Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

On Hannah Arendt and Murray Bookchin: Bridging Intellectual Legacies

Written by Jason Toney.

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
~ Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
~ Franz Kafka

The intellectual legacies of two preeminent thinkers for our times, Murray Bookchin and Hannah Arendt, have regrettably garnered limited comparative analysis. While there can be no doubt that Arendt’s influence has expanded dramatically in recent decades, Bookchin’s body of work has also attracted impressive and diverse interest, especially among the Kurdish people. There may be some value in measuring an intellectual legacy by web searches or the person’s number of citations to determine the extent of their influence, but my purpose is to more explicitly carry forward the work of bridging these intellectual legacies and encourage others to do the same.

I attempt this by first examining Bookchin’s reading of Hannah Arendt, who he cites in several books in essays. In particular, I explore his critique and reformulation of her tripartite distinction between public, private, and social realms. Second, I examine the striking similarities in their broad conception of the history and role of council democracy. Bookchin’s work provides a roadmap for realizing democracy in action, but Arendt’s more strictly theoretical investigation still echoes in harmony. Third, I give care to contemporary thought and social movements that are influenced by both Bookchin and Arendt. To think about Arendt and Bookchin in parallel will be key for activists and scholars invested in fortifying the theoretical frameworks for the 21st-century social movements that confront multiple species threatening existential crises. Among these threats are nuclear catastrophe, ecological collapse—which should be thought to include the threat of infectious disease and superbugs—and the rise of certain technologies like artificial intelligence.

While Bookchin read Arendt’s work, I can find no evidence that the reverse is true. Across his body of work, Bookchin cites parts of Arendt’s The Human Condition and On Revolution and names her influence or relevance in many of his essays and books. This is notable because Bookchin is not always exhaustive in naming his references. Bookchin had immense respect and admiration for Arendt. In Urbanization Without Cities, he refers to her as a “highly gifted political philosopher.”¹ Immediately after this remark, a type of overt praise that is uncommon in his writing, he launches into a criticism of her framing of public, private, and social realms. Bookchin argues that Arendt’s distinction between a political and social realm “allows for very little difference between political activity and statecraft.”² Bookchin argues that the state has merged so thoroughly with politics, “institutionally and functionally,” that the two are indistinguishable.³ This observation is reflected in popular political speech. Rarely, if ever, do we hear of any distinctions between politics and statecraft even in anti-statist-oriented news media. In response to this situation, Bookchin proposes a new formulation of human arenas: “social, political, and ‘statified.'”⁴ This division requires Bookchin to absorb the private realm into the nebulous social realm. At the same time, he agrees with Marx and Arendt that the private realm is a ‘realm of necessity,’ and that it requires special protections. In this way, the private realm remains a distinct space in Bookchin’s imagination, but a now unnamed one. It’s in this sense that he does not reject Arendt’s formulation, and why his reformulation is partly incomplete, although he does seem to recognize this (as I will explore later). Bookchin aims to carve out the theoretical space for the ‘statified’ realm, which he sees as not only threatening the other realms but also conjuringa new ground to stand all on its own through its vast apparatus of tools he refers to as statecraft. Not only does statecraft carve out its own ‘statified’ realm, it effectively expands and overtakes the social and public realms. The implications of this expansion are grave and constitute an increasingly common phenomenon in our time.

Arendt thought of her three realms as real, physical spaces—not merely categories. She viewed the intrusion of the State, of bureaucracy, of the centralization of power as threats not to the physical public space itself, but to the possibilities this public realm provides for realizing action, speech, and freedom within that space. In most so-called democracies today, the polis has no place to appear beyond the voting booth. Real democracy requires spaces for collective action. Today, people take to the streets in protest or engage in civil disobedience to express political aims in public, but these are typically outbursts—temporary and unsustained. Without the formal establishment of a public space to take action, freedom itself has no place to appear.⁵ This is at the heart of why Arendt argues that the greatest failure of most revolutions is their inability to institutionalize spaces for freedom to appear, manifest most clearly in the form of participatory assemblies.

