ARENDT AND THE PARADOX OF RULE

Although Sheldon Wolin is perhaps the best-known critic of the idea of democracy as a regime among American political scientists, his appreciation of the uncomfortable fit between democracy and rule is shared by a range of democratic theorists working in otherwise disparate traditions. Just as Wolin embraces conventional depictions of democracy as anarchic and revolutionary, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), building on a distinctive reading of Spinoza, abandon the idea of the sovereign people in favor of the “multitude,” which they call a “maddeningly elusive” subject that “cannot be entirely corralled into the hierarchical organs of a political body,” and which “banishes sovereignty from politics” (192, 340). Jacques Rancière identifies democracy with the “rupture in the logic of arche,” or rule, that takes place when those who have “no part” within a regime suddenly appear and speak in public without authorization (Rancière 2001, par. 14; 1999, 29–30). Finally, Ernesto Laclau (2001, 7; Laclau and Mouffe 1985), building on the influential work of Claude Lefort (1988, 17), characterizes democracy as constitutively torn between rule and the suspension of rule—or, in his terms, between the “occupation” of the “place of power” by particular groups who claim to represent universal values, and the equally ongoing exposure of the ideological character of every such claim, which keeps the place of power open or “empty.”

Although at least some of these authors flirt with a simple rejection of rule, all ultimately acknowledge that rule is unavoidable, perhaps even (partly) beneficial. This acknowledgment pulls against these authors' forceful critiques of rule, and the resulting tension both enriches and troubles their work. It leaves Wolin caught between two pictures of democracy that he does not quite reconcile: democracy as an episodic, “fugitive” rebelliousness in the face of the nearly overwhelming power of state and capital; and democracy as a continuous, everyday practice of cooperation, deliberation, and decision making (Wolin 1996; 2004, 601–6; Xenos 2001). Similarly, Hardt and Negri (2004) alternate between invocations of the unlimited potential of the multitude to exceed every form or order—under the slogan “become different than you are!” (356)—and characterizations of the activity of the multitude in terms of “decision-making” and “the rule of everyone by everyone” (339, 237; Passavant 2004; Shapiro 2004). For Rancière, the tension gives rise to an account of democracy as an ephemeral practice, always “on the shore of its own disappearance,” as the unauthorized voices that momentarily expose the injustice at the heart of rule find themselves incorporated within a new order or regime (Rancière 2001, par. 25; Deranty 2003, 152–53); and for Laclau (1996) the tension results in what sometimes sound like self-contradictory descriptions of democratic political action: democracy, he writes, consists in “the ambiguous practice of trying to fill [a] gap”—to occupy the empty space signified by universal terms like “the people”—“while keeping it permanently open” (59).

The tensions that characterize these approaches are not necessarily flaws. Instead, as Alan Keenan has eloquently argued, they may be signs of responsiveness to paradoxes intrinsic to the very notion of democracy. On the one hand, Keenan (2003) explains, democracy's radical inclusiveness and its radically self-grounding character mean that “democratic politics renders everything provisional and open to question,” including especially the identity of “the people” itself. On the other hand, “in order to be the kind of entity able to have and to regulate its own collective life, ‘the people’ must take on an identity whose relative clarity and stability depend on particular foundations, traditions, and institutional forms that cannot be fully general or fully open to question” (10). For Keenan, this means that democracy is an ideal “at odds with itself, torn between the closure necessary for the people's identity and rule, and the openness of contestation and revisability” (13). This, in turn, makes democracy into a site of “inevitable trespass, failure, frustration, disappointments, and incompletion,” because democratic actors always risk betraying some of their principles in their efforts to respect others (22). Although Keenan recognizes that such accounts of democracy, with their Sisyphean feel, might easily provoke withdrawal or resentment, he insists that that it is better to face up to the paradox than to sweep the problem under a tidy philosophical rug, and so he counsels us to supplement “overly formal and theoretical” affirmations of democratic paradox with practical strategies, including new forms of civic virtue, that will “make it easier to accept the frustration and limitation of democratic action” without falling into resignation or rage (20, 22).

The contours of this conversation about democracy and rule are echoed in contemporary treatments of the political thought of Hannah Arendt. For some readers, Arendt's most obvious contribution to our thinking about rule lies in her forceful denial that ruling has any proper place in politics at all, notwithstanding its central position in the tradition of Western political thought. In The Human Condition, for instance, Arendt (1958) argues that “the concept of rule” is at the center of the philosophical tradition's long-standing effort to escape from the uncertain world of politics—typically by substituting the logic of “making” or poiêsis, in which a craftsman applies an already-given set of “rules and standards” to his material, for the unruliness of genuine action (222, 227; see also Villa 1996, 51). Likewise, in On Revolution, Arendt (1965) seems to embrace an idea of freedom as what she calls “no-rule,” a kind of political life “without a division between rulers and ruled” and from which, in fact, “the notion of rule…was entirely absent” (30). This rejection of “rule” has led some readers to identify Arendt, approvingly, with an anarchic tradition of political thought that sees freedom as intrinsically opposed to form and associated instead with revolutionary events (Vatter 2000, 14) or with perpetual movement and the transgression of borders (Herzog 2004); and it has led other readers, even sympathetic ones, to worry about the “immoralism” that seems to lurk within her account of action as “eruptive,” revolutionary creativity (Kateb 2000, 134–44).

