activity)
and the political. The public that dominates “politics” today is the marketplace, where the
relationships that exist between humans are deﬁned by the exchange of products they
produce. This is a non-political public that has displaced the political public world of
human relationships.

For Arendt then, if the political sphere is to be “saved” from the instrumental
rationality of homo faber, it is clear that the public realm cannot be coextensive with the
world of things that lie between us. For these are things we make with our hands, and their
value is solely as use objects. According to Arendt, to conceptualize the political realm as

the public world of use objects and makers of objects that lie between human beings is to

 

63Purpose or end, “once it is attained ceases to be an end and loses its capacity to guide
and justify the choice of means, to organize and produce them. . . . Meaning, on the
contrary, must be permanent and lose nothing of its character, whether it is achieved or,
rather, found by man or fails man and is missed by him. Homo faber, insofar as he is
nothing but a fabricator and thinks in no terms but those of means and ends which arise
directly out of his work activity, is just as incapable of understanding meaning as the
animal laborans is incapable of understanding instrumentality”(1bid., 155).

139

identify the political with what goes on in the exchange market. Rather, she locates the

political realm in another part of the public sphere.

4. WWW

With the distinction between public and social, and between labor’s life-sustaining
activities and work’s world-making, we are now in a position to characterize Arendt’s
conception of the political as a public space involving “all affairs that go on between men
directly, without the intermediary, stabilizing, and solidifying inﬂuence of things” (HC,
182). The political realm is the “realm of human affairs where we exist primarily as acting
and speaking beings” (HC 181), and where the human activities of action and speech
constitute this second public space of the world of human affairs. In contrast to the
activity of work, the activity of speech and action involves not founding a world of objects
but founding spaces wherein people appear. They appear to one another with their “action
and speech.”

The ﬁrst thing to be said about Arendtian “action and speech” is that it alone is
conditioned by human plurality; that is, “that men not man inhabit the world,” each of
which is distinct from, and yet equal to the other.

This condition of plurality must not be confused with the condition of sociality,
with the fact that “men cannot live outside the company of men.” Sociality, “the natural,
merely social companionship of the human species” (HC, 24) is a natural association of
members of the same species forced by the necessities of life and the activity of world-

making. We live in social communities in order to survive more effectively, more

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adequately.

Plurality on the other hand is characterized by an equality and distinctness that
members of the human species share. It is because of the unique distinctness of each
human being that speech and action are required to “reveal” one’s distinctness to others.
And, because people are equal with one another, action and speech are also necessary to
understand one another, to “see and hear” who others are.

This condition of plurality is unique to the human species precisely in the human
capacity for speech and action. It is unique to the human species not because no other
species has variations and distinctions between and among its members, but because only
in the human species can members distinguish themselves.“ The operative word here is
“themselves.” Indeed, other species express and communicate among themselves their
needs, affections or hostilities. But for that “signs and sounds to communicate immediate
identical needs would be enough” (HC, 176). This is not the same as “communicating”
themselves. For that “action and speech” are needed. “Through them (action and
speech), men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct . . .” (HC, 176). The

condition of human plurality then is not the simple fact of difference among human beings,

 

6"Arendt is not so exact in her use of terms to explain this aspect of plurality. She uses
interchangeably, at least in W, “communicate,” “express,” “reveal.” It
seems to me that each of these carry a slightly different connotation that affects the
meaning we might give to her concepts of “action and speech.” I want to be as careﬁrl as I
can here so that we do not slip into our own preconceptions of action and speech. My use
of the term “to distinguish oneself” is meant to keep the focus on what we do in action
and speech rather than how we do it.

141

but the fact that each human being can herself distinguish herself from all others.65 It is in
this “distinguishing herself” that each is unique and yet equal to one another.

Action and speech create the sort of space between actors and speakers wherein
the participants appear to one another explicitly and without any mediation other than by
word and deed, “where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make
their appearance explicitly” (HC, 199), where they distinguish themselves. This political
public space, created solely by human actions and words, is where we make our own
appearances as human beings. By appearing to others with nothing more than our own
words and deeds, we appear not as use objects but as human beings.

This second sort of public space, what Arendt calls a “web of human
relationships,” wherein we distinguish ourselves through action and speech is, as it were, a
transparency laid over the objective world of things. It’s not another world alongside or
within the world of objects and things, though it is another kind of public space.
Overlaying the public space in which objects and things are intermediary between its
human occupants is a web constructed by deeds done and words spoken between humans.

These deeds and words, though quite real, inasmuch as by them human beings are directly

 

65Arendt’s conception of “freedom” is founded on this aspect of action as beginning
something entirely new. But freedom is not the same as self sufﬁciency and self mastery.
Indeed, the conception of the autonomous rugged individualist, isolated from and
independent of others is, according to Arendt “contradictory to the very condition of
plurality” (Arendt, Iheﬂommﬂohdjtjoo, 233-23 5). The process character of action
means that actions have no end, and thus their consequences are not only unpredictable
but irreversible. To replace freedom with sovereignty is to control the consequences of
action. And this requires the domination not only of one’s self but of all others.

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gathered together, related and separated, nevertheless have no “tangibility” of their own.66

According to Arendt, “action and speech” as that human activity by which we
distinguish ourselves, and through which we make our appearance in the web of human
relationships has two major features; ﬁrst, it gives rise to the beginning and disclosure of
the public identity of an individual; and second, it constitutes the very space of any public
appearance, and particularly democratic political space for the appearances of one another
as free and equal citizens. Human action and speech under the condition of plurality, as
understood by Arendt, both begin the reality or appearance of who we are and constitute
the space for a web of human relationships67 in which we relate with and separate from
one another as free and equal human beings.

Given the sort of web that is generated by the processes of human action and
speech, the world of human affairs that Arendt envisions provides a conception of politics
wherein citizens voice their own public identities in such a way as to retain their
differences while mutually appearing within a common public space.

To ﬁnish our reconstruction of her conception of political space, we need to
examine how action and speech give rise to the beginning and maintenance of political
space itself. We will then consider how Arendt addresses the problem of instability of

action and speech as a basis for political space, and her “remedies” for these instabilities.

 

6“ “. . . action and speech, and the least tangible and the most ephemeral of man made

‘products,’ the deeds and stories which are their outcome . . .” (Arendt, ﬂieﬂumm
Condition 198)-

67Actually by means of action and speech we establish both the space for the
appearance of objects in the world, as well as the space for the appearance of human
beings to one another.

143

To grasp what Arendt means by “action and speech” and the sort of public space
they engender we need to think of human deeds and words not as tools or instruments of
communication or power, but as, if you will, “human appearings.” For Arendt, the notion
of “action and speec ”is human activity not conceived as a set of spoken words or
performed acts, but as a way of being with other human beings - the way, the only way,
we distinguish ourselves among others.

If by the term “act” we mean simply “anything done, being done or to be done; a
performance or deed performed,” then we conceive of it as a human accomplishment, a
product, a projection of one’s plans, goals, or purposes. Conceived in this way the
meaning of human activity is bound up in its utility. That is, human activity is measured in
value by its success or failure to bring about its intended purpose.

But, according to Arendt, not all human activities can be valued instrumentally. If
we enlarge our conception of human activity to include not merely “doing something” for
a purpose or to accomplish some intended consequence, but also “being someone,” we get
to what Arendt calls the “men-ing of men,” “humans being human.” It is this sort of
human activity that Arendt wants to capture with her notion of “action and speech.”

While Arendt recognizes various meanings of “to act,” including “to begin,” “to
lead,” “to rule” and “to pass through,” “to achieve,” and “to ﬁnish,” the meaning on
which she wants to focus is that of initiative or beginning (the etymological root of all the
other meanings). To act in this sense is not simply “to do” as in achievement, but to

“initiate, to begin, to set something in motion,” and includes the idea of suffering or going

144
through an activity, (what we often refer to as “being done to”).68

Words and deeds are not merely what we accomplish when we set out to do
something, nor merely tools to accomplish certain things, but more signiﬁcantly they are
how we make our appearance to one another, how we are who we are. Human action, for
Arendt, as distinct from work activity, is not simply human activity that is instrumental,
having a purpose or being a means to an end, but also human activity that is “being
human.” Speech is not merely words spoken in order to “express our thoughts,” but is
also the way we are human.

We “act and speak” to one another not merely for the sake of surviving, nor to
simply communicate our needs, demands, affections, etc, as is the case when we use
language or conduct activity within the social realm.69 Rather, we act and speak to also
make ourselves seen and heard, to appear to one another, to “distinguish” ourselves, to
exist in the public world of appearances. “By word and deed we insert ourselves into the
human world . . . in which we conﬁrm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our
original physical appearance” (HC, 176).

We are born into the solid world of objects and things on a certain date, in a
speciﬁc city, at a given address, in a particular building, with the help of a midwife through

very private acts of laboring. At this birth, we are of course seen and heard. Our body

shape and sound of voice appear in innumerable perspectives. We begin to exist in the

 

6"See Arendt, IheHurnanConditlon 189-190.

69“Signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants would be
enough” (Ibid., 176). This is all that is needed in “species sociality”, but hardly enough for
individuality and autonomy.

145

human-made public world of objects and things. But, this appearance, “the naked fact of
our original physical appearance,” is forced upon us; it is not our doing. Being born, we
did not act, but were the offspring of others’ actions.

For Arendt, to originally act, to act freely, is to begin being who we are. By our
own action we begin ourselves. We begin to live now not merely in the public world of
objects and things, but in the human world of other actors. Action, as Arendt describes it,
is the actualization of the human condition of natality in which we begin to distinguish
ourselves. By speech we identify ourselves as the actor of our deeds, disclosing who we
are in our deeds. Speech is the process of actualizing the human condition of plurality in
which we “live as distinct and unique beings among equals” (HC, 178).

To act and speak in this sense is to become a “who we are.” Whenever and
wherever there is action and speech there is a someone who acts and speaks. Conversely,
who someone is, is disclosed only in her words and deeds. Words and deeds, in their full
meaning, cannot be conceptualized without someone who performs them.

Who we are is not someone we produce by our actions nor speak about with our
words, as if we somehow are already who we are, and then go about expressing our who-
ness. No one knows simply of himself who he is. Rather who we are can only be revealed
or disclosed through our own action and speech. It’s not like we act out from a script who
we are, or speak about who we are, as if we have some pre-conceptualized awareness of
who we are. In fact, to “disclose” ourselves in this way is not to distinguish ourselves at
all. If I act out who I am and speak about who I am, what I am doing is mounting

myself in the image that I put forth. This, according to Arendt’s appraisal, is an

146

“unauthentic who,” a “made over who,” a product of homo faber.

It is rather that we begin to act and speak, and in so doing we disclose ourselves,
even to ourselves. Indeed, oftentimes, we are the last to know who we are. Only through
our speaking and acting together with other actors and speakers do we begin to discover
who we are, and even then we may never really know.

There is no deﬁnition of ourselves, no description of who we are prior to our
acting out and speaking. And because there is no “completed” deﬁnition and description,
as long as we have the capacity to act and speak, we continue to distinguish ourselves.
The capacity to speak and act means always potentially beginning again and disclosing
anew who we are.

According to Arendt, action requires speech for it to be genuine action. Without
speech action would not only fail to reveal who acts, but would also cease to be action in
any sense of initiating a who. Action without speech would be nothing other than an
achievement, an act without an actor. It would be nothing more than the accomplishment
of some end or goal. Action without speech would be merely a means to an end. It would
have only instrumental value. When, and only when action is accompanied by speech, by a
revelation of the actor, does it have any meaning, any intrinsic value. It may have utility
but it cannot have meaning without speech.

What Arendt means by “action accompanied with speech” is action that begins to
distinguish who we are. And such action does not consist of purposeful acts done in order
to accomplish something else, but done for its own sake, for the sake of the actor

appearing, for the sake of the reality of the actor.

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Speech as it accompanies human action can take on a role and value that,
according to Arendt, is found in no other use of language. Speech as the disclosure of who
we are in what we do, have done and intend to do, is distinguishing speech. By it and
along with action, we begin being who we are, distinguishing ourselves. To be sure speech
is often used to communicate something to someone, and its usefulness is without
question. But such useﬁrl “talk,” for example, conveying an idea, expressing a want,
causing a reaction, plays a subordinate role to distinguishing ourselves.

Earlier I said that we do not act and speak to one another solely for the sake of
surviving, nor simply to communicate our needs, demands, and aﬂ‘ections, but to make
ourselves seen and heard, to appear to one another, to “distinguish” ourselves. That
statement needs clariﬁcation.

Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they

retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively “objective,”

concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which
physically lies between them and out of which arise their speciﬁc, objective,
worldly interests. These interests constitute, in the worlds most literal signiﬁcance,
something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and
bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in between,

which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about
some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of acting and

speaking agent. (Arendt, Iheﬂumanﬂondition, 182)
Indeed we do act and speak to one another for the purpose of communicating needs or to
seek public agreement regarding our common self-interests. The speciﬁc content of speech
and purpose of our action, “what” we do and say is often about matters that concern
either our own self-interests or the world that lies between us. But what is revealed in

“action and speech” is not this content, but a human reality. That is to say, implicit in

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every action and speech, whatever its content, is the disclosure of a who in speech and the
beginning of distinguishing oneself in action. Arendt is not suggesting that “action and
speech” is a separate kind of human activity individually distinct ﬁom other purposeﬁrl
human acts and communicative words. Rather, “action and speech” is the aspect of these
words and deeds in their creative, inventive, spontaneous revelatory signiﬁcance, whereby
we begin to distinguish who we are. This fuller meaning of human action and speech is, as
it were, “overlaid” upon their more “worldly” value and use.”

Action and speech, word and deed, by which we freely insert ourselves into the
world of human affairs, are inseparable. They are coeval, of the same rank, and coequal, of
the same kind.71 Either one without the other cripples our ability to begin our public selves
and to reveal who we are, to distinguish ourselves and to appear to others not as mere
laborers or workers, or achievers in the public world, but as free actors in the web of
human affairs.

The beginning and disclosure of oneself through action and speech are done only in

an already existing web of human relationships.” When one inserts oneself into the web of

 

7"The inability to grasp this dimension of human action and speech, Arendt attributes to
the basic error of modern materialism in politics, “. .. to overlook the inevitability with
which men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they
wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object. To dispense with
this disclosure, if indeed it could ever be done, would mean to transform men into
something they are not; to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure is real and has
consequences of its own is simply unrealistic” (Arendt, Iheﬂumanﬂondition, 183).

71See Arendt, IheHnmanCondition 25-27.

72“The disclosure of the ‘who’ through speech, and the setting of a new beginning
through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate
consequences can be felt” (Ibid., 184).

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human affairs, one begins the process of her own public appearance. As I mentioned
earlier, the insertion of oneself into the world of human affairs is never a predeﬁned or
self-asserting act, though it is a distinguishing act. Everyone starts her public life through
her own action and speech, but no one invents or makes her own biography. A real life
story has no author, only an agent, who starts it off, a subject who suffers its
consequences, and a “hero” who stands out for her distinction (HC, 184-185).

As we saw earlier, for Arendt, the disclosure of who we are by our own words and
deeds is impossible without an already existing web of human relationships. Action and
speech can never be done in isolation.73 At the same time words and deeds themselves
create the public spaces for human relationships where what goes on between human
beings is the direct appearance of one another.

If you will, action and speech have two ﬁrnctions for Arendt: they are revelatory
(the way an individual human being enters the public arena and distinguishes herself) and
they are creative. The simultaneous action and speech of a plurality of people acting and
speaking together create the very space in which individuals appear to and with one
another. This second major feature of deeds and words, how they give rise to the
existence of political space, is the one we are most concerned with, in our representation

of Arendt.

 

73See Arendt, IheﬂumarLCoodijjoo, 180 and 188. This is not true for the activities of
“labor” and “work.”

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D. ARENDTIAN POLITICAL SPACE AND HOW IT IS CONSTRUCTED.

A primary condition for any public human relatedness is the existence of a Space
for public appearance. Such a space of appearance comes into being, according to Arendt,
as a consequence of a multitude of simultaneous actions and speeches. This public space
of appearance is itself the “work of action and speech.” That is to say that words and
deeds together in the web of human relationships provide the public space for action and
speech as disclosure. It is this space of appearances where intersubjective speech and
inter-action occur that Arendt means to signify as the political realm."

Arendtian political space is, thus, brought into existence when and where people
act together in word and deed. Political space “properly speaking is not the city-state in its
physical location, it is the organization of the people as it (the city-state) arises out of
acting and speaking together, and its tmespaoe lies between people living together for this
purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (HC, 198). Arendtian political space is “the
space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely the space where Laopearto
We, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate
things, but make their appearance explicitly” (HC, 199).

It should be clear by now that the political space with which Arendt is concerned is
not an institutional or organizational structure of public space within which human action

and speech occur, but rather the human interaction that precedes (is an actual, concrete

 

7"“. . . the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words
and deeds.’ Thus action not only has the most intimate relationships to the public part of
the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it” (Arendt, Ihe

HomanCondition, 198, emphasis added).

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condition for) the establishment of such institutions or governments, and even makes the
establishment of any government (rule) possible. Arendtian political space “predates and
precedes all formal constitutions of the public realm and the various forms of government,
that is, the forms in which the public realm can be organized” (HC, 199). “It is as though
the wall of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around Mmeijistjng
pohhoeoaoe which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could
not survive the moment of action and speech itself” (HC, 198- emphasis added).

In fact Arendtian political space cannot properly be characterized as either a
democracy, an aristocracy, or an oligarchy, if we mean by these institutional structures
that organize human relationships. The political space Arendt is talking about underlies
such institutional arrangements, and is found in the meaning of human togetherness as a
material, as well as conceptual, precondition for any formal arrangement or agreement.

Arendtian political space is not established by political structures or institutions or
even a conceptual consensus. Rather, such institutions and consensuses are established on
the basis of political space, by what Arendt calls, “human togetherness,” people “being
with others.” This notion of togetherness as “being with others” is contrasted, by Arendt,
with both “being fox others” and “being aga'tost others.” To be with others is to act and
speak with them, to do and talk collectively, commonly, not separately one to another, and
then another, and another. To talk with another is not to talk to another nor to be talked
to, but rather, to stand alongside another and speak jointly. To talk with another is more
like a duet than a dialogue.

“Being with others” is not being for others. To act and speak for another, is to act

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and speak We, to represent them, to do for them what they are not doing or
cannot do themselves. To speak for another is to be their voice, to advocate for them, to
represent them where they cannot or do not present themselves. Likewise “being with
others” is not being against others. To act against another is to resist the action of another,
to block the activity of another, to stop another’s action. To speak against another is to
censure another, to disapprove of another, to discredit and dishonor another.

Both of these relationships - being for others and being against others - are
destructive of human togetherness, according to Arendt. Both demand a diminution of the
other as distinct and as an equal. Both are destructive of human plurality - remember,
“plurality has a twofold character of equality and distinction” (HC, 175). Being for others,
accepts the non-presence of others, the nonappearance of others; by “being for others” we
act and speak not along the side of, but in the place of others. Being against others, affects
the non-presence of others, it prevents, or attempts to prevent, the appearances of
others”. In both cases, plurality, the condition of both action and speech, the basic
condition of all political space, is ruined.”5

This space of human appearances, where people are together with others, this

 

7’See Arendt,1heﬂomao§ondiﬂon, 180. Arendt refers to both the saint, as one who I
“for” others, and the criminal, as one who is “against” others, as lonely ﬁgures, politically
marginal ﬁgures who “remain outside the pale of human intercourse.” They are both
observers only, unable to participate in political action and dialogue.

7‘5Arendt also identiﬁes a “perverted form” of “acting together” which she associates
with the “pull and pressure and tricks of cliques” (Arendt, Iheﬂomaoﬂonditjon, 203).
Cliques are perverted forms of acting together because they accept only a limited or
restricted plurality, if that is possible. Clique members are only “with” other members and
are “against” all others outside their clique.

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primary political sphere, though highly fragile, since it is established by a multitude of
human interactions and dialogues, is actualized and continues in existence only while
human words and deeds are ongoing.77 Thus, it does not always exist where pe0p1e are
gathered, nor is its existence, once begun, guaranteed.