Other readers of Arendt take her to be more ambivalent toward the phenomenon of rule, but these readings remain structured by the presupposition of an opposition between rule and freedom, closure and openness. Keenan (2003), for example, writes that Arendt's conception of political freedom in terms of novelty “illuminate[s] in profound ways the constitutive openness of democratic politics” (17), which, properly understood, is never a closed system but is permanently exposed to the possibilities of critique, contestation, expansion, transformation, and reinvention. At the same time, Arendt also sees that freedom understood as beginning is, on its own, an evanescent phenomenon: as Keenan (80) says, it “needs the support of political foundations in order to be more than an occasional or marginal occurrence.” This generates a paradox, for while Arendt tries to identify a kind of foundation that could be made perfectly consistent with freedom—looking first, in The Human Condition, to the phenomenon of promising, and then, in On Revolution, to the American Constitution—neither of these attempts succeeds. “Promising,” Keenan says, like the constitutionalization of authority, “can effectively lay down the law of freedom only by immediately violating that same law: it is a free act that at once makes less than fully free all acts that follow its law and example” (89; see also 95). On this reading, Arendt's work gives us both poles of the fundamental tension between democracy's unruliness and its need for rule.

Both of these ways of interpreting Arendt's (1958) critique of rule fit well with, and are sustained by, a common way of understanding her larger theoretical project: one that sees her as attempting to purify politics of a whole host of supposedly nonpolitical phenomena, such as rule, violence, sovereignty, embodiment, sentiment, and many others. There is good reason to read Arendt this way: she often presents herself precisely as a policer of boundaries, reminding us of the differences among the various components of the vita activa so that we can keep each one in its “proper location in the world” (73). In particular, because it is action that seems to be most in danger of being smothered by these other phenomena, doing this seems to require that she “discover a set of criteria that will isolate genuinely political action from its various simulacra” (Villa 1996, 20). It is at this point, however, that the substantive problem of the relationship between democracy and rule joins up with a long-standing interpretive problem about the meaning of Arendt's concept of action, for it has proved maddeningly difficult for her readers to flesh out these criteria, and so to determine “what specific activities count” for her as instances of action (Villa 1996, 28). The trouble is that, strictly understood, genuine action can seem vanishingly rare (and rarefied), hemmed in by irresistible social forces as well as by Arendt's own puritanical insistence that action be undertaken for the sake of nothing but itself; while, capaciously understood, action can lose its specificity, as though anything could be action if it were regarded in the right way or done in the right spirit.⁶

Just as democracy has come to seem torn between rule and novelty, order and change, Arendt's idiosyncratic conception of action has also come to seem torn between the extremes of narrowness and ubiquity.

Nevertheless, there is reason to suspect that Arendt does more than simply reproduce the paradox of democracy and rule; and, relatedly, that the function of her conception of action is different than we have supposed. Consider her comments about rule more closely. In The Human Condition and elsewhere, Arendt (1958) argues that “rule” in its ordinary sense of a power of command over others is a deeply antipolitical concept, the “hallmark” of various efforts by political actors and philosophers, starting with Plato, to “escape from politics altogether” (222). Yet the dominance of “rule” in this sense, Arendt claims, actually represents the loss of a vital ambiguity in the Greek words archê and archein, the terms that are now conventionally translated into English as the noun “rule” and the verb “to rule,” and which are often rendered Herrschaft and herrschen in German.⁷

These Greek words, Arendt observes, originally had to do with “beginning,” with setting something into motion, as well as with leading; while the complementary verb prattein (whence praxis) originally referred to the achievement or completion of a course of action.⁸ The interrelatedness of these two action-terms, archein and prattein, captured something of the mutual vulnerability that Arendt says characterizes action: “the dependence of the beginner and leader upon others for help and the dependence of his followers upon him for an occasion to act themselves” (189).

Actors and theorists alike, however, experienced this vulnerability as a limitation, and their efforts to insulate themselves from the uncertainties of action—to “make sure that the beginner would remain the complete master of what he had begun”—are reflected in the subsequent transformations in the meaning of these terms. “In the realm of action,” their thinking went, “this isolated mastership can be achieved only if the others are no longer needed to join the enterprise of their own accord, with their own motives and aims, but are used to execute orders, and if, on the other hand, the beginner who took the initiative does not permit himself to get involved in the action itself” (Arendt, 1958, 222). As a consequence, archein and prattein “split into two altogether different functions: the function of giving commands, which became the prerogative of the ruler, and the function of executing them, which became the duty of his subjects (Arendt 1958, 189; see also 222–23). Once archein and prattein were separated in this way, archein itself—now recognizable as what we conventionally call “ruling”—began to lose its ambiguity, and the idea of “beginning” came to play an increasingly insignificant role in the conceptualization of action and politics. Plato himself did still exploit the “equivocal significance of the word archein” by appealing to the soul's status as the beginning (archê) of all motion in order to explain why the soul ought to rule (archein) the body.⁹

Yet to think about beginning in this way, which reduced it to a kind of “legitimation” of rule, actually prepared the ground for the ultimate disappearance of “the element of beginning,” in the sense of the initiation of an undertaking, “from the concept of rulership.” “With it,” Arendt (1958) concludes, “the most elementary and authentic understanding of human freedom disappeared from political philosophy” (224–25).

Two features of this critique of rule deserve special attention. First and most fundamental is its attention to language. For Arendt, the elements of our political vocabulary are not just ways of pointing to given things in the world: the capacity of a word like “rule” to refer to something always also involves an interpretation of the world, an explicit or tacit sense of why some phenomena belong together, what they are like, and why they are significant. By focusing specifically on the language of rule—that is, on the gaps between the meanings of terms that are often thought to be equivalent, like archê and “rule,” or on differences in the use of archê and archein themselves across time or from one author to another—Arendt signals that her concerns about rule lie at this level: instead of reversing the positive valence traditionally assigned to the phenomenon called “rule,” she aims her critique at the interpretation of the world that the word “rule” carries with it (and which underlies both positive and negative assessments of rule's place in politics). Second, among the particular features of this interpretation that draw Arendt's critical attention, one of the most important is the close association it posits between relationships of subordination on the one hand and such phenomena as stability, regularity, and continuity on the other. The conceit of the idea of rule, Arendt (1958) tells us, is “the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey” (222). Yet the fact that structures of subordination often do produce more or less stable orders does not mean that they are the only forms of human relationship that can do so, nor does it mean that their strategies for ensuring stability are sustainable: the ideal of isolated mastership, as Arendt repeatedly reminds us, misleads rulers about the sources of their own power and so exposes them to failure and reversal (189; see also 222, 227). This, too, indicates that the point of her critique of rule and her recovery of beginning is not to celebrate those phenomena that are conventionally taken to be rule's opposites, such as disorder, instability, interruptions of regularity, or radical breaks in continuity, but to prise apart phenomena that the idea of “rule” has taught us to see as inseparably connected.

Understood in these terms, Arendt's work would intersect with debates in contemporary democratic theory in an unexpected way. It would suggest that the paradox that democratic theorists have identified in the relationship between democracy and rule may best be understood neither as a problem to be solved nor as a limitation to be accepted, but rather as a symptom of the ongoing dominance of political theory and practice by the idea of rule—that is, by a set of background assumptions about the world that are held in common by those who see democracy as a structure of authoritative control, and by those who reject such regime-oriented views of democracy in the name of revolutionary insubordination, and by those whose work is structured by their acknowledgment of the appeal of both positions. Consider again Claude Lefort's influential description of the transition from monarchy to democracy, in which “power,” once embodied in the king, becomes an “empty place” (Lefort 1988, 17). For many of Lefort's readers, this story expresses the paradoxical conditions under which democratic politics is bound to proceed (Keenan 2003, 5–8; Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 186–87; Rancière 2001, pars. 15–16). For Arendt, by contrast, this story would count less as a representation of our real conditions than as a vivid example of our enthrallment by the picture of rule as authoritative control. In Lefort's account, after all, the “place” of power remains central to the idea of democracy even in its inaccessibility; it is the thing democracy must simultaneously need, want, lack, and flee. To affirm the paradoxes that flow from such a picture, then, would not be a first step toward a more nuanced form of practice, attuned to its own limitations; instead, such theoretical affirmations of paradox would be among the causes and the signs of our practical paralysis. To spell out this possibility, and to prepare the ground for a parallel diagnosis of the broader problem I have described in Arendt's larger theory of action, we need to take up her account of “beginning” in more detail.

WHAT IS BEGINNING?

Given the unusual nature of Arendt's critique of rule—and given, in particular, her insistence on linking “beginning” back to words such as archê and archein that have come to suggest the stifling of novelty—we should expect that her appeals to the phenomenon of beginning will turn out to be more than just an effort to rehabilitate unruliness. However, it is not obvious what else “beginning” could mean. Arendt's readers typically suppose that the paradigmatic instance of beginning is an act that interrupts an existing series or a given order (see, e.g., Beiner 1984, 355; d'Entrèves 1994, 68), and thus that beginning is, precisely, that which is closed down by rule—by the making of decisions, the application of principles, the consolidation of identities, the issuing of commands. Arendt's work sometimes seems to support this understanding of beginning: in “What is Freedom,” for instance, she seems to contrast action, in the sense of beginning, with the operation of “automatic processes,” which generate only “stagnation” and “petrifaction” (Arendt 1968, 168–69). Against this background, she says, a new beginning “breaks into the world”; it is experienced as an “infinite improbability” (169). Such characterizations echo Arendt's phenomenology of “natality,” which is her name for that aspect of the human condition in virtue of which we possess “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (Arendt 1958, 9). This condition is manifest in those acts in which “something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before”; which take place “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability” (1958, 178). Beginning thus understood refers to a human possibility that is the very opposite of regularity: it means, as James Tully (1999) puts it, “the freedom of speaking and acting differently in the course of the game” (164, emphasis added).