The power needed to bring Arendtian political space into existence and sustain it is
the power of a multitude of simultaneous human appearances mediated between one
another directly by words and deeds."8 Power, in this context, is the actualized capacity for
shared action and speech, when people, a plurality of actors and speakers, are acting and
speaking together. Power is actualized “where word and deed have not parted company”;
where words continue to disclose the human realities of their speakers, and deeds continue
to create new human relations and realities, “where words are not empty and deeds are
not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions, and deeds are not used to violate
and destroy . . .” (HC, 200). The sort of public, political space created by action and
speech is where human beings are self-disclosing and new relationships are being created,
and where the relationships created are between self-distinguishing equal human beings.

Arendtian political space is not a world of human relatedness that is deﬁned by

intermediary “man made” objects (whether these man made objects are physical,

 

7"“Its (the space of appearance) peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the
work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into
being but disappears not only with the dispersal of men. .. but with the disappearance or
arrest of the activities themselves” (Arendt, Iheﬂumanﬁondjtion, 199).

7"“What keeps people together after the ﬂeeting moment of action has passed (what we

call ‘organization') and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining together
is power” (Ibid., 201).

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institutional or even consensual agreements). The category of means-end instrumentality
does not and cannot apply here. Institutional political spaces are spaces where human
relationships are deﬁned or determined in ways that are independent of the particular
human actors, though perhaps not completely independent of their founders or organizers.
It is as if the spaces of institutional realities are empty of distinguishable human actors but
rather contain objects, ideas, laws, contracts, or procedures which forge humans into
predetermined relationships.

Only words and deeds which carry their own meanings, meanings found only in
their performances, are enacted within genuinely free political spaces. But this very fact is

what makes such spaces so fragile and unstable.

E. THE INSTABILITY OF ARENDTIAN POLITICAL SPACE.

The beginning and disclosing of oneself in the public space of human appearances
is risky. We don't know how the story of our lives will end. We don't know, not because
we are unable to have a god’s eye view, but because our stories (our lives) are neither
written nor authored. They are only real, and thus can only be “read,” as we live them. It
is not until our death that the story of who we are can ever be told. And, it is only when
once there is no more possibility of action and speech that our “who” can be completely
seen and heard. But even then, never by us.

Beginning and distinguishing oneself in public is also extremely risky because of
the nature of the web of human relationships. “Since action acts upon beings who are

capable of their own actions, reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action

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that strikes out on its own and affects others. Thus action and reaction among men never
move in a closed circle and can never be reliably conﬁned to two partners” (HC, 190).
Because action and speech are always in an already existing web of relationships, they are
boundless, unpredictable and irreversible.

They are boundless in the sense that their consequences ripple throughout the web,
and are interdependent upon the action and speech of others as well.79 They are
unpredictable in the sense that who we disclose in the web is never known ahead of our
deeds and words, which oftentimes are reactions to the words and deeds of others.

Human words and deeds are also irreversible. They have a beginning, but no end.
They are inserted into the web of human affairs, but once begun, they “take on their own
life.” They continue in such a way that they can never be recalled, never “controlled.” To
be sure their consequences depend upon the many acts within the web. But unlike objects
made by human hands, these words and deeds can neither be destroyed, nor called back,
nor even revised. Their consequences, whether intended or unintended, manifest such a
perseverance that it appears as if they are out of the control of the actors themselves.

For this reason, the profound instability of genuine political space, the insertion of
oneself into the public realm of human affairs by word and deed, requires great courage.
Courage is demanded not only because we do not know who we are when we begin to

act, but also because we begin who we are without any controlling, self-determining

 

79“. . . The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same

boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, sufﬁces to change every
constellation” (Ibid., 190).

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inﬂuence on who we will become within the already existing web of human relationships,80
since the web of human relationships consists of a multitude of humans who also initiate
and disclose their selves.

Because action and speech are human processes that endure as long as human
beings are together, their consequences cannot be foretold, at least not in any complete
way. For that reason, human words and deeds are decidedly marked with an uncertainty
that should make anyone “fearful” of founding a polity on such a basis. How can we be
sure that anything we do now will survive or “work out” the way we intend? If the human
action-process of “founding” even political spaces is ever ongoing, whatever it is that we
are founding will never be completed. And because it is never completed, it may turn out
to be something wholly other than when it began.

With action and speech as the basis for public affairs, political space is plagued
with unpredictability (the consequences of human words and deeds cannot be known
beforehand), irreversibility (they cannot be undone), and anonymity (the identities of
actors and speakers are always in process, never stable; as long as the actor is alive and
acting, we don't know who she is). These are predicaments because, though they are the
source of freedom of action (human greatness and creativity) and the creation of political
space, they also indicate the profound instability of public life - an instability that has

traditionally been addressed by substituting making for action and by the application of

 

8°“. . . men never have been and never will be able to undo or even to control reliably

any of the processes they start through action” (Ibid., 232-33).

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moral standards which lie outside the realm of action and speech.“

Because of this fragility of action and speech, the traditional way of
conceptualizing political space, Arendt calls it the “Greek solution,” is to “substitute
making for acting” - to replace the frailty of action with the activity of legislating and
executing, with the activity of world making. But such a remedy, according to Arendt,
destroys the possibility of free and equal human relationships based on action and speech.
Rather than address the predicaments of action and speech, this “Greek” solution turns
them into activities that only homo faber can do, means-end acts of utility.

The anonymity, unpredictability and irreversibility of human action can indeed be
eliminated, if we conceive of all valuable human activity as merely purposeﬁrl, intentional,
or productive. Then, the meaning and value of human activity lies not in its performances
but in the successful accomplishments of its actors and authors. But, this solution

eliminates the predicaments of action and speech by eliminating action and speech, by

 

81Here Arendt also identiﬁes a dilemma within her political theory. By exercising our
capacity for human freedom, we become enmeshed in enduring consequences within the
web of human relationships which we do not fully intend and are unable to predict and
control. The freedom exercised in action and speech throws us, hook, line, and sinker, into
the web of human affairs, ﬁom which we cannot extract ourselves. Because we can't recall
what we do and say there, what we do and say have enduring consequences which we
cannot control. We are as much victims suffering the consequences of our own actions as
we are actors beginning and distinguishing ourselves. Thus, there appears a standoﬁ‘
between our freedom and our self-sovereignty, between the freedom to distinguish who
we are, and the self-mastery to control who we become. But the dilemma only appears
because we link our freedom with our sovereignty. According to Arendt, there is no
discrepancy between, and nothing inconsistent about, being free to begin something new
and being unable to control and predict the consequences of what we've begun,
particularly when what we've begun is who we are. Freedom does not exclude reliance,
dependency or trust (all of which indicate a non-sovereignty), nor does reliance exclude
freedom.

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substituting making for acting.

So too the traditional conception of the moral foundation of political relationships
has turned on the same mistake of linking the meaning and value of human action and
speech to utility and the activity of homo faber. If the normative values of political acts are
imported ﬁ'om outside the performances of the acts themselves, that is, if their normative
values are determined by their consequences, or intentionality, or motives, then political
action is nothing more than instrumental activity. In such a case ﬁrrther political action is
no longer possible, since its meaning as distinguishing action (as both a “new beginning
and actualization of which each man is capable” (HC, 204) and a “disclosure” of self in
appearing to others) is destroyed. It is then no longer a meaningful act, but merely a
purposeful act (meaning and purpose are not identical). If the morality of action is
construed on the basis of either “will” (motive) or “good” (consequence), then the
normative basis of political action is not in its performance, but lies outside political
activity and must be imported in a way that will be controversial, if not seemingly
arbitrary.

But more important, for our purposes, the difficulty with the traditional moral
foundation of political stability is its desolation of human plurality.

Remember that Arendtian political action is not in any way instrumental activity,

having a purpose or being a means to an end.82 And Arendtian speech is not understood as

 

82Not all activities are pursued for the sake of an end, as Aristotle also recognized.
Arendt here, appeals to Aristotle’s notion of “energeia” to identify those actions “whose
ﬁrll meaning are in the performance itself,” e.g., “seeing, and ﬂute playing.” See Arendt,

Iheﬂumanﬂondition, 206, her footnote number 35.

159

what is spoken in such a way as to “express an already thought.” Thus, everything that is
necessary (the activity of labor) and useﬁrl (the activity of work) is excluded from being
counted as speciﬁcally political action and speech. The public space of human action, what
I am calling Arendtian political space, (1) lies directly between humans and is unmediated
by anything other than their words and deeds, and (2) is “entirely dependent upon the
constant presence of others” to one another by their mutual words and deeds (HC, 23).
Thus, the worth and meaning of Arendtian human action and speech are “containe ”
within their own performance.

Further, political deeds are not replicative nor duplicable acts, but unique and
singular acts of a human being’s distinguishing herself. Human action is free precisely
because it is always and ever a new beginning. And because we act and speak in a
community of equals, each with a similar capacity to act, action and speech are thoroughly
conditioned and actualized by human plurality. Thus, to “import” normative criteria of
action and speech from outside of their own unique revelatory perforrnative meaning, to
import the criteria of political action from their consequences or their motivations”, is to
ignore their meaning, and to preclude the plurality of human action in public space.
Morality used in this way to condition political action results in the “degradation of action
and speech,” leaving us with nothing more than instrumental and behavioral acts

(consistent and conventional acts) of homo faber.

 

83“Motives and aims, no matter how pure or grandiose, are never unique; like
psychological qualities they are typical, characteristic of different types of persons.
Greatness, therefore, or the speciﬁc meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance
itself and neither in its motivation nor in its achievement” (Ibid., 206).

160

Some of the more persuasive arguments against plural democracy have to do with
the instability and vacillation of human deeds and words by which we relate to and with
one another. The demands for stability and for some degree of permanence has
traditionally called for a mitigation of egalitarian democracy. In order to provide the
needed stability, moral standards based upon the “shared intuitions” of a majority in a
political society, along with some institutional constraints on modifying those standards,
have been the predominate approach of political theorists. Theories differ on the precision
of these standards and the structures of the institutions, but most contemporary political
theories accept the needs for a “constrained” democracy.

However, for the most part, this traditional moral foundation of politics has left us
with a repudiation of words and deeds as constitutive of political space, and has
substituted instead the “concept of rule.” The sovereignty of moral law has replaced
freedom of the actors and their actions. This in turn, as Arendt argues, has resulted in the
obscuring or masking of human plurality. That cost is too great. The fear of the
irreversibility of actions’ processes and of the unpredictability of new realities and
relationships, which are the very assets of action and speech, has led us historically to
replace human plurality and ﬁ'eedom of action with a monarchial rule of instrumental
morality. According to Arendt, if we are to “save” genuine political spaces necessary for
democratic recognition of human plurality then we need to ﬁnd normative standards within
politics itself.

The substitution of “rule” for freedom of action results in a violation of human

plurality. And, since plurality is the “sine qua non condition” of the public realm, this

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encroachment of human plurality by traditional morality results in the destruction of the
public political realm, as Arendt envisions it.

While the consequence of this substitution of making for acting and “norrning” for
freedom, is the instrumentalization of politics, the degradation of political activity into the
means-end category, Arendt proposes alternative solutions to the predicaments of action
and speech as a basis for political space without repudiating action and speech. We now

turn to those remedies.

F. ARENDT’S REMEDIES FOR POLITICAL INSTABILITY.

Arendtian action and speech are human activities that require an actual
togetherness and simultaneous appearances of others. Political space is thus brought into
existence when and where people act together in word and deed. This Arendtian political
space has a double function: to multiply the opportunities for everyone to distinguish
themselves, and to provide a common space in which freedom of action and speech can be
performed.

The problems of stability for Arendtian political space are the predicaments in
which we ﬁnd ourselves when we act and speak. For Arendt, the solutions to the problems
of stability are found in the second function of human action and speech, not in their
revelatory aspect but in their constructive signiﬁcance. To bring this out more clearly we
need to revisit Arendt’s notion of power and examine how acting and speaking together
gives rise to political space itself.

What keeps people together after the ﬂeeting moment of action has passed (what
today we call “organization”) and what, at the same time, they keep alive through

162

remaining together is mg; (HC, 201, emphasis added). Power preserves the
public realm and the space of appearance. And without power, the space of
appearance brought forth through action and speech rn public will fade away as

rapidly as the living deed and the living word. (Arendt, WM,
204)

According to Arendt, political power by which people gather and organize
themselves is the human capacity to act and speak together. But how can action and
speech, which occur within a spaces of human appearances, be the power that sustains the
very space in which it occurs? The answer lies in the meaning and value of acting and
speaking together. Action and speech are how one distinguishes herself- how one begins
the revelation of her public identity. Remember that the meaning and value of action and
speech are located within their performances not in their purposes or intentions. “(T)he
innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and
defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for
better or worse” (HC, 205). Words and deeds in the already existing web of human
relationships do not so much “bring about” one’s public identity, in the way one might
build a house according to a predetermined plan, but rather they are the actual
appearances of oneself. Words and actions in an already existing web of human
relationships are one’s identity, not the elements from which one constructs one’s identity.
Human identity is never completed as long as speech and deeds are still possible.

So too, when words and deeds are spoken and acted together with a multitude of
speakers and actors, the simultaneous appearances of one another do not effect or cause
the space of public appearance but rather is the space of appearance. This capacity to act

and speak together is the beginning of the space of appearance, rather than something

163

publicly performed or done to accomplish the goal of constructing a space of appearance.
And, as long as acting and speaking together continue, the space of appearance continues
in existence.

Thus, the real threat to the stability of Arendtian political space, is not the
instability of action and speech, but cessation of speech and action, its completion, its
ending. The real threat to the stability of human relationships is when words and deeds are
ﬁnished and we have nothing more to say or do with one another. In a sense, the greatest
threat to Arendtian stability is ﬁnal agreement or consensus. What is required for stability
of Arendtian political space are not answers to questions, nor the institutionalizing of
preferred or idealized relationships, nor a completed agreement or contract on how we
ought to live. Rather what is needed to stabilize Arendtian political space is to keep the
conversation going, since it is in the conversation not in its consequences nor in its
motivation, and not in public institutions nor in public consensuses, that human
relationships of equality and isonomy are assured. For Arendtian stability we want to make
sure that we keep talking and acting with one another.

What is it that threatens the continuation of doing and speaking together? What is
it that brings conversation and acting together to an end? Is it the fact that our words and
deeds are unpredictable, that they are irreversible, and that they are unauthored? Since
they are unpredictable, how can I trust what you say and do, or be trusted in what I say
and do? Since they are irreversible, what I or anyone else says and does, even unwittingly,
can never be undone, nor can their damaging consequences be reversed. And since they

are unauthored, who is it that is responsible for what is said and done?

164

The difﬁculty that Arendt recognizes in founding a political space on human words
and deeds is to identify “standards” that will enable us to continue speaking and acting in
spite of the destructive possibilities of the very space needed for creative human words
and deeds.

Though the unpredictability, irreversibility and anonyrrrity of human action
“ﬁighten” us, we must not forget that they are the very assets and distinguishing marks of
free human action and speech. Human action is free precisely because it is always and ever
potentially a new beginning. And because we act and speak in a community of equals with
a similar capacity to act, action and speech, are conditioned and actualized by human
plurality. But the price for such freedom and plurality is a profound instability. The
question is then how do we respond to these sources of instability that are also, at the

same time, the sources of freedom without destroying speech and continued action?

1.11 l'l'l' 11E lEE ..

By human action we are always beginning ourselves anew. This makes us
unreliable in our appearances of who we are and in our relationships. We are not able to
guarantee who we will be tomorrow. And, because our actions are always done within a
web of other actors, who interact with us, we are unable to predict how we will act in that
web. Having no guarantee what the world of human affairs will be like tomorrow, we are
unable to rely on a not yet ﬁrture.

This double unpredictability of our own actions and our own interactions, as we

saw, makes for an unstable world of human affairs. But according to Arendt, the

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“predicament” of such an unstable web of relationships in which action and speech take
place is redeemable while still retaining action and speech as the basis of human
relationships - redeemable by what she calls, the human ability to make and keep promises.
“Without being bound to the ﬁrlﬁllment of promises, we would never be able to keep our
identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction” (HC,

23 7). The capability of making and keeping promises by words and deeds, leaves intact
the powerful unpredictability of human action while inserting “isolated islands” of stability
and certainty in the web of human affairs. Promises are our attempts to provide a
predictability to who we are and with whom we are related, but without giving up our
own power to act and speak with freedom. Promises, as a basis for giving stability to our
words and deeds, are still human words and deeds. They are not guarantees, if we mean by
that absolute certainty. There is no certainty in the world of human affairs. Promises are
not contracts; they carry no “rule of law.” For promises to provide any stability they need
to be continually renewed, continually spoken and acted out again and again.

If we want a guaranteed certainty in human political relationships, we would need
to organize political spaces by something other than human words and deeds. The
alternative to promise as a remedy to the unpredictability of human action is to reject
human action as a basis for political relationship and to replace such ﬁeedom of action and
speech with the “sovereignty” of dominating and controlling institutions, the domination
of human words and deeds by “rule.”

This capability of making and keeping promises preserves the condition of human

plurality - of acting and speaking with others. Promises are not words spoken to oneself or

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deeds done in isolation. When made to oneself promises make no sense and have no
connection to the real world of human affairs. Only promises which involve words and
deeds between human beings can hold us accountable for what we do and say, and what
we will do and say. Thus with promises, made only within the web of human relationships,
the plurality of action with all of its unpredictability, is given some relief, some “island of

assurance” within a sea of uncertainty.

The second source of instability within political space created by human speech
and action is the irreversibility of any process begun by action. To protect ourselves from
the irreversible consequences of our own actions, particularly when their consequences are
possibly destructive and violent, we might again be tempted to design political space to
include only the activity of making and ruling rather than the ﬁ'eedom of human action and
speech. Just institutions can well protect us from the damaging eﬂ’ects of free human
action. But again the cost of such protections and limitations is the denial of plurality and
freedom. According to Arendt there is another way out. The human ability to forgive
redeems us from the irreversibility of our aetions.

To forgive is to act unconditionally, without regard for the consequences of
actions and to act in a way that is not conditioned by the original act. To forgive is to
release the actor from the consequences of her original action. To forgive is, thus, to free
the original actor from her already and still irreversible acts. Human action cannot be

undone. But its consequences can be altered, even stopped by the power of another human

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action. Forgiveness as a human act, does not undo the original act, but puts an end to its
reverberating consequences. To forgive is to interfere with its consequences.

Without forgiveness we would be forever tied to the consequences of our own
action, which may, indeed oﬁen do, continue indeﬁnitely. The act of forgiveness is itself a
new beginning. By releasing the actor from the consequences of her actions, she is free to
start anew. To forgive, say, an act of injustice is to act in a way that denies the
consequence of the act of injustice. It is to stop the consequence, to prevent the injustice
from continuing.

An alternative to forgiveness of action is to re—act. To act in reaction to the
consequences of an action is to perpetuate the irreversible damage of action. Such reaction
is what we mean by vengeance, punishment, restitution. To react to an original act, is to
keep the consequence of that original act - with all its violence and human suffering -
within the web of human affairs. And, to hold the original actor to the consequences of her
act by requiring restitution or compensation is to require a restoration of the original
action, of what is now no longer.

Like promising, forgiving also preserves the conditions of human plurality and
human freedom. Forgiveness is not something that one can do for oneself. It requires a
plurality. Only others can forgive an actor for what she has said and done. Only others can
stop the consequences of an actor’s actions. And, only the forgiveness of others can free
the actor from her own past actions which have consequences that unwittingly tie its doer
to the evil it generates. As with promise, forgiveness is also dependent upon the fact of

plurality. Forgiveness of someone can only be given by another.

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Forgiveness is not toleration. We tolerate something that we take to be
unalterable. By tolerating it, we make a commitment to live with it and accept its
consequences. On the other hand when we forgive someone for what she has done, we cut
the link between the actor and the consequence of her act. By forgiving we free the actor
from the consequence of her act. It’s not that the act no longer has a consequence, but we

disconnect that consequence ﬁ'om the actor, thereby, freeing her to once again act freely.

3. WWW.

Finally, if we are to make human action and speech the basis of the political realm,
we must address the predicament caused by the condition of anonymity. The traditional
moral problem related to “unauthored” action and speech, is one of designating who is
responsible for words and deeds. How is it that one can be made responsible for what one
does, particularly given that what one does is unpredictable and irreversible? Again the
traditional solution is to deny the meaning and value of human action (as constitutive of
human identity) and to import a morality from outside the domain of free human action.
Thus, the category of means-end allows us to trace the consequences of actions to their
actors by understanding all human action as proceeding from a source and toward an end
or purpose. All actions are done to accomplish something. The success or failure of
accomplishing what one sets out to do is what is meant by responsibility of the actor. With
anonymity, the trace cannot be maintained, since who we are today may not be who we
are tomorrow.

For Arendt, the remedy for this source of instability is not to construct ﬁ'ozen or

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solidiﬁed identities but rather the human capacity to trust.84 To tnrst is to have conﬁdence
not in the identity of who people are but in an ability to rely upon the actions and words of
others; to have conﬁdence that words and deeds have not lost their power, “that men in so
far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only
because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves” (HC, 4).

The remedy for anonymity is the ability to trust that words and deeds have not
“parted company,” that “words are not empty and deeds not brutal, to trust that words are
not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and
destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (HC, 200); to trust that speech
has not degraded to “a means of persuasion, rather than the speciﬁcally human way of
answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done” (HC, 26),
and that action has not degraded into forcing people into achieving certain
accomplishments, rather than performing speciﬁcally human deeds of “beginning new and
spontaneous processes which without men would never come into existence” (HC, 231).

Again, as with promise and forgiveness, trust preserves the condition of plurality.
It can only be exercised within a plurality of human relationships. Trust is not something
given to ourselves, despite the often heard advice to “trust yourself.” To trust is to be in a

relationship with others, a relationship characterized by respect for distinctness among

 

““(W)ithout trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the
reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be
established beyond doubt. The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the
sheer passive giveness of their being, not in order to change it but in order to make
articulate and call into full existence what otherwise they would have to suffer anyhow”
(Ibid., 208).

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equals.

To trust is to act within the web of human affairs on the basis of some ﬁrture; a
ﬁrture undetermined yet becoming. But this future is never guaranteed. Thus, trust is the
correlate of promise. Trust is a remedy for anonymity not by giving an identity to the
anonymous, but by placing the responsibility for action upon all the actors who share in

the reality of political space.

G. THE MEANING OF ARENDTIAN POLITICAL STABILITY.

In the introduction to this chapter I suggested that Arendt’s conception of political
space based on the fragility of human speech and the freedom of action promises to
accommodate differences without exacerbating them in a way that keeps human
relationships most vivid. Arendt does not require that citizens take a single perspective for
public discourse, as does Rawls. Her conception of freedom as action based on principle
rather than purpose or motive means that “the public perspective” cannot be “normed,”
but must consist of a multitude of perspectives. Indeed, this multitude is what make public
space possible.

Arendt, like Rawls, recognizes the need for political stability to assure the
continuation of political space in which people can act and speak freely. But, for her,
stability is not sought in order to unify human interactions, but to keep them distinct.
Stability is needed not to secure justice, if by justice we mean a single “norrning” style and
form of action, but to secure freedom and human distinctness.

But without a normative perspective how do we “stabilize” the space needed for

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human freedom? How can we assure the continuation of a plurality of free individual
human beings within the same public space, without a Rawlsian type of self-lirnitation on
democratic participation that a consensus would seem to guarantee?

In Chapter One I talked about how the demands of stability are traditionally
interpreted as demands for equal justice requiring a limitation on democratic participation.
In traditional political thought the question of stability arises as a problem of justice or
order; that democratic participation must be constrained by a symmetry that secures
equality (of treatment and opportunity). Arendt is also concerned with equality, but not by
establishing a symmetry of relationships. She is concerned with designing political spaces
which are “within the range of every human being” (HC, 5), but which allow for the
greatest human ﬁeedom. This may best be served by asymmetry, even disorder.

Stability for Arendt is pursued not in order to secure equality in human action
(such equality would destroy the inventive power of human action) but to secure equal
freedom, equal power for all to act freely. Thus instead of securing equality of thought, by
deﬁning a single perspective from which a conception of political space is designed, what
Arendt requires for stability is the continuation of speech and action unconditioned by
unity of purpose and motive.

But, in order to endorse the freedom of “action and speech” as a basis upon which
to build political space that is both conditioned by the fact of plurality and promotes
egalitarian relationships, we need to accept and accommodate their “predicaments,”
unpredictability, irreversibility and anonymity.

The Arendtian “prescriptions” or remedies (promise, forgiveness and trust) for

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addressing these problems are clearly not presented as normative precepts by which we
judge the moral worth of political activity. Morality, in that classical sense is not
appropriate to the Arendtian conception of politics as we have laid it out. Iftraditional
normative morality were to apply, we would have to be able to know beforehand the
consequences of actions, and be able to ascribe intentions, motives, etc, to a “ﬁxed”
moral actor. To do that is to conceptualize political action instrumentally, and to deny its
freedom or what Arendt calls, human “natality.”

Rather, promise, forgiveness and trust are themselves political actions par
excellence, which establish a political space for human beings freely acting together as
equals. These actions of promise, forgiveness and trust are essential if we are to preserve
the possibility for democratic political spaces in which equals act freely with one another.

But “the will to live together in the mode of acting and speaking” (promise), and
the remittance of the consequences of free political action (forgiveness), and trust that
words and deeds have not parted company, still do not guarantee future human
relatedness among equals. Nor do they provide a stability to political spaces greater than
what human action and speech is capable of providing. We are foolish to think otherwise.
The frustrations of words and deeds are inherent in the very nature of free human action
and speech.

If we want a greater stability and security than action and speech can provide, then
the only alternative to these remedies is to substitute “making” for “action.” The only way
to eliminate the unpredictability and irreversibility of action is to not act, but to freeze

action into rules, laws, contracts, to behave according to norms. In other words, the

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alternative is to make all human action instrumental activity, where norms of moral
behavior are appropriate.

According to Arendt, morality, as a normative code whose meaning is derived
from outside the performance of human deeds, does violence to the activity required for
genuine political space between human beings. Since the original meaning of human action
and speech is such that they cannot be solidiﬁed and made objective“, genuine political
space is an extremely ﬁ'agile and frail public space in which the actions of anyone may
have a boundless, unpredictable and irreversible effect on the entire web - even destructive
of some of its members and their relationships. A moral code designed to limit democratic
participation will eventually destroy human freedom by destroying the very conditions for
uniquely human action and speech.

The prescriptions of promise, forgiveness and trust, themselves performances of
human words and deeds, are, according to Arendt, the only way to stabilize genuine, free
and egalitarian, political action. Where Rawls ﬁnds “the most reasonable basis of social
unity available to us” in a “reasonable overlapping consensus” (PL, 134), Arendt ﬁnds it
in the simultaneous performances of promise, forgiveness and trust. Like Rawls, Arendt
regards the problem of stability as a problem of perception. Though, unlike Rawls, she
hopes to establish the objectivity of human relationships not on a single point of view that
leads to conceptual agreement, but on a plurality of positions that leads to a common

sense, on a plurality of perspectives (on the common “eternal truths” of justice and

 

85At one point Arendt calls this web a “subjective in between” human beings. See
Arendt, IhcliurnanCondition 183.

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freedom) that lie in between human beings.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned a problem with conceptualizing
democratic participation as public appearances through human performances. There I
suggested~ that public (theatrical) performances are not limited to the role of the actors, but
include also the spectators. In our examination of Arendtian political space, Arendt
presents us with a theory of public action (human performance) in which a multitude of
actors who present themselves and make their appearances by their words and deed are
simultaneously a multitude of spectators who are presented with appearances of others. In
Arendt’s conception of political space, there are no actors who are not at the same time
spectators. We act and speak only in a web of human relationships, in which what we say
and do, affect and is affected by others in that web. All participants are both actors and
spectators. There can be no human appearances without there being both actors and
spectators. And, no one can make a public appearancewithout being both an actor,
making her appearance to others, and a spectator appearing with others. For without being
both, there is no public space in which people appear.

Still, it seems that the political arena is like the stage; that what (who) appears in
public appears on the stage. Ifthe performing arts (dance, theater, music) model political
space, as Arendt would seem to suggest, in what sense do the spectators appear? And if
they don't, then how does Arendt’s analysis of political action as performance preserve
plurality as she claims? Not everyone can get on stage at the same time. Only a few
“perform” at a time, while the rest observe. How can she claim that these spaces of limited

performances are democratic?

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Perhaps political space is not “the stage” but rather the entire theater? If so, then
as I suggested in Chapter Two, we need to clarify the distinction between the
performances of “actors” and the performances of “spectators,” and how each contributes
to the entire performance of the play. While Arendtian political action suggests ways in
which we are both actors and spectators with regard to public human appearances, how
are citizens as actors and citizens as spectators both performers? Is the performance of the
actor-citizen given more prominence than the performance of spectator-citizen? What

role does the spectator play in Arendtian political spaces?

Chapter V

WHY THE POLITICAL?
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISIBILITY AND ORDER.

These three theaters, Cunningham, Grotowski, and Beckett . . . are theaters for
an elite . . . Grotowski plays for thirty spectators - as a deliberate choice. He is
convinced that the problems facing himself and the actor are so great that to
consider a larger audience could only lead to a dilution of work. He said to me:
‘My search is based on the director and the actor. You base yours on the director,
actor, audience. I accept that this is possible, but for me it is too indirect.’ Is he
right? Are these the only possible theaters to touch ‘reality’? They are certainly
true to themselves, they certainly face the basic question, ‘Why theater at all?’ and
each one has found its answer . . . These theaters explore life, yet what counts as
life is restricted. ‘Real’ life precludes certain ‘unreal’ features. If we read today
Artaud’s descriptions of his imaginary productions, they reﬂect his own tastes and
the current romantic imagery of his time . . .

A director dealing with elements that exist outside of himself can cheat
himself into thinking his work more objective than it is. By his choice of exercises,
even by the way he encourages an actor to ﬁnd his own freedom, a director cannot
help projecting his own state of mind onto the stage. The supreme jujitsu would be
for the director to stimulate such an outpouring of the actor’s inner richness that it
completely transforms the subjective nature of his original impulse. But usually the
director or the choreographer’s pattern shows through and it is here that the
desired objective experience can turn into the expression of some individual
director’s private imagery. We can try to capture the invisible but we must not lose
touch with common-sense - if our language is too special we will lose part of the

spectator’s belief. (Peter Brook, flfhe Empty Soaoe, 60-61)

A. VISIBILITY AND SYMMETRY IN PUBLIC SPACES.
Here Brook criticizes theaters reserved for elites and defends his own search for

hidden patterns of power that lie in the interplay between actors and audience. We saw in

176

177

our discussion of rough theater that, for Brook, the audience keeps the entire theater in
touch with the reality of a common sense and that the voices of the spectators are essential
if theater is to make the invisible visible. Still, such an involvement of the actors with the
spectators is “indirect” and requires courage, inventiveness and improvisation.

In any theater, by the way a director “encourages an actor to ﬁnd his own
freedom,” his own experience of humanity, he (the director) cannot help but project his
own subjective experiences onto what is made visible on stage. Indeed, to do otherwise
would be inhuman, unworldly, an abstraction from “our mortal form.”

Nevertheless, the director ought not to “cheat himself into thinking his work more
objective than it is.” There is a danger here, that what are offered as objective experiences
of the eternal, recurring patterns of human relationships are no more than the
choreographed patterns of the director’s own private life experiences. The danger is that a
given production of the invisible made visible may reﬂect only the director’s “own tastes
and the current romantic imagery of his time.”

To prevent theaters from going this far, and directors from cheating themselves,
Brook suggests that directors keep in “touch with common-sense.” To capture the
invisible in a credible way (and this is where, for Brook, the audience comes in), the
language of theater must remain tied to the common experiences of the spectators. He
suggests that the best method for the director, the “supreme jujitsu,” is to inspire the actor
to transform the director’s own original state of mind into more objective patterns.

When the director mistakes his own private imagery for the desired objective

experience, theater becomes elitist. The problem with elite theaters is that their emphasis

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on order and symmetry, “rigorous discipline” and “absolute precision,” invariably leads to
a myopic concern with the problems between director and actors that eventually results in
a limitation placed on the participation of audiences - since “larger audiences could only
lead to a dilution of work.” While theaters designed for elites may explore life, they are
compelled to restrict what counts as life. Their search for symmetry requires a conception,
a preconception, of the real that precludes certain features of reality as “unreal,”
particularly what is inconsistent and not “all of a piece.” In their concern for “direct”
control of the problems facing actors and directors, and their emphasis on symmetry and
order, elite theaters lose sight of the real purpose of theater, to make visible the invisible
eternal patterns in human relationships.

According to Brook, the purpose of theater as elitists would have it, the purpose
of elite theater, is the search for symmetry and order even before meeting the conditions
for full visibility. For Brook, however, the reason for good theater is “to capture the
invisible” patterns of eternal rhythms that control our relationships, rather than to procure
symmetrical orderings of human relationships. For Brook, the answer to “why theater at
all?” is not to strike good symmetry but to make visible what is invisible.

Brook’s critique of elite theater also sounds a warning for democratic theorists.
When we design political spaces we cannot help but project our own state of mind onto
the patterns or procedures for democratic participation and political action of citizens. To
do otherwise is inhuman, unworldly, an abstraction from “our mortal form.” Nevertheless,
we must be careﬁrl not to cheat ourselves into thinking that our work is more objective

than it is.

179

As with theatrical directors, the real danger facing democratic theorists is when we
lose touch with common-sense and begin to speak a “language that is too special”; an
ideal language that, instead of making visible the hidden inequalities that rule lives,
substitutes the theorist’s private imagery for the objective experience of human
relatedness. When that happens, our designs are elitist and the credibility of the “play”
between human appearances of actors and spectators is lost.

As theorists we need to be clear on why democratic spaces. What is the purpose
of the spaces we are designing? Is it to make visible the invisible relationships of inequality
that rule our lives, or to provide a symmetry among human beings in their relationships
with one another?

If symmetry, then are we searching for a universal pattern that ﬁts any and all who
enter such spaces, a rule by which we preclude certain “unreal” features? Where do we
ﬁnd the patterns for such symmetry? Is it in our own subjective experiences or are we
“dealing with elements that exist outside” ourselves? Ifobjective, how is this pattern
made visible?

If visibility, then we need to establish a common sensibility from which we can all
perceive what is hidden in our own relationships and appearances. Brook again suggests
to us that the best method for designing political spaces for the visibility of human
relationships is not to choreograph patterns of just (symmetrical) relationships, but to
stimulate the “inner richness” of citizens as actors and citizens as spectators (all
participants) to make their own appearances and make visible our inequalities.

In Chapter One I spoke of the danger of confusing the problem of visibility with

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the problem of order and symmetry. As theorists designing democratic spaces, we need to
ﬁrst specify the conditions of visibility before we talk of order and symmetry. If we
confuse these two, or too quickly offer normative conditions for arranging human
relationships before we are clear about the objective conditions for human visibility, then
the spaces we end up designing are less democratic and based more upon our own
“private imagery.” To secure objective conditions for human appearances that do not
exclude those inequalities we need to base our design of political space on a “common-
sense,” a multiple perspective that is common yet not an abstraction, common but not
specialized.

In designing democratic spaces I suggested, then, that the conditions of visibility
be satisﬁed before we answer the question of order and symmetry. I suggested that the
conditions for human visibility require, ﬁrst, an acoustic in which all voices are audible,
and a “visual ﬁeld” in which all human actions are visible; and second, a common sense, a
common perspective, that is constructed ﬁ'om a plurality of local human positions (voices
and deeds) all of which are related to one another as different perspectives on the common
world.

In this chapter I want to explore further how Rawls and Arendt establish the
conditions of human visibility, and how each answers the question “why the political?”
What I will show is that Rawls’s construction of justice as fairness as an overlapping
consensus implies a conception of political space that may prove too restrictive; that
Rawls’s design of political space modeled by the original position establishes symmetry in

relationships before it fully lays out the conditions of visibility. I will show how Arendt’s

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design of political space as human performances, on the other hand, gives ﬁrst
consideration to the conditions of visibility, particularly in her construction of a common
sense.

We begin our review of Rawls’s and Arendt’s reasons for the political with an

explication of their different conceptions of human freedom.

B. WHY THE POLITICAL? RAWLS AND ARENDT ON HUMAN FREEDOM.

In Chapter Four we saw how Arendt’s search for stability is in many ways quite
similar to Rawls’ s: the endurance of the human world, a public domain of a plurality of
human beings who are often at odds with one another, and a foundational basis of free
political actions among a democratic citizenry. Yet she differs with Rawls in where she
ﬁnds that stability.

The unity of mankind and its solidarity cannot consist in a universal agreement

upon one religion, or one philosophy, or one form of government, but in the faith

that the manifold points to a oneness which diversity conceals and reveals at the
same time.86

Where Rawls ﬁnds stability in a conceptual consensus on a “political conception”
that organizes human relationships and produces institutions and structures of those

relationships, Arendt ﬁnds stability in the free activity of its citizens acting together, the

same source from which instability arises. Arendt’s concern for political stability is rooted

 

86Hannah Arendt, “Jaspers, Citizen of the World,” Wes (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968) 90.

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in her search for a permanent space for ﬁee human action”, whereas Rawls’s concern is
rooted in a search for a set of just arrangements that are chosen through a normative
procedure of public reason modeled by the original position. Arendt’s conception of
political space differs considerably from Rawls’s, and this diﬂ‘erence concerns their

different conceptions of political freedom, or free human action.

1. mm.

For Rawls, persons are free when they attain “full autonomy.” And, they are fully
autonomous when they publicly afﬁrm principles of justice, which they arrive at by the free
exercise of judgement, and when they apply those principles in their public life. This means
that citizens not only comply with the principles of justice, but recognize and act on the
basis of those principles.

Thus, people are free (fully autonomous), according to Rawls, when they possess
certain capacities or powers to act on principles of justice (the capacity for a sense of
justice, the capacity for a conception of the good, and an ability to reason"), and when
they recognize and afﬁrm a political conception of justice by which they willingly organize

their lives and by which they act as fully cooperating members of society. “(C)itizens think

 

"“Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to
makes its appearance” Hannah Arendt,“What is Freedom,” W (New
York: The Viking Press, 1954) 149.

”“The basic idea is that in virtue of their two moral powers (a capacity for a sense of
justice and for a conception of the good) and the powers of reason (of judgement,
thought, and inferences connected with these powers), persons are free. Their having these
powers to the requisite rrrinimum degree to be fully cooperating members of society makes

persons equal” (John Rawls, EmitLoaLLihemljsm, 19).

183

of themselves as free in three respects: ﬁrst, as having the moral power to form, to revise,
and to rationally pursue a conception of the good; second, as being self-authenticating
sources of valid claims; and third, as capable of taking responsibility for their ends. Being
.-.; ' .7 ~ _- .- g“. - 'z-j 0 3's. 1 ,'. .__l .441, .U on. o, ”’39

For Rawls, individual freedom is tied up with a person’s capability of rational
deliberation and decision making, including the abilities to form a conception, to
authenticate assertions or declarations, and to take responsibility for one’s own goal or
purpose. This third element, being “capable of taking responsibility for their ends,” is part
of rational deliberation because of “the guiding principle that a rational individual is always
to act so that he need never blame himself no matter how his plans ﬁnally work out” (TJ,
422). Thus, to be free, for Rawls, is to be in “control” of what one believes (her
conceptions) and what one decides (authenticating one’s own beliefs or claims), and to be
above reproach whatever the consequences of one’s acts.90

People cannot be ﬁ'ee if they are not capable of rational deliberation, of decision
making according to a procedure that determines “a rational plan of life in the light of
which they schedule their more important endeavors and allocate their various resources
(including those of mind and body, time and energy) so as to pursue their conceptions of
the good over a complete life, if not in the most rational, then at least in a sensible (or

satisfactory) way” (PL, 177). Citizens are free when their lives are organized around a

 

89John Rawls, PoliticoLQbﬂalism, 72, emphasis added.