One problem with this reading, however, is that it treats Arendt's concepts of beginning and natality as something akin to restrictive clauses in grammar—that is, as qualifications that pick out the particular subset of human acts that actualize the power to break with an existing series or pattern. The trouble with that approach is twofold. The first issue has to do with the formal function of the concept of action (with which beginning and natality are associated) in Arendt's text: Arendt's famous triad of “labor,” “work,” and “action” does not operate straightforwardly as a set of categories into which different instances of human activity are to be sorted; indeed, she herself suggests that activities may belong to more than one of these at once.¹⁰

(As I have suggested, however, it seems equally problematic to think of these categories as something like a set of dimensions that inhere in every instance of human activity, because part of the point of the book seems to be to warn against the loss of certain capacities or possibilities; if that's right, then there must be something restrictive about these concepts. I shall return to this problem.) The second issue is substantive: at crucial points, Arendt says things that seem inconsistent with the conventional reading of beginning or natality as the power to break with a series, change direction, or act differently. Consider a passage from “Understanding and Politics,” one of the most important transitional essays Arendt wrote after the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism, as she was undertaking the work on the tradition of political philosophy that would eventually find expression in The Human Condition. After criticizing appeals to laws of cause and effect in historical writing, Arendt offers a different characterization of the task of the historian:

What is crucial about this passage is the puzzling claim that a kind of unexpectedness and novelty—which Arendt immediately equates with “archê” and “beginning,” and ties not just to the activity of the historian but also to political science and political action (Arendt 1994, 320–21)—is a feature of all events, including those that are hoped, feared, or foreseen. Several years later, Arendt (1968) amplifies the same thought in “What is Freedom,” where she writes that “every act” is, from a certain perspective, a “miracle”; and that “it is because of this element of the ‘miraculous’ present in all reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass” (169–70).

In what sense could something “foreseen” or “anticipated” nevertheless also be “unexpected”? Arendt's point cannot be to claim that even those things of which we count ourselves certain are, as matters of scientific fact, uncertain, or that even those acts that conform to our expectations count as beginnings if the agent could have chosen to act differently: even to dwell on the margins of error in our expectations, or on the space of underdetermination, is still to remain in the register of cause and effect, and that, she insists, is never enough to account for the phenomenon of beginning (Arendt 1994, 319–20). Instead, her point is that when an event passes from possibility to actuality—regardless of how probable or improbable we may have taken it to be while it was still only a possibility—something changes in a different register; namely, the register in which happenings are not only caused states of affairs but also meaningful events, features of a world, and, in particular, occasions for response.¹¹

Even the most purely strategic kinds of response are crucially affected by the passage between the possible and the actual: what might have invited preemption or prevention now invites retaliation or compensation, for instance; and the significance of this difference is no less when it comes to other modes of response, from holding liable, to forgiving, to narrating, to thanking, to following, and so on. To say that all events exhibit unexpectedness in this sense, then, is to say that no degree of certainty about whether something will or will not happen, and what it will turn out to be, can smooth over the difference between “not yet” and “already.” Beginning is tied to the perspective or stance in which that difference matters: the novelty of a new beginning, its eruptiveness, arises not out of the degree of qualitative difference it manifests with respect to what has come before, as though the features of this act were being compared with the features of its predecessors by a neutral observer of history, standing outside of time, but precisely out of an agent's attunement to its character as an irrevocable event, and therefore also as a new point of departure.¹²

Some further evidence for this way of understanding beginning comes from the fact that it helps make sense of Arendt's characterization of natality as a condition of human life, rather than as a feature of human nature or a property of the will. Although Arendt's capsule account of natality is well known, it is also deceptively simple. The word “natality” refers to the fact that human beings are born; at the same time, it refers to the capacity of human beings to engage in action—to give birth, as it were, to new beginnings (Arendt 1958, 8–9, 177). These two senses of natality are, somehow, connected: we are “newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth”; our words and deeds are “like a second birth” (176, 177, emphasis added). That connection is captured in Arendt's beloved passage from Augustine—“that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody”—which means, on her gloss, that “with the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world.”¹³

Yet the precise nature of this connection is uncertain. If we lean toward a literal reading of Arendt's deployment of Augustine, we might take her to mean that the power of beginning is a faculty each human being possesses, implanted in us with the creation of the species and passed on from generation to generation; but that would seem to be a claim about human nature—that is, about the essential properties that mark us off as beings of a certain kind, rather than the basic structures of our existence, which are not in us. Conversely, if we incline toward a less literal reading of the passage from Augustine, matters are not much better. If Arendt simply means that the biblical account of creation is a vivid metaphor which figures the subsequent birth of each individual human being, and if she means, in turn, that the phenomenon of beginning as manifest in action is like both of these sorts of “birth,” then “natality” would seem to be little more than an analogy, useful, perhaps, for drawing attention to a certain human capacity, but not a condition of anything.