9°“Acting with deliberative rationality can only insure that our conduct is above
reproach, and that we are responsible to ourselves as one person over time” (John Rawls,

W, 422423)-

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“plan of life” that they have chosen, when their actions are consistent and in conformity
with their chosen life plan.

According to Rawls, the conception of freedom as full autonomy is modeled in the
original position.91 To say that the original position models freedom or ﬁll] autonomy is,
according to Rawls, to say that freedom is determined by “how the parties are situated
with respect to one another and by the limits on information to which their deliberations
are subject” (PL, 77). Rawls’s pursuit of stability (beyond the issue of motivational
stability) is to provide some way (the original position) that citizens can reasonably choose
principles of justice around which they agree to organize their public lives. The political
conception is stable when, given the “fact of reasonable pluralism,” it is the “focus of an
overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines” (PL, 78). Thus, for Rawls, ﬁ'eedom, ﬁrll
autonomy, is realized “only if the full explamtjooandjustiﬁoatjon of justice as fairness is
publicly available” (PL, 78, emphasis added). It is publicly available by means of the
original position through which citizens come to select and act on public principles of
justice. Rawlsian political stability secures political freedom as autonomy. The
autonomous individual citizen, organizing her own life according to a freely chosen
reasonable life plan, selects a political conception without coercion and undue inﬂuence

even of her own advantage (in the original position behind the veil of ignorance) and acts

 

91“We have seen that citizens’ rational autonomy is modeled in the original position by
the way the parties deliberate as their representatives. By contrast, citizens’ ﬁrll autonomy
is modeled by the structural aspects of the original position, that is by how the parties are
situated with respect to one another and by the limits on information to which their
deliberations are subject. To see how this modeling is done, consider the idea of ﬁrll

autonomy” (John Rawls, BohttcalLihetahsm, 77).

185

on a conception that is also the focus of an overlapping consensus.

2. Arendtianﬁteodom.

Arendt’s conception of freedom is quite a bit different, which accounts for her
concern with a diﬁ‘erent kind of stability. The freedom with which Arendt is concerned is
not a freedom to deliberate, to choose a political conception without coercion, but a
freedom to act, to do things, to perform in a certain way, particularly, to begin something
totally new and unpredictable. “(T)hat is, the freedom to call something into being which
did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or
imagination, and which strictly speaking, could not be known” (BPF, 151). We are free,
not merely when we can make choices without coercion, not merely when we can discern
what is the best way to attain our good or determine our life plan and then act (be self-
motivated) to achieve it, but when we begin something totally new and “spontaneous.”

The Arendtian understanding of human ﬁ'eedom cannot be made clear without her
theory of human action and her conception of political activity. Indeed her theory of action
and conception of political space is an extended defense of the sort of freedom she
advocates. To understand how her conception of freedom differs from Rawls’s, we need
to use her notions of instrumentality (human actions designed to achieve a goal or
purpose) and sovereignty (“the ideal of uncompromising self-sufﬁciency and mastership,”
HC, 23 4).

For Arendt free human action has a character of non-instrumentality, being done

for the sake of its own performance as opposed to being done to achieve a goal or for a

186

purpose. An action is free when its meaning or signiﬁcance is not found in its purpose or
goal, or its motive, but in its performance. For Arendt, only perforrnative acts are
candidates for being free acts. We are all familiar with examples of perforrnative acts such
as promises, congratulations and apologies. In political spaces, the primary perforrnative
acts are those by which we appear to one another and begin to reveal who we are.
Arendtian freedom also has a character of non-sovereignty, of bringing something
into existence without controlling the process of it coming into being; “of being able to
begin something new and of not being able to control or even foretell its consequences”
(HC, 235). A free human act, according to Arendt, while performed by an actor is not
“caused” or determined by her.92
Action, to be ﬁee, must be free from motive on one side, ﬁ'om its intended goal as
a predictable effect on the other. This is not to say that motives and aims are not
important factors in every single act, but they are the determining factors, and

action is free to the extent that it is able to transcend them. (Hannah Arendt,
W, 151)

To be free, for Arendt, it is not enough simply to choose one’s own goals and life plans
and be self-motivated. The kind of freedom that concerns Arendt is not simply a freedom
from the coercive forces of life, from dependency and necessity, to think and believe what

one wants and to choose on the basis of what one believes (self motivated), but a freedom

 

92See also, Arendt, W, 164 ff. “Within the conceptual
framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difﬁcult to understand how freedom
and non-sovereignty can exist together, or put it another way, how ﬁ'eedom could have
been given to man under the condition of non-sovereignty. Under human conditions,
which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on earth, freedom and
sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously... If men wish
to be ﬁ'ee, it is precisely their sovereignty they must renounce.”

187
to perform deeds on the basis of their own signiﬁcance - a freedom to act, not so much
without motive and without goal, without intention and without purpose, but in such a
way that transcends these aspects of action. To act not “in order to,” nor “for the sake of”
but to act purely and simply, to bring about that which we do (to act) without even the
“coercion” of purpose and motive.93

In some sense one’s purpose as goal and one’s motive as cause of what one does
coerces one to act. That is, these two (purpose and motive) dam: one’s action, decide
it, explain it. How often do we claim to be able to predict what one does or will do from
knowing one’s purpose and motive; that is, given one’s life plan and the “virtues” of
consistency and conformity, we often attempt to “deduce” one’s actions ﬁ'om her
intentions and motives.

Arendtian freedom, on the other hand, is unpredictable, indeterminate,
uncontrolled, uncoerced action. It is creative, inventive, improvisational, and
revolutionary.

Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under

the dictate of the will - although it needs both for the execution of any particular

goal - but springs from something altogether different (following Montesquieu’s

famous analysis of government) I shall call a principle. (Hannah Arendt, Begum
Bastandﬁunne, 152)

 

93Consider an example of making an apology. I say to someone “I am sorry.” Arendt
wants to say that to the extent that my saying “I am sorry” is governed only by motive and
purpose, it is not free. If, for instance, I say that I am sorry merely in order to get back
into the good graces of my wife or for the sake of pleasing her, then saying “I am sorry”
(the performance of an apology) is not ﬁ'eely being sorry. Only when my saying “I am
sorry” is not done merely “for the sake of” nor “in order to,” but simply to be sorry does it
qualify, according to Arendt, as a free act.

188

According to Arendt, to be under the “guidance of the intellect and dictate of the will,”9"
is to have actions determined by their goals and motives. Ifall human action can be fully
and adequately characterized by purpose and motive, as is implicit in the deliberative
actions characteristic of Rawlsian political space, then freedom is properly understood as
self-deterrrrination, choosing one’s own goals and being self motivated. But Arendt
challenges the adequacy of this conception of ﬁeedom. Any human action that is
determined, even self-determined, is not free.

Is the signiﬁcance of every human activity, each of which may have a purpose as
well as a motive, completely apprehended by its purpose as goal and motive as cause? Are
there not human actions whose meanings (and values) are beyond attaining some goal and
which cannot be adequately explained by the motives of its actors? In fact, examples of
such “unpredictable” actions are often found in the human narratives behind original,
creative and ingenious inventions, discoveries and innovations.

Here we come to what is probably the most opaque aspect of Arendtian freedom.
It seems strange to talk about the freedom of action without talking about human purpose
and motive. But Arendt is not suggesting that purpose and motive have no role in human

action, only that these are the dots-omitting factors of action, not the factors of their

 

9“Arendt will often speak about human psychology in classical terms of faculties, the
faculty of the intellect, the will, natality, etc. Nevertheless, the distinction that Arendt
makes between purpose as goal, motive as cause, and principle as meaning (which I
discuss in the next few pages) can be made without committing ourselves to the sort of
“faculty psychology” that she seems to accept. The question is whether the notions of
purpose and motive are sufficient to give an adequate account of free human action, or
whether the notion of “principle” is needed. I think Arendt is correct to argue that motive
and purpose is not sufﬁcient to capture the entire meaning of some human actions.
Whether her notion of principle does the job, I’m not sure.

189

freedom, and that the freedom of a human act is not accounted for by what determines it.
Freedom, for Arendt, is not, as Rawls would have it, tied to the capability of rational
deliberation, but to the capability of spontaneity, improvisation, invention, creativity, of
bringing something out of nothing.

For Arendt, free human action is something done whose power or source is the
unique human ability to bring into being what was not. This is what she tries to get at by
her notion of “natality.” From the perspective of the agency of the actor who performs
free acts, Arendt tries to capture the source of freedom by talking about the human
capability of beginning something totally new, from nothing; what she calls “natality.”
“(T)he faculty of freedom itself (is) the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and
'mspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and
beautiﬁrl things” (BPF, 169, emphasis added). From the perspective of the free act
performed, Arendt tries to capture this same character of ﬁeedom by talking about the
“inspiring principle” of an act (as distinct from its purpose and motive).

Let us look at Arendt’s characterization of an “inspiring principle”:

In distinction from its goal, the principle of an action can be repeated time and

again, it is inexhaustible, and in distinction ﬁ'om its motive, the validity of a

principle is universal, it is not bound to any particular person or to any particular

group. However, the manifestation of principles come about only through action,
they are manifest in the world as long as the action lasts, but no longer. Such
principles are honor, glory, love of equality . . . , but also fear or distrust or hatred.

Freedom or its opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are

actualized; the appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles,

coincides with the performing act. Men are free - as distinguished from their
possessing the gift for freedom - as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to

be free and to act are the same. (Hannah Arendt, W, 152-
53)

190

The inspiring principle of an act is not its goal, nor its motive, but its character.
“Principles” which inspire an act, are what give an act its “spirit” or quality; its mood,
tone, temperament, passion. The principle of an act is something that is “repeatable” in the
way a goal is not; its goal when achieved is ﬁnished, aeeompli, but the principle of an act
can inspire other acts as well. Principles are universal in the way that motives are not.
Motives are speciﬁc to individual actors and particular circumstances, but the same
principles can inspire many actors in a variety of circumstances. The principle of an action
is not something put into an act by the agent, as is motive and goal, but is something that
begins with the performance of an act and ends with its cessation.

Consider an example of a courageous act of rushing in a burning building to save
its trapped occupants. Courage, as a principle of the act, begins when the heroine rushes in
a blazing apartment to save its residents and ends when she either comes out or dies in the
process. Courage, as an inspiring principle, is different ﬁom the purpose of rushing into
the ﬁre (its purpose is to save the residents) nor is it the same as one’s motive for rushing
in (one’s motive might even be to become a popular heroine and receive accolades).
Whatever the purpose or motive, and even if the act was unsuccessful in achieving its
purpose, it was still courageous. As an inspiring principle, courage is repeatable in a way
that the goal of an act is not, and universal in a way that the motive is not. Once the goal is
attained, it is no longer a goal. And the motive that caused one actor to perform an act of
courage may not be the same motive that causes another actor to perform an act of
courage. Many acts, by many other actors can be inspired by the same character or

“virtue” of courage.

191

Since freedom for Arendt is an attribute of action, the opposite of freedom is not
dependency or reliance or inﬂuence and persuasion, but determinism, conformity,
convention, regulation, control, and consistency. The determination of human action even
by one’s goal and motive is, for Arendt, too much of an assault on the contingency of the
human condition, a contingency which is the basis of Arendtian human freedom. Yet, if
freedom of this Arendtian kind is to continue to exist within the world, there needs be a
space wherein humans can act without determination, regulation, even calculating
deliberation of their own making. It is the stability of this kind of space for free human
action that Arendt pursues in her design of political space.

According to the Arendtian model, democratic spaces are more than simply
associations of people founded upon a contract, if we mean by “contract” a ﬁnalized,
completed, or ﬁnished agreement, even a shared political conception that organizes
relationships. Indeed the political acts of any society are incomplete, ever continuing, in
process. In fact, this ongoing, process character of building democracy is precisely what

gives rise to the problem of its political stability.

3. BoodornondDernocraticSoaoes.

Democracy is an ongoing activity between and among human beings, something
never ﬁnally completed, but always coming about. A democratic space that is inclusive is
based on a manifold of perspectives pointing to a common space for a diversity of
appearances and human relationships. Arendt’s concern for stability is not so much with

regard to political institutions (contracts, ﬁnalized agreements) which organize human

192

activities, but more so with the ongoing visibility of human activities themselves. She is
not interested in motivating citizens to accept the publicly agreed upon arrangements that
limit one’s ﬁ'eedom (remember that for Rawls, political power is always coercive, see PL,
68) but rather concerned with people acting together as free and equal citizens. Arendt
wants to believe that there is a political space, perhaps yet to be secured, that is not
coercive; where public agreements need not limit one’s freedom but, in fact, secure it.
Thus, her concern for stability is to design a public realm in which all persons can appear
and act freely, without coercion even of their own making.

For Arendt, the burden of securing political stability does not rest on the
motivations of people, nor on the conceptions they share with one another, but on public
actions that preserve spaces in which free, uncoerced human actions remain possible. For
Arendt, the primary virtues of democratic citizenship are “the act of public appearance,”
making one’s appearance by her own words and deeds, and “the act of perceiving human
appearances,” enlarging one’s perspective through a common sensibility. Stability of
political space in which human beings relate to one another in this way, is possible,
according to Arendt, only when all citizens become participators, active performers in
public affairs, making their voices heard and listening to the voices of others.

While Rawls’s concern for stability is focused on the justice of basic structures
(arrangements) of society, “society’s main political, social and economic institutions, and
how they ﬁt together into one uniﬁed system ‘of social cooperation from one generation to
the next” (PL, 11), Arendt’s concern for stability is focused on the visibility of

relationships between humans that alone sustain democratic political institutions.

193

The problem of stability for Arendt is not to establish a conceptual unity (public
recognition according to some conceptual standard) but to provide for enduring public
appearances of human realities”, particularly the reality of human freedom. Arendtian
freedom is not something given in our biological or social, or even intellectual existence. It
is not a capability or capacity that we have individually, but something we do, in public, as
a public. It is not something we possess, but something we perform. As such, it is of
human origin, dependent on ongoing human actions. And, because it is so contingent, we
need to pay close attention to “preserving” its continued possibility.

There are many threats to this kind of human freedom. The loss of genius, the
disability to create new human relationships ﬁ'om “nothing” (ﬁ'om something “not given,
not even as an object of cognition or imagination”), that is, the inability to “perform
miracles9‘,” to realize (act out) the creative power we have, is the greatest threat to our
freedom. The pursuit of stability, according to Arendt, is to ﬁnd ways to preserve this not
un-common human capacity for extraordinary genius (a capacity that Arendt believes is

available to all) within our human plurality.

 

S”Human realities are things which exist only in the human world and exist because of
human activity. These include 1) goods for consumption, which have no permanence; 2)
use objects, whose permanence is their ordinary durability; 3) art works, whose durability
is potentially immortal; and 4) human actions, human events, words, deeds, relationships
(the most fragile and ﬂeeting of all four), whose permanence require memory woven into
stones.

96“Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose
framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a “-miracle” that is something
which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the
same, it follows that ._ , - ,
oﬂhomanjaooltjes, This sounds stranger than it actually is” (Hannah Arendt, “What rs
Freedom,’ MW, 169. emphasis added)

 

194

In the next section I will reexamine Rawls’s thttedLrbetmsm and show how his
conception of political space secures primarily those conditions needed for (economic)
instrumental freedom and how Rawlsian political spaces are concerned predominately with
instrumental and distributive problems of order and symmetry. In this sense I suggest that
Rawls’s liberalism is too limiting, too restrictive of citizen participation; that its language
is too specialized to identify the creative power of human genius that is common to us all
and, therefore, necessary for human visibility.

I will then reexamine Arendt’s distinction between social and political and show
how her conception of political space is more attentive to the problems of visibility and

perception, and, thus, more inclusive of the diversity of citizens.

C. RAWLSIAN POLITICAL SPACE: SEARCHING FOR SYMMETRY AND ORDER.

In Chapter Three we saw that Rawls’s solution to the problem of political stability
requires a defense of a double agreement: ﬁrst, an agreement on the conception of the
political domain constructed from the perspective of a single specialized rationality (the
original position with its higher level impartial standpoint) and based upon selected shared
ideas held in common; second, an agreement on this conception from each individual
perspective within a plurality of reasonable and irreconcilable comprehensive views.

Both agreements are defended by Rawls on the assumption of a prior agreement,
which he does not defend but simply lays out: the model of a reasonable citizen as one
who leaves behind her own position in favor of the original position whenever public

deliberation is involved. The political space deﬁned by justice as fairness is from the outset

195

constructed from a single perspective of an “expert citizen,” the representative citizen in
the original position, who is able to “fairly” and dispassionately assess the nature and
distribution of social goods needed for constitutional democracies.

This Rawlsian construction of political space leaves little room for different
appearances of ordinary citizens; too little room for the appearances of citizens in their
own position, with their own perspective from which to agree on the basic structures of
society. This is because Rawls is concerned with constructing a space that ﬁrst and
foremost fairly distributes social goods. The ﬁrst stage in his constructivism is to deﬁne
political space as that which organizes human relationships according to legitimate
principles of justice, not as the place where free and equal human beings can appear to one
another. (Actually, for Rawls, citizens are free and equal only to the extent that they
organize their relationships according to the principles of justice.)

In both stages of the Rawlsian construction, the model of the original position
plays a pivotal role. In the ﬁrst stage, the production of the political conception of justice
as fairness, it provides the rationality needed to organize the basic structures of society. In
the second stage, where Rawls thinks he ﬁnally secures stability by showing unanimity on
the political conception, the original position is the model of practical reason by which the
ideal citizen always takes a reasonable position whenever public conﬂicts occur. The
principle of reasonableness secures the commitment that one will always take the impartial
view over her own view, once she has justiﬁed justice as fairness on the basis of her own
comprehensive doctrine. But again, Rawls’s focus is not on stabilizing the free and equal

appearances of citizens, but on securing a common objective basis for adjudicating

196

conﬂicts.

Within Rawlsian political spaces, all citizens must be able to enter the original
position and judge how political space is to be organized. In order to do this they must
have clearly developed life plans, keen competencies for deliberative rationality, all the
virtues of reasonable liberal citizens, and above all must be able to leave behind their own
positions in favor of a position which ignores certain signiﬁcant differences among
citizens. Ordinary citizens who want to speak and be heard, to act and be seen in their own
voices and with their own deeds, that is, ﬁ'om their own positions and not from the one-
and-only original position, have a constricted place in the well-structured society. They
can begin to partially appear at the constitutional stage, more so at the legislative stage
and even more so at the judicial stage, as the veil becomes lifted more and more. But they
are fully visible only after all these conceptual, constitutional, legislative and judicial
institutions are established.

In Chapter Two I argued that stable democratic spaces between human beings
require width, encompassing a great variety of perspectives in which citizens are visible to
one another. Yet, in the “founding moments” of Rawlsian political spaces there is little
room for the ordinary citizens to speak and be heard in their own voices. For the sake of a
Rawlsian stability, which translates into a unanimity of position, diversity at this very point
of creating political space (the founding moment) is renounced. In the name of
“reasonable pluralism,” a unison (unanimity) is favored at the expense of human plurality.
Rawlsian citizens all sit at the table but without retaining their separate identities. One is

no diﬂ‘erent from the other when they enter the original position.

197

In this way the conceptual design of Rawlsian political space violates the basic
principles we have identiﬁed for constructing democratic spaces, the construction of a
common space in which human beings appear with one another, a construction based on a
design that brings together a plurality of positions. It is not enough simply to construct a
common political space in which there appears a diversity of human beings, if that
diversity can only appear symmetrically related to one another. Ifthe construction of
political spaces - even of spaces in which a plurality appears - is made ﬁ'om a single
position”, then their stability is suspect. It is suspect because, at these very founding
moments, exclusions are made, pre-arrangements are slipped in under the guise of
rationality, impartiality and neutrality. Thus, the so-called plurality (visibility of diversity)
of the constructed space becomes questionable.”

To support this appraisal, let us examine, in greater detail, two features of
Rawlsian political liberalism: his conception of the political domain, “justice as fairness;”

and his procedure of political constructivism.

 

9"Remember the danger facing a democratic theorist who fails to include the
perspectives of the “audience” in his search for the invisible - he loses touch with the
common sense and can easily “cheat himself into thinking his work more objective than it
is.” The way to protect ourselves ﬁom this form of elitism is to provide for human
visibility before establishing symmetry. This means that we design our political spaces not
from a single perspective, but from the multitude of perspectives of the human plurality.

98One might argue that Rawls does not claim to address the issue of human visibility,
and that this criticism is unfair. But, as I have been arguing all along, the issue of visibility
is not something that can be tacked on at the end of a political theory. It must be
addressed from the very beginning. Thus, to say that Rawls does not concern himself with
the problem of visibility is, in my analysis, a weakness to the Rawslian approach, not
merely an oversight or something he neglected to consider.

198

First, Rawls’s particular conception of the political domain organizes political
relationships according to an economic model.99 Rawls’s central concern is with the basic
structures of society and their capability to fairly dispense the social goods to which
citizens are entitled. What governs the basic structures of society and keeps them well-
ordered, according to Rawls, is the idea of fairness, fairness in equality of opportunity,
with the one exception provided by the difference principle. But these principles
adequately deﬁne the political domain only if we view the political as an institutional
regulation of democratic relationships according to economic principles of entitlement,
production and distribution. Justice as fairness speciﬁes those regulative principles that
Rawls considers implicit in the culture of western societies. Anyone ought to be allowed
to enter the “market” of social-political goods, and since the exchange ﬁeld is to be
relatively level, except where an advantage is “better” for all, the political domain, when
necessary, regulates this ﬁeld.

Because of this market proceduralism underlying justice as fairness, the political
domain, as Rawls lays it out, requires some degree of expertise needed to operate within
the various markets of social goods. This need for expertise provides the rational basis for

a cadre of elite bureaucrats. Given the Rawlsian conception of political space it makes

 

99This interpretation of justice as fairness is one that takes seriously the criticism that
the economic model of the free market guides Rawls’s political proceduralism. See
Stephen Esquith, WSW, 198-203, and Stephen Esquith & Richard
Peterson, “Original Position As Social Practice”, Politieallheog 16.2 (May, 1988): 309-
3 14.

199

good sense to deﬁne the value of political activity as essentially instrumental. The political
domain, according to “justice as fairness” is about instrumental relationships, about the
“fair” distribution of social goods, and the maintenance of stable institutions distributing
those goods. prolitical arrangements are concerned primarily with the distribution of
goods, then knowledge, tactics, strategies, efficiency, in short, instrumental rationality, is
probably the best way to secure a just and fair distribution. And, if so, bureaucrats
probably ought to be the central political actors, since most citizens lack the proper
training and skill, and would, no doubt, parcel the goods unevenly.

Though “justice as fairness” regulates the basic structures of society economically,
it is inadequate to characterize democratic political space as a place for direct, unmediated
relationships between and among free citizens. Rather, “justice as fairness” is more
accurately presented as an “economic conception of the political domain” in which the
principles of democracy are brought to bear, as best they can, on the distribution of social
goods. Justice as fairness is not a democratic conception of political space in which people
equally appear and relate to one another as free citizens. For Rawls the focus is not on
securing equal appearances between a plurality of citizens, but on distributing goods
equitably, whether they be material goods, needed for biological life, or social goods
needed for the realization of one’s goals.

No matter how much we “reform” our political institutions by revision of
principles of rationality and distribution, as Rawls would have us do, we cannot ignore
considerations of the inequalities between citizens who support those institutions. Our

political institutions will be reformed and made more democratic only when all citizens

200

equally appear in the public spheres of human endeavors. What secures stability within
democratic institutions is the experience of stable appearance and relationships between
and among our citizens, even those that are asymmetrical. Justice as fairness does not
address this political space, the direct face-to-face space between and among citizens in
which they appear to one another as citizens. Rather, it seeks to reform only the mediating
structures between citizens. To conceptualize the political merely in this way, as a space
for mediating relationships, is to view citizens as not much more than recipients of
entitlements, and to characterize political relationships as essentially instrumental.

The problem with limiting the political to instrumental relationships is that
instrumental rationality will eventually and inevitably undermine the design of stable
egalitarian spaces between human beings, since it requires that all citizens are arranged
under the category of means-end.

Rawlsian political space is too conﬁning for diverse human relationships. The
languages and voices allowed of Rawlsian citizens as they create the very space in which
they operate are apparently only four; as constitutional delegate, as legislator, as
administrator, and as judicial officer.loo And because there is very little, if any available
space for citizens in their ordinary voices, that is, for the untrained non-expert voices,
particularly in the founding moments of Rawlsian spaces, the stability of the political
domain is in jeopardy.

The expertise required for Rawlsian citizens Operating in the well-ordered society,

 

100This reading of Rawls I take from Stephen Esquith, Wm (opus cit),
particularly 198-200.

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might be justiﬁed within a more deﬁned and limited scope of economic justice and political
economy. From the perspective of the ordinary democratic citizen, experts are needed to
assure the production and fair distribution of social goods - these are difficult tasks that
require a great deal of time and knowledge. And because bureaucratic government
regulates these needed social goods, justice as fairness may reﬂect the best regulative
principles of the economy consonant with democratic principles.

In supporting the argument of others that “justice as fairness” is an economic
model of the political, I am also suggesting that we take more seriously and follow
through with Rawls’s own claim of the distinctness between “political liberalism” and
“justice as fairness” - that we understand this distinction as a distinction between the
political domain and procedural economy, between the citizen as free and equal and the
citizen as client and consumer. As I suggested above, perhaps “justice as fairness” is best
interpreted not as a conception of the political domain, but as an attempt by Rawls to give
a more democratic model of political economy. Might we view justice as fairness as an
attempt to regulate capitalistic economic structures within a constitutional democracy
according to the basic intuitions of democratic societies, rather than as a conception of the
political domain of a free and equal citizenry? Ifwe take seriously the distinction Rawls
makes between “political liberalism” and “justice as fairness,” where he recognizes
“justice as fairness” as one among other possible conceptions of the political domain
which political liberalism could embrace, we see that he has loosened the hold that justice
as fairness has on his political liberalism, and seems open to expanding the political space

needed for broader participation. If so, then Rawlsians will need eventually to determine

202

how many of the components of justice as fairness (the various conceptions and ideas that
Rawls has developed in the original ﬂeshy and since then) are essential to political
liberalism, and how many of them are integrally tied to justice as fairness. “’1 With the
publication of Politjoal Liberalism we now have two levels of abstraction on which to
examine Rawls’s views; the more general view of political liberalism and the more speciﬁc
and normative view of justice as fairness. What are the differences and similarities of
meanings of the original position, of an overlapping consensus, of public reason, and of a

political conception of persons at each level?

We saw how Rawls’s political liberalism begins with the assumption that there is
no adequate and legitimate way to adjudicate fundamental conﬂicts in the public domain
and ends by arguing that the only way to secure political stability is to bypass these
conﬂicts, to leave them behind in the pluralism of the background culture and rise above
them into a consensus that overlaps all reasonable views.

Rawls concluded that the only way for people with irreconcilable differences to

 

101This interpretation of Rawls’s Wen), that the tie of justice as fairness to
political liberalism is loosening and a rudimentary analysis of what this means
for Rawlsian liberalism, can be found in recent philosophical literature. I refer to Samuel
Schefﬂer, “The Appeal of Political Liberalism,” Ethlos 105.1 (October, 1994) 4-22 and
Leif Wenar, “sz An Internal Critique,” Etlhos 106.1 (October, 1995) 32-
62. Both of these articles suggest that “Justice as Fairness” may not meet the criteria of
“Political Liberalism” without ﬁrrther adjustments. Brian Barry, on the other hand, thinks
that Rawls is mistaken to suggest that “Justice as Fairness” and “Political Liberalism” are
separable. See Brian Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Etm'eo 105.4 (July,
1995) 874-915.

203

live with one another peaceably is to ﬁnd a way to ignore those differences by creating a
space where all are in basic agreement. By constructing the political as a space requiring
an “overlapping consensus” among all its participants, Rawls has effectively eliminated
“reasonable pluralism” from the political domain at the outset - not from the background
culture but from his design of political spaces. According to Rawls, only an overlapping
consensus can secure political stability of the basic structures of society.

Thus, Rawls begins his approach to the problem of stability with the recognition of
the legitimacy of irreconcilable differences - what he calls the fact of reasonable pluralism -
and ends not by addressing those disagreements, but by keeping them at bay, blocking
them ﬁom entering the political domain, and constructing a political space in which there
is an assured agreement, the overlapping consensus. It is in order to assure that second
stage agreement that Rawls’ s construction is engineered under the constraints of the
original position. Because he wants to secure stability by means of an agreed upon
conception, he is bound to eliminate the irreconcilable diﬂ’erences of pluralism at the very
point of constructing the political space in which people move. Rawlsian political
constructivism means constructing a political space in which there is unanimous agreement
and no basic ﬁrndamental differences. For Rawls, only “when people share a reasonable
political conception of justice, they share common ground on which public discussion of
ﬁrndamental questions can proceed” (PL. 115).

Rawls constructs the content of his overlapping consensus as a unanimous
agreement resulting from everyone entering the original position. The original position is

so laid out that any individual entering it will arrive at the same conception, the same

204

decision. Unanimous agreement is assured by the original position since it is a “mutually
disinterested rationality.” And everyone is “represented equally” by anyone who enters.
Rawls is convinced that the only way to be assured of this agreement, and therefore, to
ultimately secure his kind of political stability, is to have the outcome “determined by
reason analytically: that is the original position is to be characterized with sufﬁcient
exactness so that it is possible to work out ﬁom the nature of the parties and the situations
they confront which conception of justice is favored by the balance of reasons. The
content of justice must be discovered by reason: that is by solving the agreement problem
posed by the original position” (PL, 273/274).

The problem with securing unanimity in this way is that an agreement is reached
without ever hearing one another, without hearing any other with whom we would have
such agreement. While the original position secures unanimity in the sense of a
harmonious agreement between individuals - all individuals arriving at the same decision -
there is no communication between and among such individuals regarding the supposed
agreement. It is, in this regard, a strange sort of “agreement.” In the original position, as a
model of political discourse, we all agree without ever saying a word to one another and

without having heard one another. "’2

 

102A possible response to this criticism needs to be considered here, namely that, for
Rawls, there is a dialogue going on in the original position, not between individuals, but
within the representative person. In that “inner” dialogue a variety of voices are expressed
and yet agreement is still reached. While such an interpretation does allow for some
“other” voices, such voices are expressed only if they have been initially heard and carried
into the original position. But what assurance do we have of that? Can we say that any one
individual who enters the original position has heard and given adequate voice to all those
voices around her? And, how do we determine whether one who enters the original
position has brought with her all the “relevant” voices?

205

While Rawls claims that the fact of reasonable pluralism is what guides his political
liberalism, it has guided it only as something to be avoided. Rawls “addresses” the
problem of stability by deﬁning a procedure - the original position - which, as an impartial
point of view in the second stage of his construction, eliminates, at the outset, at the
moment when political space is founded, any signiﬁcant differences within reasonable
pluralism that might cause irreconcilable conﬂicts. His model of construction for the
content of a consensus provides for a stability in political discourse, but in the wrong way
- at the price of overly narrowing the political domain. By modeling his ﬁrst stage
construction on the original position he has started out with a “prior consensus,” and by
eliminating any effect of the fact of plurality at this ﬁrst stage Rawls has preempted
expressions of real and signiﬁcant differences that might show up at the second stage. "’3

As a consequence, then, Rawlsian political space also fails to oﬂ‘er any mechanisms
for dealing with actual irreconcilable conﬂicts.” The only possible candidate for this is the
reasonable citizen, which is modeled after the representative citizen in the original

position. The original position is the impartial position that the ideal citizen would choose

 

103This seems to me the essential underlying point of the criticisms that Haberrnas
makes against Rawlsian constructivism. See Jurgen Haberrnas, “Reconciliation through
the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Joumalef
Philosophy XCII, 3 (March, 1995) 109-131. What I ﬁnd to be the most compelling
criticism of Rawls is how he can meaningfully talk about securing rational agreement
(binding mutuality) by means of isolated acts of rationality. I think Haberrnas is right to
suggest that Rawls’ proceduralism puts political deliberation beyond the reach of
democratic dialogue.

104Note that because Rawls sees the political domain as “resting” on or arising out of
the larger cultural-social domain of a society, to exclude irreconcilable conﬂict from the
political does not resolve the conﬂicts; they may still ferment in the larger “culture of the
social.”

206

when faced with irreconcilable conﬂicts between their doctrines. But again, this does not
address conﬂicts as much as ignore them, since such conﬂicts cannot and do not arise
within its competence.

As a model for Rawlsian constructivism, the original position is “mono-cratic.”
Rawls presents the original position as a device for representation, which assures one of an
objective point of view. The original position enables those with irreconcilable conﬂicts to
recognize the difference between their own point of view and a point of view that
“establishes a public frarnewor ” - a public point of view. The original position represents
this public point of view. A reasonable citizen will then choose the public point of view
over her own when there are certain questions of political differences - constitutional
essentials and matters of basic justice. Yet, with such a single “public point of view” as the
original position, one’s own view never gets expressed in the public arena, at least in
essential matters. According to Rawlsian constructivism, the standpoint of the original
position must always be preferred over our own; it must “rule over” our own whenever
irreconcilable differences matter. Thus, it is mono-cratic in that it is a single, preestablished
public point of view which “rules” the public conversation.

Rawls wants to reform the way we negotiate differences, particularly irreconcilable
conﬂicts. But the Rawlsian reform preempts the formation of different non-economic and
non-instrumental relationships. The Rawlsian rules for public deliberation begin with the
presumption that all human relationships involve competing positions (humans competing
for limited resources) and assume that before entering the original position, one has as her

goal the appropriation and consumption of resources. Clearly these kinds of human

207

relationships are either consumptive or instrumental. But where and how are free and
egalitarian relationships, non—competitive, non-econorrric and non-instrumental
relationships represented in the Rawlsian reforms? Does politics have nothing to say about
this kind of relationship?

The problem lies within Rawls’s model of construction, where his overlapping
consensus is spawned from the original position, not with his notion of construction. What
is needed is an alternative model; one that will preserve the conditions of visibility, and
thus, plurality (one that consists of a plurality of positions rather than ﬁnd a way around
them); a model of construction based on a different form of intersubjective
communication; a model for constructing a political space where both distinctness and
equality are valued at its founding moment. We need a model of construction that will
enable us to construct, from a plurality of positions, a common sensibility in which the
appearances of a diversity of human beings are secured.

We will consider one possibility of an alternative model in a later section, when we
examine Arendt’s analysis of Kantian aesthetic judgement. However, ﬁrst I want to
consider whether Arendt’s conception of political space can better represent the kind of
democratic relationships, particularly with its conditions of equal visibility, for which we

are searching,

D. ARENDTIAN SPACE OR RAWLSIAN SPACE?
Arendt’s conception of political space and how it differs from Rawls’s is most

vivid where she makes her distinction between the social and political spheres of human

 

208

activities. In developing these distinctions as Arendt suggests them, we will be able to
identify and distinguish the different normative principles regulating each sphere; that the
regulative principles of political economy - the social spheres - are not the same for the
political sphere.105 The Arendtian distinction between the economic with its instrumental,
means-end rationality, and the political with the ongoing activity of keeping public spaces
of human appearances in existence, enables us to reconceptualize the relationship between
the normative criteria of justice that regulate the production and distribution of social
goods, and the distinctly different criteria of human relationships between free and equal
citizens by means of which free human action is stabilized. Political democracy is not
economic democracy; its range is not equivalent to the concerns of a democratic political

economy. Arendt’s conceptions of the political and social provide a way to work out this

 

105This Arendtian distinction seems to parallel Rawls’s distinction between
“constitutional essentials” and “questions of basic justice” (John Rawls, Politieal
Ljhetaliem, 227-230). According to Rawls, both of these “express political values,”
though a different set of principles regulates each. Yet, there is an ambiguity here that
Rawls seems to recognize but leaves unattended. On the one hand, he says: “Similarly,
though a social minimum providing for the basic needs of all citizens is also messential,
what I have called the “difference principle” is more demanding and rs not.” (Ibid., 228- 9)
On the other hand he says: “Here I remark that if a political conception of justice covers
the constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice -for the present this is all we aim
for - it is already of enormous importance even if it has little to say about many econonric
and social issues that legislative bodies must regularly consider. To resolve these more
particular and detailed rssues it is often more reasonable togohexondmpohttoal
eoneeotlonendjhexalumtepgoomleoexotess, and to invoke nonpolitical values that
such a view does not include. But so long as there rs ﬁrm agreement on the constitutional
essentials and established political procedures are reasonably regarded as fair, willing
political and social cooperation between free and equal citizens can normally be
maintained” (Ibid., 230, emphasis added). It is unclear how, for example, “a social
minimum providing for the basic needs of all citizens” (the Arendtian “necessities”?) is a
constitutional essential and, therefore, clearly political (even though “the difference
principle is more demanding and is not”) and yet why his political conception “has little to
say about many economic and social issues.”

209

distinction more clearly, and to expand political liberalism’s conception of the political
beyond the economic models of distributive justice - including “justice as fairness.”

For Arendt, the democratic political realm, as distinct from the social, is that space
where people appear and interact with one another not in the context of necessity nor
means-ends to satisfy human needs, but as free of such needs and as equals in speech and
deeds. The political is not for achievement of human ends or goals, nor for the satisfaction
of human needs, but for distinguishing selves in word and deed.

Arendt’s conception of the political domain, as distinct from the human condition
of sociality, suggests a space that both uniﬁes and separates, since it lies “in-between” its
members and not “above” or “outside.” It is not a space that we enter by leaving
something of ourselves behind (our partiality is “enlarged” not bracketed out), but a space
we enter when we act and speak in concert, under the condition of plurality.

The political is conditioned by distinction and equality. ‘06 A precondition of
equality is that the necessities of life are sufficiently satisﬁed. The liberations from poverty
and the satisfaction of economic and social needs - these are the concerns of “political
economy” - are pre-political matters for Arendt. Still, that does not mean that they are of
no political interest or consequence. While the political for Arendt does not exist in order
to have these necessities met, if they are not met, human equality, and therefore the

political, is not possible. Freedom and poverty are incompatible.107

 

106The condition of plurality has a twofold character of equality and distinction (see
Hannah Arendt. IhoHumarLCondition, 175 ﬂ7)-

107“Poverty is more than deprivation, it is a state of constant want and acute misery
whose ignominy consists in its dehumanizing force; poverty is abject because. . .” Hannah

210

Such “economic” matters are dictated by the demands of necessity and are to be
decided by experts - the “representatives” we elect are the experts we “democratically”
appoint to deal with such matters. For Arendt this is the role of administration, not of the
political. Such tasks of administration are not, or at least ought not to be, subject to the
vicissitudes of mass society, but are determined by the conditions of rationality. What
needs to be done in the economic domain is prescribed by the conditions of necessity over
which morality and the principles of justice “rule.’”‘”

But this is not the domain of the political, a space for free and equal citizens. Ifthe
experts of administration and just distribution are allowed to rule over citizens as free and
equals (not merely citizens as clients or consumers) then the political does become a place
controlled by an elite (OR, 240).109

Rather, the realm of the political is human freedom. The political predicament that

poverty causes and why we ought to be politically concerned with it is not for the

 

Arendt, mltemhrtion (New York: The Viking Press, 1963) 54.

10"“Since the revolution had opened the gates of the political realm to the poor, this
realm had indeed become ‘social.’ It was overwhelmed by the cares and worries which
actually belonged in the sphere of the household and which, even if they were permitted to
enter the public realm, could not be solved by political means, WM

1.0111 9.1 0' 0.1.011. 9'.'l'il 3"} l'l‘l a! 10 '31

f i ' n ” (Ibid., 86, emphasis added).

109“All rulership (as distinct ﬁ'om free and equal political space) has its original and
most legitimate source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men
achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burdens of life
for them ..... Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete that to attempt to
liberate making from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more
dangerous... The result was that necessity invaded the political realm, the only realm
where men can be truly ﬁ'ee” (Ibid., 110).