There is another possibility, however. If, as I have suggested, the phenomenon of action as beginning turns not on the degree of qualitative difference between one state of affairs and its predecessor, but rather on the irreducible further difference introduced by the happening, the actuality, of every event, then to call natality in the sense of birth a “condition” of beginning would be to say that birth is the fundamental phenomenon on the basis of which this difference becomes meaningful: it is that in virtue of which the actuality of events acquires its weight. This reading seems to be confirmed by Arendt's account of the phenomenon of time. The individual life-story, she says, which has a beginning and an end, is “distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life” (Arendt 1958, 19). Birth and death, in other words, are the conditions of the experience of linear time.¹⁴

This is why Arendt calls the appearance and disappearance of individual human beings the “supreme events” (97, emphasis added). It is also why she ties action, in the sense of a new beginning, so closely to what she calls the “disclosure” of the uniqueness of the individual agent (175ff): not, as is sometimes supposed, because action necessarily expresses an individualistic or self-centered attitude on the part of the actor, but simply because she thinks that the lives of distinct persons, whose beginnings and ends are the markers that lend our experience of time its linear character, are for this reason the medium of action: the points into which meaning gathers and from which it disperses, dependent on but never determined by the initiative of individuals.¹⁵

On Arendt's understanding, then, beginning is by no means only manifest in acts that depart from an existing series or constitute a “radical break with our ordinary expectations” (Beiner 1984, 355). Instead, the term “beginning” points to a kind of novelty that can also be present in moments that satisfy our expectations, follow existing patterns, or continue observable regularities, but which comes into view only from a stance of practical engagement with events. Correspondingly, the reason the dominance of the concept of rule tends to obscure beginning is not that beginning is diametrically opposed to the phenomena conventionally associated with rule, because nothing about beginning requires a break with the terms of an existing order, or resistance to regularity as such. Rather, the concept of rule obscures beginning by blocking this posture of practical attunement; and it can do so in more than one way. By teaching us to associate phenomena such as regularity and continuity with hierarchical relations of command and obedience, the idea of rule can encourage the sort of withdrawal from practical engagement that is required to maintain the illusion of mastery (Arendt 1958, 222–23). However, the same background assumption of a close connection between subordination and regularity can equally well inform democratic critiques of rule, leading us to embrace a countervailing commitment to openness and interruption—which, however, we seem to be tragically bound to violate every time we make a decision, indeed every time we move in one direction rather than in another, and which can therefore produce paralysis.

Still, all this leaves us with some unanswered questions about Arendt's conception of beginning. The source of the eruptiveness of beginning in Arendt's sense lies in what I called “our attunement” to events—but this phrase glosses over some difficulties too quickly. Whose “attunement”? What is attunement, anyway? Does this just mean that something is a beginning if the person who undertakes it thinks it is? Or if he or she has some other kind of mental state in relation to other events in the world? These answers might seem to constitute a way to deal with the formal problem about the nature of the category of “action” that I bracketed earlier: perhaps Arendt's apparent hesitation between an inclusive use of that category, in which every instance of activity can be seen from the perspective of action, and a restrictive use of that category, in which action names something we are in danger of losing, can be resolved by thinking of action as an attitude or stance that is available to be taken toward any activity, but which we do not necessarily always take up. The turn to the difference between possibility and actuality in this idea is right, but the implicit intellectualism is misleading, to the extent that it suggests either that it is an actor's mental states that determine whether his or her activity counts as action, and also to the extent that it suggests that the recovery of action might simply be a matter of theoretical reflection, of seeing what we are always already doing as action in a way that leaves the shape of our activity untouched. To see why, to develop a fuller account of what it is that makes a beginning a beginning, and to prepare the way for a return to democratic theory, we need to go back to Arendt's text, approaching the problem this time via the intersection between the ideas of action and rule.

ACTION AND RULE: ARENDT'S DANTE

The chapter on action in The Human Condition begins with two epigraphs. The first, from Isak Dinesen, reads: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The second, from the first book of Dante's De Monarchia, is printed first in Latin and then in Arendt's own English translation:

In a recent study of Arendt, Susannah Gottlieb has begun to unpack the meaning of these epigraphs, and of the passage from Dante in particular. Noting the irony involved in Arendt's use of a passage drawn from a philosophical defense of universal monarchy, Gottlieb (2003) brilliantly tracks the ways in which Arendt turns Dante's passage into “a plea for a nonmonarchial politics,” a transformation that, she observes, turns on a distinctive translation of Dante's “explicare” as well as a mistranslation of the crucial last sentence (163). Yet there are further layers of significance in this epigraph that Gottlieb leaves unexplored. One of these comes into view when we notice the importance of the concept of rule in Dante's work. Although he uses a variety of other terms to refer to political authority, including monarchia, imperium, regnum, and related words, he also frequently calls the monarch princeps and his rule principatus, which suggests a connection between monarchy and the “principle,” principium, of humanity (Dante, De Monarchia 1.2 [1998]). Indeed, Dante's defense of monarchy rests on his claim that a single, universal princeps is uniquely able to produce peace, which is the prerequisite of the fulfillment of the principium of humankind. Moreover, unlike many other terms for political authority, princip- words—which were used to render archê and related terms in medieval Latin translations of Greek texts—also bear some of the same semantic complexity that Arendt finds in archê and archein: princeps can also mean first in time; and both principatus and, more commonly, principium can refer to a beginning or origin (Lewis and Short 1879).¹⁶

Against this background, it seems plausible to treat Arendt's brief but rich engagement with Dante as an extension of her critical engagement with the ideas of rule and beginning.