211

satisfaction of wants, but “darkness,” “public obscurity,” the inability of those whose
necessities are not met to enter into the public arena. The political is the space for
distinction, for individuation, for freedom, not self-preservation. The social realm, on the
other hand, is the space for addressing the needs of human preservation. Thus, the
different spheres each have their own criteria and principles of action and interaction. 1 1°

Arendt’s concern for stability of the political domain leads her to want to
“liberate” politics from economics, not in order to purify the political for an elite, nor to
protect economic power from being inﬂuenced by the political realm. Arendtian political
space, as distinct from the economic, is based on a recognition that economics is a
consequence of human necessity made into a public concern and not a consequence of free
political action, any more than politics is a consequence of economics.111 “Politically such
a position is a surrender of freedom to necessity” (OR, 59).

When the economic sphere intrudes into the political domain there is a conﬁrsion
of the political with its pre-political conditions. The foundation of freedom - which occurs
only within genuine political space - is liberation from tyranny not liberation from want

and necessity. It is the “foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where

 

110“No revolution has ever solved the “social question” and liberated men ﬁom the
predicament of want. .. And although the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates
beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads
into terror. . .” (Ibid., 108).

1“See Hannah Arendt, QoRelolotion, 57-58.This is not to say that the economic
realm is not under the “power” of the political, nor that economic issues have no political
signiﬁcance. But it is to say that economic matters are of political concern because
economics is a pre-condition of the political. Economic questions per se are not political
questrons.

212

freedom can appear” (OR, 121) even though it must be preceded by a liberation from
poverty. “2 The possibility of freedom is preceded by liberation from necessity, but the
foundation of freedom is the stability of free political spaces.

The most stable political domain is an “isonomy,” not a “democracy” - not any
rule, even of the majority, but no-rule, an equality of freedom! This kind of equality is not
a given condition of human living, but can only be created by human action. Nor is this
kind of equality achieved by a just distribution of social goods according to some
standard, though it does require a liberation from poverty. We are not born (physically, or
socially) equal, nor can we be made equal regarding social necessities or capabilities.
Rather, we “become” equal politically, as we act and speak freely, unmediated and

without merely instrumental value in the public spaces between one another.

1'1! 1' EIHIS !'-l r'?
At this point it is perhaps appropriate to consider a long standing objection to
Arendt’s conception of the political, particularly her distinction between “political” and
“social,” which is best articulated by Sheldon Wolin in 1983. Wolin charges Arendt with
an anti-democratic strain that is elitist and contradictory of whatever egalitarian sentiments

she might have. Consider the following passage:

 

“2“. . .freedom was understood to be the ﬁee man’s status, which enabled him to

move. . . to go out into the world and meet other people in word and deed. This freedom
was clearly preceded by liberation... But the status of freedom did not follow
automatically upon the act of liberation. Freedom needed, in addition to mere liberation,
the company of other men h r a - :

soaoeJorneotthem... ” (Hannah Arendt “What IS Freedom”_etnteon_l’_astand_liuture,
148, emphasis added).

   

 

213

(I)t is not diﬁicult to show that many of the major categories that compose and

distinguish her political outlook were either critical of or incompatible with

democratic ideas. This I believe to be the case with the distinction on which her

political ideals were grounded, the distinction between “the political” and “the

social.” Her critical attitude toward democracy rested on a correct intuition that

the impulse of democracy has been to override that distinction. For historically,

democracy has been the means by which many have sought access to political

power in the hope that it could be used to redress their economic and social lot.

The “natural” state of society contains important distinctions of wealth, birth, and

education that are typically extended into political power. Thus social power is

translated into political power which is then used to increase social power.

Democracy is the attempt of the many to reverse the natural cycle of power, to

translate social weakness into political power in order to alleviate the

consequences of what is not so much their condition as their lot-tery. i
Democracy would also obliterate these Arendtian distinctions because it

wants to extend the broad egalitarianism of ordinary lives into public life. It is at

odds with the emphasis on authority, ambition, glory, and superiority that ﬁgured

so importantly in Hannah Arendt’s conception of authentic political action. It was

not accidental that she excluded sentiments of fellow-feeling - compassion, pity,

love - from the political realm, or more important, that she was silent about

“ﬁiendship” (so central to her ancient Greeks) and “fellowship” (so basic to

Hebraic and Christian conceptions of community). These democratic sentiments

and virtues do not accord with the agonistic conceptions of action she extolled.

Democratic action is, perforce, collective; its mode is cooperation; and its

presupposition is not a small audience of heroes but shared experience. “3

 

The general force of Wolin’s critique centers around the idea that equality and
distinction are incompatible; egalitarian democracy is at odds with the idea of an individual
actor “distinguishing” herself and being “distinguished” in the public arena. Thus, Wolin
considers Arendt an elitist who reserves the political sphere for the actor and what
happens on stage, leaving the ordinary citizen to be a mere observer of the spectacles.

In replying directly to Wolin’s criticism I am interested in determining whether

 

"3Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmmndl 60
(1933):3

214

Arendt must be read the way Wolin reads her, or whether her conception of political space
can and does contain the conditions for democratic relationships.

First, regarding her use of the metaphor of “the performing arts,” let me suggest
that the actors on stage are not meant to indicate politicians or governmental ofﬁcials, but
citizens, all citizens, as they speak and act and appear to one another. Likewise the
spectators are citizens as well, only now citizens as they listen, hear, and see others. In
Arendt’s conception of the political as a space for human performance, her use of
“performing art” is only as a metaphor not as a deﬁnition.” The signiﬁcance of this
metaphor for Arendt is in the nature of a performing act in which both actor and spectator
are essential, not in the notion of a stage and its separation from the audience. My own use
of the metaphor of theatrical space, and the insights of Peter Brook should by now have
made this point clear. In the political arena both citizen as actor and citizen as spectator
are participants in public human performances. The political “stage” is not the restricted
ﬁeld on which the actors move around, but the space between the actors and the
spectators, between citizens as actors and citizens as spectators.

Furthermore, it seems clear that when Arendt uses the metaphor of theatrical,

performing arts, she is not suggesting it as a standard for evaluating the historical

 

11““Since all acting contains an element of virtuosity, and because virtuosity is the
excellence we ascribe to the performing arts, politics has often been deﬁned as an art.
This, of course, is not a deﬁnition but a metaphor, and the metaphor becomes completely
false if one falls into the common error of regarding the state or government as a work of
art, as a kind of collective masterpiece. In the sense of the creative arts, which bring forth
something tangible and reify human thought to such an extent that the produced thing
possesses an existence of its own, politics is the exact opposite of an art - which incidently
does not mean that it is a science” (Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom,”Bem_eerLBast_and
Ermine, 153)-

215

structures of the state or of a government but as a representation of the space in between
ordinary human beings which supports or establishes those structures. Likewise, her
critique of democracy is not a criticism of the ideal of egalitarian relationships between
human beings, but of the concrete forms of so called democratic governments (consider
her critique of Wm) which have elicited the support of a so-
called democratic people under the guise of (economical) “freedom.”

Thus, when, as Wolin says, Arendt was critical of the “impulse of democracy to
override” the distinction between political and social, I am suggesting that she was not
criticizing the ideal of democracy but its concrete western forms.” Indeed, Wolin’s
observation, that historically western democratic governments have provided the many
with the hope of redressing their economic and social lot, makes the same point that
Arendt makes, namely, the fact that the political has become the battle ground for the
distribution of wealth and for publicly addressing the economic conditions of necessity.
Arendt is critical of the mixture of the political and the social, because, according to her
analysis, there are two different sets of rules and regulations regarding these spheres. To

mix them is to confuse the different kinds of hidden rhythms (eternal truths) that rule our

 

ll"‘That representative government has in fact become oligarchic government is true
enough, though not in the classical sense of rule by the few in the interest of the few; what
wetodayeallﬁemoctaoy is a form of government where the few rule, at least supposedly,
in the interest of the many. This government is democratic m that popular welfare and
private happiness are its chief goals, but it WW
rnr :00 °r nu .. . It on r‘olr‘°'o r' .Thedefenders
of this system, which actually rs the system of the welfare state, if they are liberal and of
democratic convictions, must deny the very existence of public happiness and public
freedom; they must insist that politics is a burden and that its end is itself not political”
(Hannah Arendt, mutton, 273, emphasis added).

 

216

lives.

Wolin’s criticism of Arendt as anti-democratic is based on a difference of
understanding how the political and the social are connected. Because she wants to keep
distinct the social and the political is no reason to think that Arendt is uninterested in
public attempts to address issues of economic necessity. Indeed, within her own analysis,
there is reason to think that she is, or ought to be attentive to this, since she claims that
basic necessities of the human condition must be met in order that people can enter the
political sphere. (Still courage is required since human necessities are never completely

met.) And these attempts at social justice must be regulated according to some type of

“rule” which, again according to her analysis, is incompatible with egalitarian relationships

and with Arendtian freedom. Even Rawls recognized that “political power is always
coercive” (PL, 68).

For Wolin, “social power is translated into political power which is then used to
increase social power. Democracy is the attempt of the many to reverse the natural cycle
of power, to translate social weakness into political power in order to alleviate the
consequences of what is not so much their condition as their lot-tery.” But is this way of
“reversing the natural cycle of power” democratic action? Are egalitarian relationships
secured by using political power to increase the social power of the “have-nots?” Such
uses of political power are coercive and uneven. They may effect a leveling of wealth and
“natural resources,” but that does not make them democratic. Arendt is suggesting, as
Rawls does elsewhere, that democratic relationships of equality and freedom can best be

secured by preventing “the important distinctions of wealth, birth, and education” from

 

‘

 

 

217

being extended into the political arena, rather than by using the political arena for a battle
ground for power between those of different social distinctions.

Wolin is mistaken to think that democracy “wants to extend the broad
egalitarianism of ordinary lives into public life.” There is no such “broad egalitarianism of
ordinary life,” let alone one which can be extended into public life. Democracy is a process
of bringing about egalitarian relationship between human beings. Such relationships are
not given to us at our births, but are constructed, or, to stay within Arendtian terms,
created by the free actions of human beings acting together.

Democracy is a set of human relationships that can only come about by human
activity. Egalitarian relationships are possible because each of us, every human being, by
being born into the world has the power to distinguish herself, to become who she wants
to be. And, because we each have this power of distinction, the power of natality, the
capacity for heroic action, as long as a public space where-such actions are possible can be
maintained, egalitarian relationships among a free people are more than a mere fantasy.

“Distinction and equality” are not contradictory, since the basis of equality, of
political equality, is the extraordinary yet common capacity for human distinction. The
metaphor of performing arts for the political is not elitist if we recognize that we are all
both actors and spectators by virtue of our capacity to act and to speak. The political
arena is not the stage, but the entire theater, the entire space that lies between human

beings‘“, a space that is often, too often, emptied, or rather crowded by consumptive and

 

116Here the metaphor of theatrical space begins to break down, since theaters are
limited in size and capacity. Indeed, at times we have used the phrase “political spaces” to
indicate that there is a plurality of democratic, egalitarian spaces. Clearly no one individual

 

.r.

218
instrumental relationships.
A particular passage from Arendt’s Qn Revolution seems to stand out as indicative
of so called Arendtian anti-democratic sentiments.
Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by

no means a universally valid principle but again, applicable only with limitations
and even within spatial limits. (Hannah Arendt, intexolutioo, 279)

To claim that freedom is possible only among equals is not to say that freedom is
unavailable to everyone. Indeed her criticism of representative democracy, which Arendt
disparagingly considers “administration” and not political, is precisely that in this form of
government public freedom has become the privilege of the few. Her point is not that
freedom is only available to the few, but that freedom can only exist where there is
equality; and equality is available only to those whose necessities are satisﬁed enough for
them to be able to leave the sphere of consumptive activity and who have enough courage
to enter the most ﬁ'agile sphere of words and deeds. What is unfortunate is that only a few
make, or are able to make, this move.

If we want freedom for all citizens, then we must make it possible for each to leave
the spheres of consumptive and instrumental activities. Can equality among all ever be

attained? Yes but not social equality, and certainly not equality with regard to what is

 

can appear to every other person, no one theater is large enough to get everyone in. The
metaphor breaks down because theatrical spaces are enclosed, contained by walls, and
roofs. Political spaces are not, though they are still perhaps spatially limited. The problem
that eventually needs to be addressed when using a spatial metaphor is to identify what
inscribes or contains political spaces. Perhaps it is ordinary language, the ability to use and
to understand the words, gestures and rhetoric of a common language.

 

219

needed for sustaining human life and meeting our physical needs. We differ too much at
these levels. Equality can be achieved only with great difficulty and only in the political
arena as Arendt designs it. Equality is not something to be found, but something to be
created. It is created only when citizens, with great courage (which, Arendt suggests, is
“perhaps not as rare as we are inclined to think,” OR, 280) leave behind the personal
demands for the necessities (and niceties) of life and enter a humanly created space where
no one has any more power than anyone else, where there is no “rule” of one over
another, and where anyone can distinguish herself with her own words and deeds. Arendt
is not suggesting that free political action is limited to a small audience of heroes. What
she is suggesting is that we all must become heroes if we are to be free. And, we will not
be able to be free unless there is a public space into which we can enter and distinguish
ourselves with one another.

The phenomenon I am concerned with here is usually called the “elite,” and
my quarrel with this term is not that I doubt that the political way of life has never
been and will never be the way of life of the many, even though political business,
by deﬁnition, concerns more than the many, namely strictly speaking, the sum total
of all citizens . . . My quarrel with the “elite” is that the term implies an oligarchic
form of government, the domination of the many by the rule of the few. From this
one can only conclude - as indeed our whole tradition of political thought has

concluded - that the essence of politics is rulership and that the dominant political
passion is the passion to rule or to govern. This, I propose, is profoundly untrue.

(Hannah Arendt, 91821121111121], 280)

Here Arendt is clearly not saying the political way of life is only for the few, but
that, historically, only the few have entered its spaces. For Arendt, equality is the
distinguishing mark of political spaces where free words and deeds occur. The problem

with political elites is not that they are the few, but that they dominate, rule over, the

 

220

many. If the social (where inequality does exist) and the political (where equality should

 

exist) are mixed, then the few will always and eventually “reign,” since “rulership,” with
its rational order and symmetry, is the most efﬁcient and just distribution of resources.
Another criticism of Arendt, similar though perhaps not so caustic, by Jurgen
Habermas is that her conception of the political and its distinction ﬁ'om the social is naive
and unrealistic. According to Habermas, Arendt envisioned:
. . . a state which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a
politics which is cleansed of socio-economic issues; an institutionalization of public 7
liberty which is independent of the organization of public wealth; a radical '
democracy which inhibits its liberating efficacy just at the boundaries where

political oppression ceases and social repression begins - this path is unimaginable
for any modern society. ”7

If Arendt advocated a separation between the social and the political as a
disconnect and isolation of one from the other, then surely such a path is unimaginable for
any modern society. But Arendt does not, at least need not, discredit the importance of
“administration,” and of addressing the human condition of consumptive needs. Indeed,
even in her own terms, these needs must be addressed if the political is ever to exist. The
political is not independent, in that sense, of the organization of public wealth. But the
space for those human activities in which wealth is distributed is not the political space in
which citizens speak and act freely with one another. By making the distinction between
the social and the political Arendt is not suggesting that we can ignore the social, but

rather that we give proper attention to the political as the space of human freedom. Again,

 

117Jurgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Sooial
Researoh 44.1 (Spring, 1977): 15

 

221

Arendt’s distinction between the social and the political is not offered as a standard by
which to gauge modern politics, implying that the modern state should not concern itself
with problems of poverty, neglect and degradation. Rather, the value of her distinction is
with her analysis of the diﬁ‘erent functions of the social and political spheres and
particularly with preserving the ﬁrnction of the political as spaces for human freedom
(spaces which she thinks are in serious threat of no longer being even imaginable).

Arendt criticizes western democratic governments that claim to provide for
people’s economic necessities but fail to provide the spaces needed for the exercise of
freedom. The failure of western forms of democracy is that all too little power is given to
creating and sustaining spaces for human freedom. We think that by providing for the
necessities of human life we are providing the condition for ﬁeedom. But satisfying our
consumptive demands is only a precondition of freedom. In most modern democratic
societies we have only begun the process of democratization. Much more needs to be
done if we are to continue becoming free and equal democratic peoples.

Wolin is right to recognize that Arendt excluded “sentiments of fellow feeling”
from the political domain. But she excluded those sentiments that she understood as
appropriate only to consumptive or instrumental relationships. The sentiments of
compassion and pity are not appropriate in relationships between equals (these are
sentiments of saints toward sinners) and thus do not belong in political spaces. They are,
on the other hand, appropriate sentiments among bureaucrats whose job it is to distribute
public resources needed to satisfy human necessities. We expect our bureaucrats to have

compassion and pity on those who are in need. Among equals, who publicly appear to and

 

 

222

with one another, the appropriate and indeed crucial “sentiments” or perspectives are
those built on trust, promise and forgiveness; critical postures that political participants are
asked to take not because of inequalities between them but because of the power and
instability of their free human actions. Let us now reexamine those “sentiments” and their

role in democratic spaces.

2. L'rr'!‘ fr _|- to r i 11..-; o u '9' .-u 'rm. . o . m .?

In Chapter Four, we have seen how Arendt’s conception of the political rejects the
traditional solution to the instability of political space - of replacing the frailty of free
human action with the activity of legislating and executing a normative consensus
agreement. We cannot solve the instability of political action by taking a “higher road,”
turning the political into a single perspective from which the sources of instability (free
human speech and action) are overarched or overlooked.

We saw earlier that the reason for the Rawlsian approach to stability is the “fact of
reasonable pluralism” (that there are irreconcilable yet reasonable conﬂicts) and the fear
that such conﬂicts (conﬂicts that result from the irreversibility and unpredictability of
human actions and relationships, both of which are also the source of great democratic
power) will lead to violence. To prevent such violence, the traditional, and Rawlsian
solution has been to institutionalize human relationships by replacing human plurality and
freedom of action with a monarchial rule of, in Rawlsian space, an overlapping consensus.
The “rule” by overlapping consensus displaces the diversity and differences of the

individual actors and their actions. And this displacement, in turn, as Arendt argues,

 

_J‘T

 

223
results in the invisibility of human plurality.

Rawlsian stability is maintained at the expense of human plurality, and that expense
is too great a price to pay. Arendt’s solution is not to replace free human action and
speech as the basis of political action, but to address the problem of stability by designing
the nature of political participation to include the heroic and inspiring acts of forgiveness
and promise.

The greatest threat to the stability of democratic political space occurs when
human freedom in human relationships is no longer even imaginable. The threat to the
stability of egalitarian human relationships is when speech and action are nothing more
than instrumental, where human relationships are visible only as instruments for human
consumption or production. The greatest threat to ﬂee human relationships is when all
political action is seen as merely orderly arrangements in which speech and action are
solidiﬁed and terminated into completed, ﬁnal agreements with “the rule of law.” The
Rawlsian overlapping consensus is such an agreement by which human relationships are
measured, deﬁned and determined. The Arendtian alternative of promise, rather than
institutionalizing agreements that determine present and ﬁrture actions, makes visible an
actor who links her ongoing ﬁee human activity to a future by what is itselfa ﬁee
uncoerced action, the act of promising.

Promises, as distinct from institutionalized contracts, “leave the unpredictability of
human aﬂ‘airs and the unreliability of men as they are, using them merely as the medium, as
it were, into which certain islands of predictability are thrown and in which certain

guideposts of reliability are erected. The moment promises lose their character of

 

 

and to map out a path secured in all directions, they lose their binding power and the

 

224
uncertainty, that is, when the faculty is misused to cover the whole ground of the future
whole enterprise becomes self-defeating” (HC, 244). By means of promises, citizens as
actors agree to act in the ﬁrture, not by giving up their freedom (and, thus, their
unreliability) by agreeing to continue to enter into human relationships of speaking and
acting with one another.
Arendt is also concerned with ﬁnding ways to stop the violence, but not by
overarching the conﬂict, nor by diminishing human freedom by means of ordering kl
symmetrical relationships. Rather, her remedy is to insert another ﬁee action within the
very conﬂict itself. Forgiveness does not stop the conﬂict (and, thus, preempt the
potential violence), but does put an end to the consequences of the conﬂict - the hurt, the
pain, the violence is stopped. With forgiveness, sought and given, human conﬂicts, which
are an inevitable part of any free and egalitarian relationship, do not erupt into violence.
Forgiveness is that human action by which the violent consequences of human actions are
prevented (though not always and not completely) from proceeding as effects of those
actions.
These Arendtian solutions for political stability recognize that some conﬂicts are
beyond human control; there are some conﬂicts that are part and parcel of human freedom
and plurality. Difference and plurality are not something to be blocked at a certain point,
even when they become irreconcilable. Human conﬂict is part of the human condition. The

problem with which we need to concern ourselves is not that human beings are in conﬂict,

but when human conﬂict turns violent and causes suffering and human destruction. And, it

225

matters not whether this suffering is deliberate or accidental, whether it comes from
someone responsible or irresponsible. In either case human suffering is real, and once it
begins, it cannot be undone. It is irreparable. The best we can hope for, without destroying
the very source of free and equal human relationships (plurality with its elements of
distinctness and equality), is to stop the violent consequence of conﬂict either from
beginning or from continuing. We do that by our power to forgive.