Another layer of significance in the epigraph becomes visible when we attend to the role of Aristotle in the first book of De Monarchia, and in particular to Dante's use of categories drawn from Aristotle's philosophy. Dante's inquiry into the principle of humankind takes the form of an investigation of humankind's highest power (potentia); the principle—that is, for Dante, the goal or end—of humanity is to actualize this potential (actuare, also reducere de potentia in actum, “reduce” from potential to act; 1.4.1, 1.3.8 [1998]). Among the functions of the monarch is to “dispose” (disponere) humankind rightly for this task, which involves a kind of arrangement and ordering of humanity that strengthens certain human potentials (and weakens others)—for instance, by intensifying the power of justice and minimizing the power of greed (1.11, 1.13 [1998]). And the passage that Arendt uses as her epigraph is drawn from that section of De Monarchia in which Dante argues that the monarch is best able to dispose others well in this way (1.13.1–3 [1998])—an argument that turns explicitly on a citation of Aristotle's account of potentiality and actuality (dunamis and energeia) in the Metaphysics. Perhaps, then, Arendt's use of Dante is also tied to her own, distinctive use of Aristotle's metaphysical vocabulary in the chapter on action—for instance, in her account of the relationship between power (dunamis) and activity (energeia; Arendt 1958, 199–206 and passim).

Gottlieb's reading of Arendt's epigraph begins with an observation about her translation of Dante's “explicare” in the phrase “propriam similitudinem explicare,” which Arendt renders as “the disclosure of his own image.” Gottlieb (2003) writes that “explicare (‘uncoiling’ or ‘unfolding’) can characterize a purely internal occurrence—and this is indeed the direction of Dante's thought as he seeks to justify the institution of monarchy”; for this reason, Gottlieb argues, Arendt's translation of explicare as “disclosure” shatters Dante's solipsism, highlighting the fact of plurality, the existence of others to whom the agent's disclosure is directed (162). At first glance, the suggestion that Dante's analysis is “entirely absorbed with the relation of the agent to itself” might seem to be mistaken: after all, in this chapter of the Monarchia, Dante is concerned precisely with the power of the monarch to shape and dispose others, and he has already characterized humanity as a “multitude”; correspondingly, Dante's translators render “propriam similitudinem explicare” as to “reproduce” or “replicate its own likeness.”¹⁷

But Gottlieb's point is, presumably, that this posture—not so much total self-absorption as infinite self-propagation—doesn't really count as a relation to others. There is no acknowledgment of separateness here—not even in the term “multitude,” which has a very different meaning in the medieval Aristotelian tradition than it does for contemporary radical democrats. As Richard Kay observes, in that tradition multitudo “signifies that which can be divided ‘according to its potency’ into discontinuous parts,” that is, something that cannot realize its full potential except as a functionally differentiated but interlocking and integrated plurality (Dante 1998, 19 n. 5). This plurality is merely the effect of the self-division of the one; correspondingly, the multitude is best disposed when—through subjection to a monarch—it approximates the unity of God, for “the whole universe is nothing else than a sort of footprint of the divine goodness” (1.8.2 [1998]).

Gottlieb then goes on to discuss the rendering of the last sentence of the epigraph, “nihil igitur agit nisi tale existens quale patiens fieri debet,” which Arendt translates as “thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.” As Gottlieb (2003) notes, and as the context indicates, this is evidently a mistranslation (162); Shaw's edition has “nothing acts unless it has the qualities which are to be communicated to the thing acted upon” (Dante 1.13.3 [1996]); and Kay's translation reads “nothing acts unless it is already what the patient ought to become” (Dante 1.13.3 [1998]). What, exactly, has Arendt done? Because the “patient” or the “thing acted upon” is the patiens, Gottlieb (2003) concludes that Arendt has transformed “patiens” into “patent” by “subtracting an i” (162). This cannot be right, however, for it leaves us with no plausible account of where Arendt finds “latent” in this sentence, or of what she would mean by that word. It seems more likely that Arendt has read “existere” as “to make patent,” and “patiens” as “the latent self,” in which case her crucial departure from Dante would lie not in dropping an “i” but in tying existens and patiens to the same subject, rather than treating patiens as the separate recipient of the actor's action. (From two subjects to one: it is Arendt, notice, who is letting herself be absorbed into the question of the agent's self-relation—but sometimes it may be more effective to approach plurality indirectly.)