Rawls’s solution of an overlapping consensus is to eliminate conﬂict, which he
does by also eliminating differences, irreconcilable differences. But are irreconcilable
differences the sources of instability? The limitation of Rawls’s solution is that an
overlapping consensus does not show us how to live with irreconcilable differences, but
requires that they give way to a conceptual, hypothetical agreement made by a procedural
rule or regulation. They remain, only now are invisible. They remain, still as sources of
instability, but now arched over, ignored. The problem with Rawls’s solution is not that it
fails to eliminate the differences (that would be destructive of plurality), but that it hides
them, keeps them invisible.

Arendt’s solution of forgiveness and promise is to keep the diﬁ‘erences visible, but
end the reverberating, destructive and violent consequences that the use of human power
too often causes.

It should be clear by now that the Arendtian remedy for political instability and the
Rawlsian solution are not at all parallel. Ifwe use the distinction between social and
political that Arendt develops, we might say that Rawls is concerned with social freedom

and equality while Arendt is concerned with political freedom and equality. Their different

 

226

conceptions of human freedom, (and different answers to the question “why the
political?”) lead Rawls to search for political stability in symmetry and order, and Arendt
to look for it in conditions of visibility.

I have been arguing all along that the conditions of visibility need to be laid out
before we even look at the problems of order; how people appear to one another precedes
how we organize their relationships. I have criticized Rawls for being too quick with the
question of democratic order, the symmetry of egalitarian relationships, before adequately
laying out the conditions of visibility. In my search for the conditions of visibility and
perception, I have also criticized Rawls’s use of a single perspective by which he secures
the conditions of visibility, arguing that the original position makes too many differences
invisible.

It remains for us now to consider how Arendt’s conception of the political domain
and its distinctness ﬁom the social allows for a common perspective in which the

conditions of visibility are provided.

E. ARENDTIAN POLITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM.

In Chapter Two, in our consideration of the Packard case as an illustration of the
construction of democratic space, I suggested how the conditions of visibility for the
Packard employees and managers were secured by their creation of a common perception,
a “common sense” of who they were and how they wanted to relate with one another. I
suggested that this common sense was constructed by means of intersubjective

communication between a plurality of individual participants, each ﬁ'om their own

 

227

“enlarged perspective.” I further suggested that one’s enlarged perspective was the result
not of leaving behind her own perspective, but of taking, while still within one’s own
perspective, a multitude of different positions.

The problem we now must address, particularly since we have rejected Rawls’s
version of constructing a “common sense” with its single perspective (the original position
as the public point of view), is whether we can develop an alternative model in which a
plurality of human beings appear (preserving the conditions of plural visibility) and in
which no one need leave behind her own perspective.

In this section I want to suggest how we might ﬁnd an alternative to the Rawlsian
construction in Arendt’s original, though incomplete analysis of the political implications

of Kant’s analysis of “judgements of taste”

1. h- Mn- fAr 0.1-1 n .ar' ' ‘ "1131 .ndu-n s

We saw how Rawls uses the original position as a device to set up a single public
point of view through which all conﬂicts within the boundary of reasonable pluralism must
pass. The original position with its veil of ignorance allows us to construct an idealized
public point of view from which ﬁrndamental conﬂicts of values are in effect eliminated.

An Arendtian constructivism, on the other hand, based on the fact of human
plurality, tries to preserve the diversity of viewpoints and, by means of intersubjective
communication, construct a public position that consists of a multitude of perspectives. To
use Rawlsian language, it seeks to incorporate reasonable pluralism m’thin the public point

of view rather than ﬁnd a way around it.

 

228

By turning to Arendt’s reﬂections on Kantian aesthetic judgements I hope to
suggest a form of constructivism based not on shared ideas, conceptions and beliefs, but
on a shared capacity for making political judgements that take other viewpoints or
positions into account. What Arendt seeks to construct is not a political conception that
can become an overlapping consensus, but a “sensus communis” - a common sense of the
shared world. And she seeks to construct it not from or by means of a single original
position, but by a plurality of “enlarged positions.”

The public point of view, for Arendt, is not some “higher standpoint” that requires
us to rise out of our own “skins,” but is constructed by taking the plurality of other
viewpoints into account118 by means of what she calls, “critical thinking.””9

According to Arendt, we always begin with our own limited perspectives on the
world, a world we share with one another. And by critical thinking we enlarge our own
perspective by which we still subjectively view the world though now not merely from our
initial limited perspective but ﬁom a perspective constructed by “going through” and
“visiting” a plurality of positions.

“Enlarged thought” is the result of ﬁrst “abstracting from the limitations which

 

“"‘You see that impartiality is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into
account. impartiality is not the result of some higher standpoint that would then actually
settle the dispute by being altogether above the melee” Hannah Arendt, Leotureeon

WW ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago. The University of Chicago Press,
1982)42.

119“Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoint of all others are open to
inspection. while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.”’ By
the faculty of imagination we thoughts, enlarge our minds; “by the force
of imagination critical thinking makes the others present, and thus moves in a space that is
potentially public, open to all sides...” (Ibid., 43, emphasis added).

 

229

contingently attach to our judgement,” of disregarding its “subjective private

conditions . . . , by which so many are limited,” that is, disregarding what we

usually call self-interest, which, according to Kant, is not enlightened or capable of
enlightenment but is in fact limiting. The greater the reach - the larger the realm in
which the enlightened individual is able to move from standpoint to standpoint -
the more “general” will be his thinking. This generality, however, is not the
generality of the concept - for example the concept “house,” under which one can
then subsume various kinds of individual buildings. It is, on the contrary, closely
connected with particulars, with the particular conditions of the standpoint one has
to go through in order to arrive at one’s own “general standpoint.” This general
standpoint we spoke of earlier as impartiality; it is a viewpoint ﬁom which to look
upon, to watch, to form judgements . . . (Hannah Arendt, LeetmeiooKantls

Bohtioalihlksoohx 43 -44)

For Arendt, political judgements are more like aesthetic judgements, “judgements
of taste” than “cognitive judgements.” The diﬁ’erence between “judgements of taste” and
“cognitive judgements, is that tastes are idiosyncratic, so that judgements of taste are
subjective in the sense that they are made on the basis of one’s own point of view, while
cognitive judgements are objective, based on the singular universalized perspective of the
conceived object.

Just as sensations of taste are transformed into judgements of taste via the human
capacity of “imagination,” one’s own private perspective is transformed into political
judgements via the capacity of a “sensus communis.” The idea is that we justify our
political judgements, our “subjective” judgements, and, therefore, make recommendations
to others regarding our own point of view based on a “sensus communis.” In this way, by
appealing to the “sensus communis,” our political value judgements are able to become
“objective.” They are justiﬁed from our public point of view, a point of view that is

uniquely our own, and, at the same time, public. They are justiﬁed from our enlarged point

of view.

230

With this notion of “sensus communis,” Arendt seeks to build a political unity
necessary for continued dialogue not by means of a single viewpoint, as the original
position, but by means of a plurality of enlarged viewpoints, that are able to contain a
multitude of perspectives. The Arendtian procedure for political constructivism is to
“enlarge” our own viewpoint, if you will “growing it” into a public point of view.

How do we do that?

This W is what judgement appeals to in everyone, and it is this
possible appeal that gives judgements their special validity. The it-pleases-or-
displeases-me, which as a feeling seems so utterly private and non-communicative,
is actually rooted in this community sense and is therefore open to communication
once it has been transformed by reﬂection, which takes all others and their feelings
into account. The validity of these judgements never has the validity of cognitive
or scientiﬁc propositions . . . Similarly, one can never compel anyone to agree
with one’s judgements. . one can only“w ”or “”court the agreement of
everyone else And it is this persuasive activity that actually appeals to the

“community sense” (Hannah Arendt, LaotrnesorLKantlleolitioalPhilosoohx, 72)
By contrast with Rawlsian political constructivism modeled in the original position with its
veil of ignorance, Arendtian constructivism begins with idiosyncratic tastes, feelings, tones
of voices, intensities that can only be expressed from the individual’s perspective, as the
material out of which we form political judgements on how to remedy the inequalities in

120

democratic political space. Rawls’s original position organizes political space from the

 

120In a reply to Voegelin’s criticism of her Qﬁginooflotalitotimsm, Arendt reveals
how her “method” of analysis differs from the “objective” viewpoints of science: “I

therefore cannot agree with Professor Voegelin that the ‘morally abhorrent and the
emotionally existing will overshadow the essential,’ because IheLemLemtgLfonnan
integmloattoﬁt This has nothing to do with sentimentality or moralizing” To describe
the concentration camp sine ira is not to be ‘objective’ but to condone them. ..IfI write
in the same ‘objective’ manner about the Elizabethan age and the twentieth century, it may
well be that my dealing with both periods is inadequate WW
humanfaeoltyjorespoomeithet. Thus the question of style is bound up with the

 

23 1
top, from above the plurality of appearances, while Arendt organizes it from within.
Common sense is amiable to difference and conﬂict, since it begins with and is built upon
differences.

In Arendt’s approach, political space that secures visibility is constructed from “a
certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from
which he looks upon and judges the world” and decides how the world will “look and
sound, what men will see and hear in it” (Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Culture,”
WM. 222).

But, being subjective does not mean that such judgements are incommunicable or
merely private perspectives.

Communicability obviously depends on the enlarged mentality; one can

communicate only if one is able to think ﬁom the other person’s standpoint;

otherwise one will never meet him, never speak in such a way that he understands.

By communicating one’s feelings, one’s pleasures and disinterested delights -
one’s tastes - one tells one’s ohoiees and one chooses one’s company. (Hannah

Arendt, LootnrosonKanllsPolitiodﬁhilosoohy, 74)
Political judgements, according to Arendt are derived “from the fact that the world itself is
an objective datum, something common to all inhabitants.” When judgements are
communicated and when they are made together with others, they “decide how this world,
independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will

see and what they will hear in it” (BPF, CC, 222). Thus, political judgements establish

 

problem of understanding, which has plagued the historical sciences almost ﬁom their
beginnings. I am convinced that understanding is closely related to that faculty of
imagination which Kant called Einbildungskraf’t and which has nothing in common with

ﬁctional ability” (Hannah Arendt, W, p. 403-4, emphasis
added).

 

232

impartiality not from an Archimedean point but ﬁ'om a common sense; from an ability to
see things from our own enlarged perspective that incorporates the perspectives of all
others who are present.
And since political judgements, like aesthetic judgements, are perspectival they do
not “compel” but are rather persuasive;
(T)he judging person - as Kant says quite beautiﬁrlly - can only ‘woo the consent
of everyone else’ in the hope of conring to an agreement with him eventually. This
‘wooing’ or persuading corresponds closely to what the Greeks called peithein,
the convincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically political

form of people talking to one another . . . the judicious exchange of opinion
about the sphere of public life and the common world,. . . (Hannah Arendt, “Crisis

of Culture.”B_eto/_eonl’_ast_and_liunrte, 222-3)

Persuasive speech among a plurality of perspectives is integral to Arendtian
constructivism.

For Arendt the principle of political unity is not a unanimity reached by everyone
leaving behind their own perspective and individually taking the same perspective, but is a
“common” experience of the world, a sensus communis, each ﬁom her own perspective.
Political unity is secured by two political acts: ﬁrst, of a plurality of actors who create the
public spectacles, the political spaces, in which we move, and second, of a plurality of
spectators who “complete the steps of creating” (see ES, 127 - also above, Chapter II,
introductory quotation) political spaces by their enlarged judgements of what appears in

the political domain.121 This is different from Rawls, who wants to base stability on a

 

121There is, in Arendt, a certain ambiguity between the roles of actors and spectators in
constituting public spaces. On the one hand she says, “(t)he public realm is constituted by
the critics and the spectators, not by the actors or the makers” (Hannah Arendt, Legumes

onKanthlolitioaLlﬂosoobx, 63), and on the other hand, “(I)n order to judge a

spectacle you must ﬁrst have the spectacle” (Ibid., 61). I have been suggesting that, with

233

conceptual unanimity attained only by leaving behind who we are, particularly in all our
differences and conﬂicts of judgements. Thus, the Arendtian model has this advantage
over Rawls’s: political judgements, like certain aesthetic judgements, being subjective and
local, yet communicable, do not “compel” but persuade.

Rawls is worried about an irrepressible conﬂict among a plurality of beliefs and
conceptions of the good, and seeks to establish a political space that will enable public
institutions to survive in spite of such sources of instability. Thus, Rawls seeks to organize
political dialogue before it gets started; to ﬁnd a prior basis for a voluntary consensus that
will limit public reason within the context of irreconcilable conﬂicts. In this way Rawls is
compelled to preclude certain features as ‘unreal’ and to limit the participation of the
audience. Arendt, on the other hand, organizes political dialogue around a common
activity, a way of talking, where public reason is not merely purposeful, to reach
consensus on how to organize political institutions, but is designed to keep the web of
human relationships intact, to keep the conversation going, even when there is
unpredictable and irreversible damage.

Stability for Arendt lies in preserving the founding moments of constructing
political spaces - not as a memory past, but as an ongoing possibility still alive. Stability
for Arendt, lies in “keeping the revolutionary spirit alive.” Stability involves both the
founding of freedom, “a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can

appear” (OR, 121), and the preservation of that space where freedom can appear “to

 

Brook’s understanding of theater as an experience of the invisible and of the relationship
between actor and audience in theatrical performances , we can expand Arendt’s insightﬁrl
but unﬁnished and somewhat deﬁcient analysis of political judgement.

 

234

assure the survival of the revolutionary spirit - out of which the act of founding sprung”
(OR, 122), and thus to “assure the citizen’s right of access to the public realm” (OR,

123).

2. “Pole .rz‘vrrr.‘ twin .Herr'r ' 1-1!:1,

BertonnmsAns.

In proposing aesthetic judgement as a model for political constructivism Arendt
must be especially careﬁrl not to overstate her case. There is a particular difficulty with
using aesthetic judgements to get at the kind of intersubjective space for human visibility
that our notion of democratic politics requires, especially since many aesthetic experiences
are based on individualistic, subjective perceptions of “works of art.” The experience of
something as beautiﬁrl or holy is often a consequence of specialized “training” (whether
formal or informal) by which we are enabled to perceive those elements in an object that
make it beautiful or holy. Understood this way, it is diﬁicult to see how a “common sense”
would play any role in aesthetic judgements. Indeed, the suggestion that aesthetic
judgements model the construction of political spaces seems to imply an elite source of
political power rather than a common basis. Only certain “expert” spectators, critics who
have acquired an expert knowledge in political affairs, would seem capable of making
sound “aesthetic” political judgements.

To address this predicament we need to be clear about the kind of aesthetic
judgement we propose for our model. Not all aesthetic experiences and judgements are
alike, and I’m not convinced that the notion of “taste” gets at the needed distinction. The

distinction I want to make here is between aesthetic judgements appropriate to the so-

 

 

 

 

235

called performing arts, particularly theatrical arts, and aesthetic judgements appropriate to
other non-performing arts. To argue, as I have from the beginning chapter, that the
question of human visibility is prior to the question of order, might lead us to look to the
visual arts for the meaning of aesthetic judgement. But this is a mistake. It is critical that
we keep in mind how we understand human visibility in political democratic spaces. As
I’ve proposed in Chapter Two, political visibility is not a matter of presentation or
representation of an accomplished or completed self, but a matter of ongoing
performance. We are visible to one another by acting and speaking, not by our shape,
color, talents or other characteristics that we “possess” or that can be ascribed to us.
Thus, to suggest aesthetic judgement as a model for political construction is to have in
mind from the beginning aesthetic judgements appropriate to public “theatrical”
performances that involve speech and action.

To make clear the distinction between theatrical aesthetic judgements and other
aesthetic judgements, I again turn to Peter Brook. First, recall that in Chapter One we
identiﬁed two places where human beings make their appearances: on stage and in the
audience. We were careful then to emphasize the participation of both actors and
audiences in the creation of a public space where human visibility can ﬂourish. In Chapter
Two we focused on the relationship between the actors on stage and the audience when a
performance is happening, particularly how theatrical performances occur not on the stage
but in the theater, between actors and the audience. There we took notice of Brook’s
proposition that there is no true performance, no “aesthetic wor ” of a theatrical

performance, without the audience “completing the steps of creation.” A “theatrical” work

236

of art, a work of creation by which the human condition is made visible, a “theatrical”
performance, does not, cannot, exist unless an audience “completes” it. As he says, “in
theater . . . until an audience is present the object is not complete” (ES, 127, also above
Chapter Two, introductory quotation).

Thus, a signiﬁcant difference between aesthetic judgements within the contexts of
theatrical performances and aesthetic judgements of other works of art, according to
Brook, is that, in theater no aesthetic object exists without the audience’s judgements,
without the spectator audience “bringing it to completion.” In other forms of aesthetic
experiences and judgements we are presented with an object. Then, depending upon our
own capabilities or instincts (our “expertise”), we “see” what is there and make our
judgements. We do this “when standing alone with the completed object.” Not so with a
theatrical performance that is more than “essentially artiﬁcial.”

Not all aesthetic judgements are alike. Some, perhaps most, follow upon a created,
completed work, but others, like the judgements of an audience in theatrical performances,
complete the creation of the work. It is this second kind of aesthetic judgement that I
believe Arendtian constructivism needs as a model when talking about the construction of
a common sense perspective and enlarging our own subjective point of view into a public
perspective.

At the end of his reﬂection on theatrical space, where he raises a question about

“what remains, when a performance is over?,”122 Brook’s concluding insights into the

 

122Peter Brook, IheEmogLSoage, 136-141. Brooks’s question here is not unlike our
question of democratic stability. If democratic spaces are built on the ﬁagile appearances
of one another, is there anything of our relationships in which the inequalities of power

237

nature of theatrical performance and the participatory role of the spectator audience again
suggests to us a way to clarify our understanding of the participatory role of spectator-
citizens and of the nature of political democratic judgement. There Brook proposes that
good theater consists of three essential elements: (1) _reoetitjon or rehearsal, (2)
Leoteoehtetjon or the action of the actors on stage during a performance, and (3)
assistanoe or the “action” of the audience as it “inter-acts” with the event occurring on
stage to bring it to completion.

Repetition or rehearsal is the process of preparation of the actors for a
performance. Through constant and demanding repetition the actor gains a degree of
expertise regarding the actions he is to perform on stage. Without rehearsals, the action
that an actor is supposed to perform is not possible. A performance without rehearsals is
incredible.

The second element, representation, is an actual performance of what has been
rehearsed. A representation is not simply another repetition or rehearsal, but a process by
which the actor “takes yesterday’s action and makes it live again in every one of its
aspects” (ES, 139). A representation is a re-presenting of the human condition, a renewal

of life, a making visible the invisible powers that rule our lives. But what makes a

 

have been made visible and remedied that lasts, or are we, as the Evans and Boyte studies
suggest, bound to recreate free spaces, over and over again. Brook’s response to his own
questions seems appropriate for us as well: “When emotion and argument are harnessed to
a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself - then something in the mind burns.
The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell - a picture. It is
the play’s central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are rightly blended
this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say. . . .
Then a purpose will have been served. A few hours could amend my thinking for life”

(Peter Brook, W. 136).

 

 

238

representation or a theatrical performance different from simply another rehearsal?

The study of what exactly this means opens a rich ﬁeld. It compels us to see what
living action means, what constitutes a real gesture in the immediate present, what
forms the fakes assume, what is partially alive and what is completely artiﬁcial -
until slowly we begin to deﬁne the actual factors that make the act of
representation so difficult. And the more we study this the more we see that for a
repetition to evolve into a representation, something ﬁrrther is called for. The
making present will not happen by itself, help is needed. (Peter Brook, Ihe_Emoty

.Soaoo. 139)

What is needed, according to Brook, is an assistance provided by the spectator
audience.

Assistance - I watch a play: j’ assiste a rare piece. To assist - the word is simple: it
is the key. An actor prepares, he enters into a process that can turn lifeless, at any
point. He sets out to capture something, to make it incarnate. In rehearsal, the vital
element of assistance comes ﬁ'om the director, who is there to aid by watching.
When the actor goes in front of an audience, he ﬁnds that the magic transformation
does not work by magic. The spectators may just stare at the spectacle, expecting
the actor to do all the work and before a passive gaze he may ﬁnd that all he can
do is a repetition of rehearsals . . . Occasionally, on what he calls a ‘good night’,
he encounters an audience that by chance brings an active interest and life to its
watching role - this audience assists. With this assistance, the assistance of eyes
and focus and desires and enjoyment and concentration, repetition turns into
representation. Then the word representation no longer separates actor and
audience, show and public: it enve10pes them what is present for one is present for
the other. The audience too has undergone a change. It has come from a life
outside the theater that is essentially repetitive to a special arena in which each
moment is lived more clearly and more tensely. The audience assists the actor, and
at the same time for the audience itself assistance comes back from the stage.
Repetition, representation, assistance. These three words sum up the three
elements, each of which is needed for the event to come to life. (Peter Brook, The

W, 139-40)
According to Brook, what makes an experience of theater an experience of life, of what is
real and human (rough theater), is not the action on the stage but both the action of the

actors and the inter-action of the audiences. The aesthetic object, the invisible made

239

visible, the visibility of unequal powers that rule our lives, is brought into existence by the
representations of the actor-citizens but only with the assistance of the spectator-citizens.
The judgements of the spectators, made during the performances, are as essential to the
creation of the performance as are the rehearsed representations of the actors.

Ifwe read Arendt’s proposal of aesthetic judgements of taste as a model for
political judgements without the above distinction between aesthetic judgements, then I
think she is open to criticisms of elitism and antidemocratic tendencies. But, I do not think
we need to read her that way. The problem is not so much with the drarnaturgical
model as it is with the way we understand theatrical performances. Ifwe think that the
action of the actors on stage is the creative act of the performance, then our drarnaturgical
model does exclude spectator citizens from the performance of political acts. But, if we
recognize, as Brook points out, how the performance is a result of both actors and
spectators, then we have a way of talking about the active participation of spectator

citizens in the creation of democratic political spaces.

 

One of the more signiﬁcant elements of political liberalism is how its design of the
political domain along with its method of construction deﬁnes the conditions under which
the public reasons together. That seems correct. But, since I have rejected the conception
of the political domain as “justice as fairness” in favor of an Arendtian conception, the
conditions for public reason need now to be reexamined.

For Rawls public reason is constrained by “justice as fairness” as it is established

 

240

by the original position. “In justice as fairness, and I think in many other liberal views, the
guidance of inquiry of public reason, as well as its principle of legitimacy, have the same
basis as the substantive principles of justice. This means in justice as fairness thatthe
...11‘i 1-7034141-” '. '1 «.10011’ In it f' '-_. x n... for,

,.‘1-_- o .0 o 0 91-1: 1‘ 2.111. on. o r . o. r‘-_. n o 1". u: 0 1‘ 10m ”(PL,
225, emphasis added).

Since we are suggesting an alternative constructivist model, how are we to specify
the conditions and limitations of public discourse? As Rawls reminds us, the completion
of one’s political conception requires a conception of public reason. “(A)n agreement on a
political conception of justice is to no effect without a companion agreement on guidelines
of public inquiry and rules for assessing evidence. The values of public reason not only
include the appropriate use of the ﬁrndamental concepts of judgement, inference and
evidence, but also the virtues of reasonableness and fair-mindedness . . . “ (PL, 139).

We have seen above that Rawls’s and Arendt’ s conceptions of judgement and
reasonableness are quite different and thus play different roles in their conceptions of
public reason. If we understand political space as more than an instrumental arrangement
of human beings, but instead as providing the conditions for mutual public appearances of
human beings, then the kind of political “reasoning” carried out in public discourse is not
the making of substantive decisions nor achieving consensus but is rather political
judgement understood the following way:

(1) The contents of public reason are, like aesthetic judgements of “taste,” always

open to discussion and subject to dispute. Conﬂicts of judgement are resolved not

241

on the basis of their truthfulness, as Rawls correctly recognizes, nor on the basis of
their reasonableness, as Rawls advocates, but according to their capacity to
inﬂuence and affect the public “performance.” Such political judgements, as
distinct from moral judgements, do not “compel” but rather require a
“persuading.” “(I)t is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather
judgement and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of
public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be
taken in it, as well as how it is to look henceforth, what kind of things are to
appear in it” (BPF, “CC,” 223). What is at stake in political public reason
(political judgements, as with theatrical aesthetic judgements) is not the
reasonableness of our viewpoint or our belief system, but rather what kind of
world do we want to live in, and how do we want to live (appear) in it.‘23 As
Brook put it, “Here the question comes back to the spectator. Does he want any
change in his circumstances? Does he want anything diﬂ’erent in himself, his life,
his society? Ifhe doesn’t, then he doesn’t need theater . . .” (ES, 137). If he
doesn’t then he doesn’t need political spaces. On the other hand, if he does, then
he needs to stay and, along with others who stay, bring to completion the
performances of public deeds. His presence (as both actor and spectator) is critical

to the outcome.

 

123“The activity of taste decides how this world, independent of is utility and our vital
interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it. Taste
judges the world in its appearance and its worldliness. . . For judgements of taste, the
world is the primary thing, not man, neither man’s life nor his self” (Hannah Arendt,

“Crisis in Culture,” Belmonﬁasundiunno, 222)-

242

(2) “Taste decides not only how the world is to look, but also who belongs in it”
(CC, 223). Because political judgements, like aesthetic judgements of taste, also
disclose the person(s) making the judgment(s), ‘yvherever people judge the things
of the world that are common to them, there is more implied in their judgements
than these things” (CC, 223), public reason involves, of necessity, the words and
deeds of its actors and its spectators. This disclosure of “who one is” in political
judgements as well as aesthetic judgements of taste, humanizes the political realm,
by enabling us to “arbitrate and mediate between the purely political and the purely
fabricating activities, which are opposed to each other in many ways” (CC, 225). If
the political domain is the sphere of founding and maintaining human ﬁ'eedom, it is
by political judgements that we resist the compelling force of expertise (and elite
powers that rule our lives) and the necessities of consumption (also powers that

rule our lives).

(3) Thus, public reason is the capacity to judge not only from one’s own point of
view, but the capacity to judge from the different perspective of all those present in
the shared public space. This, which Arendt calls an enlarged mentality, is what
enables us to orient ourselves in a common public that lies between us, that is
constructed by us, between us. “Judging is one, if not the most, important activity
in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass” (CC, 221), in which

stability of the public, political arena is maintained.

243

One of the more serious criticisms against a dramaturgical model of politics comes
at this point, in discussions of the content of political discourse. Joseph Schwartz, in his
critique of Arendt for example?“ argues that politics as theater shelters the political from
the onslaughts of self-interest and sets it apart from real life. Because dramaturgical
models such as Arendt’s, “remove matters of social conﬂicts from the realm of public
deliberations” they “strip politics of any concern with interests or “life processes” and,
thus, “denude politics of any content other than individual performance” (Schwartz, 196-
197). Political action in dramaturgical models is seen as an art of performance separate
and distinct ﬁom the activity of labor and necessity and, thus, presumably separated from
ordinary life. The problem with Arendt’s model, according to Schwartz, as with Wolin and
Habermas, is her separation of the social and the political.

Arendt . . . fails to comprehend that her hostility to the role of interests in politics
precludes her ﬁ'om engaging in a radical critique of existing social interests . . .
Thus, Arendt relegates all attempts at social reform to the realm of expertise and
administration. The only activity that appears to rescue Arendtian politics from a
peculiar metadiscourse of great speeches on the nature of politics are the processes
of creating and defending regimes. But Arendtian politics deals only with the form
of regimes, not with the content of their policies (“outputs”). (Joseph Schwartz,

Ihollennanencoofthollolitioal 197)

By exorcizing the social question from politics, she loses all interest in the
possibility of democratizing social organization. Political and managerial talents
may well be somewhat distinct, but this does not preclude democratic participation
in discerning both enterprise goals and managerial talent. Any committed democrat
believes that organizations that have binding power over the actions of their
members should be governed by those members . . . Arendt, however, believes
that social organizations must be governed by rules of efﬁciency which inherently
conﬂict with principles of participation . . . (Joseph Schwartz, Ihel’ennanent‘eof
tholiolitioal, 212)

 

12"Joseph M. Schwartz, Iheﬂeunaneneegftheﬁolitioal (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), Chapter Six, “Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Action,” 189-216.

244

I have already talked about the meaning of performance in democratic politics. I
have argued, with the help of Peter Brook, that performance is not limited to the activity
of the actors on stage but requires the interaction of both actors and audiences. Thus
politics in a theatrical model need not be seen as limited to an elite set of actors who have
the luxury of acquiring an expertise by rehearsals but includes an equally necessary,
although different kind of, participation of an audience. Politics, (including the meanings
and the values in political discourse), requires the active participation (a re-active
discourse) of the ordinary citizen. There is no democratic performance without this
involvement of the audience. In this way, I think the criticism of elitism can be countered.
What occurs in the “rough theater” of democratic politics are not individual performances
on a stage, but a play between actors and audience in which the invisible powers that
actually rule lives become visible. To be sure, there is an element of leisure required for
any theatrical performance. But no more than the leisure required for any deliberation or
any other process of perceiving what is hidden.

The other aspect of Schwartz’ s criticism relates to the distinction between the
political and the social in an Arendtian model of politics. To be sure, Arendt draws a sharp
and clear distinction between the political activity of performance and the activities of
work and labor. But, as I have indicated in my response to Wolin and Habermas, to make
a sharp distinction between the three is not to disconnect them from one another. We have
already seen in Chapter Four how, according to Arendt, the necessary activities of labor

must be addressed in order for anyone to enter the political realm. A certain degree of

245

freedom from life’s necessities is required for the political to exist (this is where the
requirement of leisure comes from). Thus, while the human needs of shelter and food and
health are not themselves political issues for Arendt, they, nevertheless, have great
political signiﬁcance. They are the necessary preconditions of political space and, as
preconditions, they certainly would be part of the content of political discourse. The
“structure of production and social provisions” are political issues, though not inherently
so, because they are related to the preconditions of political participation. Because certain
structures of production and distribution may prevent political participation, we must
address, within political discourse, the normative questions they pose.

But, in addressing theses social problems there are two ways to approach them,
both of which are necessary. The ﬁrst, and most important for Arendt, is regarding their
political implication, namely their impact on the kind of political relationships we want
between ourselves. Thus, for example, if we want our political spaces open to all, then we
will address the normative criteria of production and distribution of social goods
differently than if we want to limit political spaces to certain “kinds” of citizens. Issues of
meaning and value are addressed at this level. Secondly, once the political space is deﬁned,
and questions of meaning and value are decided politically, the strategic and tactical issues
involving social questions ( issues of production and distribution) are best resolved by
expertise and strategies of eﬂ’ective administration.

It seems to me that the predicament with clarifying the content of political
discourse in Arendtian political space does not arise because of the distinction between the

social and the political, but is a result of a lack of clarity regarding how the two are

 

 

 

246

separated and related. We all recognize that there is a distinction between the social and
the political, and we all recognize that they are not unrelated. Arendt, does not so much
“fail to see that the way we structure both production and social provision are inherently
political issues” (Schwartz, 211), as that she is more concerned with the conditions of
egalitarian political discourse than with the preconditions for entering such discourse. The
failure of Arendt to adequately address the political signiﬁcance of the social preconditions
of democratic spaces, does not indict her dramaturgical model as an elitist understanding
of political action, but shows her preoccupation with the conditions of political visibility.
If Arendt is guilty of “exorcizing the social question ﬁom politics” it is not to
support a position that they have nothing to do with each other or that politics occurs only
in the conﬁnes of a protected and leisurely theatrical space, but to show that the human
relationships of equality are never, and can never be found in the social sphere but exist
only in a democratically created political space, a space open to everyone and without
power relations of sovereignty. In fact, her claim is that if we are ever to structure social
relationships (which are always unequal) in a way that supports democratic egalitarian
relationships, then we must ﬁrst establish a space where there can be truly egalitarian
relationships and come to understand and study the necessary conditions for their
formation and continuance. The ﬁrst political act is the perception of one another and the
stability of human visibility. Social questions are questions of order and symmetry that are

best resolved once the conditions of human visibility and perception are provided for.

 

 

 

247

F. DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SPACES REVISITED.

Political space is not something “given,” but is conditioned by the fact of a
plurality of human beings. That means that the genuinely political domain does not remain
in existence by means of deliberative structures, even by means of a conceptual consensus,
but only by the shared activity between a human plurality. The basis for democracy is
established ﬁrst and foremost on the public visibility and appearances of its citizens not on
some idealized discourse, nor in a normative deliberative consensus.

The difference between political deliberation that leads to agreement and political
activity or judgement that leads to visibility is meant to focus on the difference between
the symmetry or order of human relationships and the visibility of what is invisible in
human relationships. The ﬁrst political act is to become visible. Only then do questions of
order and symmetry make sense.

The meaning and value of these ﬁrst political acts lie not in their motivation nor in
their achievement, but in their performance. Such political acts of visibility are
performative acts of human beings within a plurality. Political stability is assured only
when the performances continue, only when political spaces allow and support an ongoing
“play” by which we appear to and perceive one another.

Democratic political spaces do not continue to exist independent of those who
occupy them. They change, for the better and for the worse, as we embrace others or
separate from one another. What characterizes democratic spaces is the diversity of its
members and the kind of mutual embrace; an embrace that enlarges our own perspective

to recognize and accept others’ perspectives as like unto our own. The more common the

 

248

experiences of such embraces, the more likely such spaces will be created. And, the larger
this embrace, that is, the wider its extent, the more power it has to sustain itself, and the
more stable it will be.

I began this dissertation with an argument designed to show that if we want to
include a great diversity of people in the political spaces we create for democratic plural
societies, then we ﬁrst need to concentrate on meeting the conditions of human visibility
(how human beings are visible to one another) before we begin to address issues of order
(how they are organized and relate to one another); that the problem of political stability is
ﬁrst a problem of human perception and appearance and only then a problem of balance
and proportion; and that problems of inequalities of power within democratic societies
have the best chance of being remedied when we are able to secure the visibility and
appearances of human beings who live within their domain.

I suggested then that we need to rethink the meaning of democratic space, and
democratic participation; that the traditional conception of the political as organizing
human relationships needs to give way ﬁrst to a conception of a space in which people
appear and are perceived by one another; that the problems of democratic participation are
best understood not as issues of deliberation and public reason, but as issues of how
humans appear in public and of how they perceive one another.

From an examination of various illustrations of public spaces, I suggested that
democratic spaces are best understood not as spaces designed to symmetrically order and
balance human beings, but as spaces designed to provide both the objective conditions of

human visibility (an acoustic and ﬁeld of vision in which all citizens can be heard and seen)

249
and the subjective conditions of perceiving human beings (the formation of a common
sense by which each citizen can see and hear one another). In my examination of the
theories of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, I looked for a conception of democratic space
that addresses these conditions of visibility and perception.
In my review of Rawlsian political liberalism, I found that Rawls’s concern with
order and symmetry limits the visibility of human relationships within his design of political

(C

space. I found also that Rawls’s original position,” was an inadequate model for the
subjective conditions under which citizens are likely to perceive human diversity; the
“original position” is too limiting and excludes differences that make a diﬁ‘erence.

I found Hannah Arendt’s conception of the political better able to provide the
conditions of visibility and perception. Arendt’s distinction between the political and the
social was helpﬁrl in keeping the problems of visibility and perception distinct from the
problems of order and symmetry. Her conception of the political as the space for human
performances by words and deeds (citizens as actors) provides us with a way to
understanding the objective conditions of human visibility, as humans making their own
appearances by their own words and deeds (human freedom). Her conception of a “sensus
communis” and its model of aesthetic judgements provides for the perception of human
diversity in ways that do not exclude perspectives, but enlarges them. “Sensus communis”
is a public perspective built up from one’s own perspective through a process of taking in
a multitude of perspectives.

In advocating an Arendtian conception of political space over a Rawlsian

conception, much more needs yet to be addressed. In Arendtian political space how do we

250

approach the problem of symmetry and order? While the conditions of visibility and
perception seem clear enough, it would also seem that Arendt is inattentive to the
problems of order and symmetry, and indeed may even preclude their adequate
consideration. In her defense of freedom against tyranny has she inadvertently leaned
toward anarchy?

The relationship between the conditions of visibility and the conditions of order
and symmetry seems to parallel the distinction between the political and the social that
Arendt makes. The Arendtian distinction between the social and the political does allow us
to keep clear and distinct the problem of order from the problem of visibility. But can the
social and the political be so separated, as she seems to want? How can the social and the
political be kept from mixing in the real world, so that equality and freedom can ﬁnd a
place to ﬂourish? What barriers would need to be erected? By separating them as Arendt
has, is the political unattainable, beyond the reach of contemporary societies? How can
we keep the distinction to which Arendt draws our attention without isolating and
detaching both from each other?

Arendt’s conception of the political also places great demands upon citizens who
would create genuine political spaces. One might argue that the courage she requires of
citizens, their willingness to let go of their individual concern for satisfying their own
consumptive needs and to leave behind their concern for the things of the world in favor of
direct and extremely fragile human relationships, is simply too much to ask. While Arendt
holds up an ideal to which, she claims, all can aspire, are these demands unrealistic and

beyond the reach of most? In this sense has she put democratic egalitarian space beyond

 

251

the reach of ordinary people, as Wolin suggested? Could it be that Habermas’s criticism of
her naivete may be valid not because she sharply separated social concerns from political
one, but because she might very well have made the political unattainable.

In Arendtian political space the only power we have in direct human relationships
is the performative power of our own words and deeds. For Arendt, this means that we
leave behind any rule of power we might have over others. Indeed to enter a space in
which we relate with one another solely based on our words and performances (our
appearances) and without any nrle or regulatory control, requires great trust and courage.
Is there any basis on which we might be motivated to enter into such relationships? Can
citizens trust that they will not be destroyed, or at least misused? What is the basis for
such trust and courage?

But courage, while necessary for creating democratic spaces, is not what gives us
the political spaces we seek. Only human words and deeds can do that. And, because of
the kind of power that words and deeds have, they are also unpredictable, unbounded and
uncontrollable. Thus, the second and third demands that an Arendtian design puts on
citizens in creating political spaces are the political virtues of promise and forgiveness. It
seems strange to talk of forgiveness as a political virtue, especially at a time when what
seems to matter most in the political arena is either the acquisition of power over others or
the protection of self from the power of others. How do promise, trust and forgiveness ﬁt
into such a sphere?

One of the more interesting and challenging aspects of Arendt’s political theory is

the way she approaches the issue of the normative basis of political action and

 

252

participation. For Arendt, politics is grounded, though neither morally nor religiously nor
metaphysically so. We have already seen why traditional moral standards will not work in
Arendtian political spaces. She wants to establish the normative basis of political action
within the political activity itself. But how does she do that? What are the normative
standards of sound political action? Arendt’s conception of political action as performative
rather than instrumental leads her to look for the normative basis of politics in what she
calls the “aesthetic judgements of taste.” If the normative standards of political acts,
political performances, are similar in type to the normative standards of artistic

performances, clearly much more needs to be done in deve10ping these standards.

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