The first part of this hypothesis is plausible enough, for exsistere can mean to be, but also to emerge, appear, or be made manifest; and it would be no surprise for Arendt, the student of Heidegger, to stress these latter senses.¹⁸

Moreover, both parts of the hypothesis receive some support and elaboration later in Arendt's discussion of action, when she says that “the meaning of the last sentence of the Dante quotation at the head of this chapter,” which “defies translation,” is as follows: “The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer passive givenness 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 passively anyhow” (Arendt 1958, 208). Here, Arendt unpacks “the latent self” into an even richer notion, “what one has to suffer passively anyhow”; and that phrase is identifiably a rendering—albeit a misrendering, ungrammatical and unmoored from the context of Dante's words—of tale…quale patiens fieri debere.

Reading Arendt's mistranslation this way has a chain of important consequences. The first is that it clarifies what Arendt means here by “the latent self.” When Arendt's Dante says that “nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self,” it is tempting to think of this as a kind of unveiling: the identity of the self rests, fully formed but unseen, under the cover of darkness, until the actor steps into the light of the public, putting his persona—carefully crafted back in the private workshop—on public display. Yet Arendt's own comments about the “non-sovereign” character of action belie this reading. “Nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed and word,” she says (Arendt 1958, 180): and this is because this “who” is formed in the crucible of disclosure itself, where it is shaped by the unpredictable reactions it provokes; the “unchangeable identity of the person” only comes into being as such in retrospect, once an actor's life “has come to its end” (193; see also 233–34). Does this mean, then, that the “latent self” in this epigraph is merely the symptom of a kind of ideological misrecognition, the falsely naturalized sediment of a series of performatives, which good Arendtian political actors should attempt to expose as such and to resist (Honig 1992, 1993)? Yes and no: sometimes the rhythm of Arendtian beginning may involve making spaces for subversion of existing norms, or for the creation of something that looks substantially different from what has preceded it, but, as we have seen, such unruliness isn't constitutive of what it means to be engaged in action on Arendt's account; and anyway Arendt's talk of “making patent,” “making articulate,” and “calling into full existence” do not fit well with the thought that “the latent self” is a misrecognition to be unmasked.

The phrase “what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow,” however, suggests another possibility, one that lies outside this all-too-familiar dichotomy between the self as settled in advance and the self, if it can still be called that, as in perpetual flux. It suggests that what Arendt calls the latent self is not an identity, real or illusory: instead, it is action's point of departure, the constellation of circumstances, events, and forces to which each new act is a response. To say that this is not a real identity is to say that action, in responding to such a point of departure, always does more than merely reveal an always already established character; to say that it is not an illusory identity is to say that this point of departure cannot be unmasked—to do that would be like pulling oneself out of that matrix in which there are occasions to do things, in which acting makes sense at all. Of course, because circumstances, events, and forces are usually things that we regard as external to the self, it may seem problematic to say that they are among the self's constituents: doing so may seem to still seem to dissolve the self into its surroundings. Yet it is important to notice that Arendt's account of the latent self is not reductive in this way: for her, we might say, the latent self exists at—indeed, it is—the intersection between these worldly happenings and circumstances, on the one hand, and the biologically individuated human beings for whom they are meaningful, whose bodily trajectories from birth to death serve as the threads that organize this latent stuff into selves and make it possible to speak intelligibly of an individual actor's initiatory response to the circumstances and events with which he or she is confronted (and which will turn out to have made up part of the story of who he or she is).

All of this suggests that there is a close connection between Arendt's account of the “latent” self, that in relation to which one is patiens, on the one hand, and the idea of the event that I spelled out earlier, on the other. Yet there is also a subtle temporal twist here. Recall that what makes a beginning a beginning for Arendt, what lends it its eruptiveness, is not its degree of departure from what preceded it, but rather our attunement to its character as an irrevocable event, which also means: as an occasion for response. This suggests that the status of being a beginning is not acontextual: beginnings are always beginnings for some agent or agents; specifically, for those from whom the beginning calls for a response. Now, however, Arendt has also told us that what it means to act is to “call into full existence” something that one would otherwise merely suffer passively. To do that, it would seem, is precisely to be attuned to the character of this latent stuff as a set of irrevocable events and an occasion for action. There is no way to undo what has been done, no way not to suffer it—but you can do more than merely suffer it: you can take it as your point of departure. You can, in short, begin. Taking these two points together: what makes an act an instance of beginning? That, against its background, someone begins. What makes that a beginning? That it becomes an occasion to begin—and so on.

This temporal structure has several crucial implications. Notice, first, that it immediately does away with the notion that the question of whether an instance of activity is a beginning might be decided by the attitude or mental state of its agent. To the contrary, whether your activity is a beginning is not wholly under your control: it is, instead, a matter of the character of the responses and reactions it provokes (or fails to provoke) in you and others. In this sense, the structure of intersubjective vulnerability that Arendt discusses in The Human Condition under such rubrics as the “boundlessness” and “unpredictability” of action applies to more than just individual instances of action: it also applies to the very status of action as action. Second, this also suggests that the being of beginnings is a public matter—not in the sense that it is to be decided by rational-critical discourse, nor in the sense that it is a question of the common good rather than the private interest, nor in the sense that it is involves the exposure of a hidden truth—but simply in the sense that it is a worldly phenomenon, which only exists in the sometimes face-to-face, sometimes impersonal, but always uncertain circulation of address and response (Warner 2002). Third, it also indicates that the being of a beginning is actually not best conceived as a state. Action, understood as beginning, is an ongoing activity whose future is uncertain—and indeed whose past is in a certain sense uncertain as well, insofar as the character of one act as a beginning hangs on its future reception. For this reason it might be better to speak of action as something that is, at various times and places, coming into being or passing away, as the intensity of responsiveness in a space of potential circulation waxes and wanes, but which never simply or definitively is.

We are now in a position to return to the interpretive problem deferred earlier, about the curious difficulty in knowing whether Arendt means concepts like action and beginning to pick out a specific subset of human activity, or to point to a dimension of significance that might be found in any instance of human activity. This difficulty, recall, is closely related to the trouble readers of Arendt often have in finding a suitable criterion in her work by which to decide whether an example of human activity counts as action. We should now be able to identify some of the sources of this trouble. First, it may sometimes be the result of a focus on relatively individualized examples of activity, abstracted from the sequences of occasion and response in which they are embedded. Such abstraction makes the examples more manageable, but it also extracts them from the contexts in relation to which Arendt's account of action as beginning makes sense: trying to decide whether this instance of activity, on its own, is a beginning is like trying to decide whether this instance of me flexing my knee, on its own, is running. Second, this difficulty is also the result of trying to decide whether an instance of activity is or is not a beginning, for beginning, as we have seen, isn't a finally settled property, but a possibility we actualize—though never completely—by responding to it. From the stance of the classifier, who sorts specimens of activity into categories, action and beginning are bound to seem paradoxical.

Together, these features of Arendt's account of beginning shed light on her transformative appropriation of Dante. As I indicated earlier, rule, on Dante's account, is a matter of the realization of the highest possibility of human beings through their “disposition” by a sovereign, who is himself already a maximal embodiment of the virtuous dispositions that remain merely possible—latent—in his subjects, and whose activity of disposition is a kind of reproduction of his own likeness in those he governs. This is why the passage Arendt mistranslates is so crucial to Dante's argument: “nothing acts unless it is already what the patient ought to become.” Indeed, in the sentence immediately following this—which Arendt does not quote—Dante adds the authority of Aristotle to his conclusion: “This is why the Philosopher says in the Metaphysics that everything that is brought from potentiality into actuality is produced by something similar to itself that already exists in actuality; for if anything tried to act otherwise, it would try in vain” (1.13.3 [1998]).¹⁹

The passage to which Dante seems to be referring is part of Aristotle's account of the various ways in which actuality, energeia, is prior to potentiality, dunamis. For example, “the actual member of the species is prior to the potential member of the same species,” and helps to produce it: “man [is produced] by man, musician by musician.”²⁰ Or again, in a slightly different sense, actuality is prior to potentiality in the sense that the actuality of a thing is its end, and the end, as that for the sake of which the thing is, is prior to the thing qua potentiality: hence “animals do not see in order that they may have sight, but have sight that they may see” (Aristotle, Meta. 1050a7–11 [1984]). Dante here translates such ideas about the priority of actuality into a doctrine of hierarchical rule, treating the monarch as, at once, the one who activates the potentiality of the multitude (as the one who disposes) and the one who defines its potentiality (as the embodiment of the telos of human beings).

By contrast, Arendt's mistranslation of Dante is a perfect miniature of her critique of the concept of rule in the philosophical tradition. Dante's separation of the monarch from the multitude—expressed in the conventional translation of the crucial sentence, in which existens and patiens relate to two separate subjects—is an example of the breakdown of the original interdependence between beginner and responder, and of the transformation of that relationship into the Herrschaft exercised by one who already knows what is to be done (who is always already actual) over one who obeys (who has to be brought from potentiality to actuality). In collapsing existens and patiens back into the “patent” and “latent” selves of a single agent—the action one undertakes, and the constellation of irrevocable events within which, and in response to which, one takes it—Arendt peremptorily denies the claim of any agent to be a full embodiment, always already actualized, of human potentiality. In so doing, she also tacitly rejects the reading of Aristotle on which Dante relies. Whereas Dante tends to understand energeia as actuality in the sense of a state of complete development or perfection, Arendt restores to that concept its association with activity: as Aristotle also says, it is because of the priority of energeia to dunamis that we say that “it is thought impossible to be a builder if one has built nothing or a harpist if one has never played the harp; for he who learns to play the harp learns to play by playing it, and all other learners do similarly” (Meta. 1049b, 30–32 [1984]). Here, as in the case of beginning, to be “actual” is not to have a certain set of qualities at a particular time, nor is it to realize a possibility always already implanted in you. It is, instead, to be engaged in an activity, making and remaking (in ways at once orderly and unruly) that activity and its possibilities as you proceed, and sustaining your attunement to the events that call for your response.