Bookchin’s reformulation of Arendt’s public, private, and social realms hinges on making these realms transcendent rather than physical. Bookchin’s contribution provides us with another lens to examine Arendt’s realms. His addition of the ‘statified’ realm helps us understand that more than intrude on existing realms, the State has managed to carve out its own space through its vast bureaucracies, undemocratic institutions, and industrial complexes. Rather than reject Bookchin’s more transcendental view in favor of Arendt’s more physical one or vice versa, the coalescence of these ideas provides us with a more robust toolkit to examine and identify the rise of totalitarianism and the assault on essential spaces for being human. To be clear and fair, Bookchin does not wholesale reject the physicality of these spaces despite his suggestion in Urbanization Without Cities. In The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin recognizes the physical space required for freedom to appear. He notes that the agora or the polis itself was where freedom could appear, and he cites Arendt again when he makes this note.⁶ The public, private, and social realms, for both Arendt and Bookchin, are essentially in an endless game of tug-of-war, insofar as they have the potential of being dominated by the State, rather than being spaces which facilitate the vita activa: work, labor, and action. Arendt calls these opposed forces “competitors for public power.”⁷ Politics is the antonym of statecraft; bureaucracy and the professionalization of politics eliminate and overtake spaces for freedom.

Bookchin and Arendt came to their ideas from very different backgrounds and training in political philosophy, but both are defined by their dedication to the life of the mind, as well as their willingness to change course and go against the grain of their contemporaries. Bookchin was an avowed critic of Heidegger—one might say he was dismissive—whereas Arendt not only studied with him but also had a partnership. One could elaborate at length about biographical and intellectual differences, but it does not take away from the striking similarity in their conception, broadly speaking, of council democracy. They both critically admired and studied ancient Athenian rule by the demos, New England town meetings, soviets, the Bavarian Council Republic’s räterpublik, the Hungarian Worker Councils of 1919 and 1956, and many other municipal council systems throughout history. We would be remiss to leave their insights to isolated silos.

Decentralized, face-to-face, direct democratic structures are tentpoles in Arendt and Bookchin’s imaginations on freedom. Arendt argues that the revolutionary moments in which people experienced freedom and ‘public happiness’⁸ came when these forms of self-governance arose. Sometimes these institutions arose rapidly, in the context of violence and the absence of other powers or institutions, and they held brief but significant degrees of power. However, Arendt explains that not violence but power creates lasting revolutionary change. Arendt thought that violence was sometimes justified, that it could create positive change, but that “it pays indiscriminately.”⁹ Political violence entails unintended consequences. Roger Berkowitz explains that “for Arendt, ‘violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction.’ All that violence can do is make injustice visible. When it seeks to do more, the most probable result is not justice but ‘a more violent world.'”¹⁰ For Arendt, that’s why violence ought only to be used, if at all, to pursue short-term goals. Violence itself is too limited a scope to see revolution through. Instead, lasting revolutionary change comes through the cultivation of power from the bottom-up. When revolutionary political movements fail to create space within the public realm to facilitate this power and instead rely on violence, like Robespierre, an attempt at liberation is doomed to fail. In a letter to James Baldwin, Arendt describes how the best qualities that arise out of oppressed people, “their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity,” never survive “the hour of liberation by even five minutes.”¹¹ Capturing the spirit of a revolutionary movement, which is the result of the action of the oppressed, requires spaces for those people to express their power. History’s most radical revolutionary bodies are often extremely short-lived. The Paris Commune lasted a couple of months and Hungary’s Republic of Councils in 1919 lasted only 133 days. The challenge of establishing long-term real democracy is rarely if ever achieved. Arendt believed that the unique circumstances surrounding the founding of the United States led to a somewhat longer establishment of real democracy, but it was imperilled by the lack of constitutional protection for Township councils or Jefferson’s notion of a Ward system. Jefferson imagined another branch of government: a decentralized, municipal-based, and confederated system of Town Meetings across the US. As quickly as true democracy appears, without an institutional framework to protect it, it will not only disappear but be overtaken.

Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism¹² reads, in some ways, as a direct response to many of the problems Arendt rightly identifies in the revolutionary process. Bookchin wrote that libertarian municipalism is “a revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become decision-making bodies.”¹³ Again, this was not an altogether new formulation—the idea of public assemblies, as has been stated, has a rich history. In a sense, both Arendt and Bookchin are conservative, insofar as they want to restore more just forms of governance rooted in examples from the past. But Bookchin’s statement almost reads like a direct response to Arendt because it attempts to address the exact issues she raises. Libertarian municipalism maintains that democratic power, and the institutions that facilitate it, ought to be cultivated now. We ought not wait for a revolutionary moment, but rather build power where we are and work towards linking these place-based power centers. This is the essence of dual power—building power alongside the state, intruding on its territory, taking back ground lost to the ‘statified’ realm.

In her Preface to Between Past and Future, Arendt discusses the ‘lost treasure’ of the council tradition: public happiness. She cites the French poet and member of the French Resistance, René Char, who said “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament” (our inheritance was left to us by no testament). She says it is “perhaps the strangest of the strangely abrupt aphorisms” written by him, but it “compressed the gist of what four years in the résistance had come to mean to a whole generation.”¹⁴ When the Third Republic collapsed, these révolutionnaires were suddenly in charge of a public realm and inherited this newfound power and freedom without a “pre-established framework of reference” to guide them.¹⁵ Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism is an attempt to link, temporally, the moments before and after the hour of liberation and provide a framework of reference to give freedom not only space to appear but to last.

Arendt and Bookchin’s ideas are crystallized in an essay entitled “Reimagining Revolutionary Organizing: A Vision of Dual Power.” The essay was written by a group that would later found Symbiosis, “a confederation of community organizations across North America.”¹⁶ Using an Arendtian framework to describe power, they argue for a Bookchinian strategy to establish a form of libertarian municipalism through building dual power. They begin from Arendt’s premise that “intolerable situations such as ours could be cast aside by the public’s revolutionary withdrawal of support from governing institutions.”¹⁷ Using Bookchin’s framework, they argue that for such a withdrawal to be successful requires a “preformation of a postrevolutionary society,” meaning the establishment of participatory institutions before any major power shifts occur.¹⁸ While the actual impact of Symbiosis cannot yet be appropriately judged, their essay marks an important step forward in the bridging of these thinkers.

There is great value to reading Arendt through the lens of social ecology, the field Bookchin helped forge.¹⁹ For instance, in her essay on “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” the question she addresses, “‘has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?’”²⁰ resembles various questions asked in the social ecology tradition. Arendt’s answer necessarily touches on the relationship of society and technology to our environment—or the built (human-made) and unbuilt (natural) worlds.²¹ In her concluding remarks on this question, Arendt says that “we have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside.”²² To highlight this absurd circumstance, she writes that “from a sufficient distance, the cars in which we travel and which we know we built ourselves will look as though they were, as Heisenberg once put it, ‘as inescapable a part of ourselves as the snail’s shell is to its occupant.’ All our pride in what we can do will disappear.”²³ A society so detached from nature, that views everything through a scientific worldview, will lead us to see more things on the ground, on earth, like a photograph of a mine by the Candanian photographer Edward Burtysnky. Despite being defined by its extractivist, destructive, human-made elements, from a certain vantage point as the one Burtynsky chooses, the mine appears to be a beautiful creation of the natural world in which humans played no role. When you look more carefully at Burtynsky’s mine, you begin to notice the ladders and tool boxes scattered around. After a certain length of time, the mine loses its beauty, and the reality of its creation sets in. This resembles Arendt’s astronaut, in their attempt to escape the human world of Earth, they end up in a vessel surrounded entirely by manmade things. Even looking out into the vastness of space, the astronaut will catch a glimpse of the reflection of his gadgets’ blinking lights behind him. All of this is strikingly captured in Bookchin’s statement:

Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.²⁴

There is a danger to being deceived by the allures of technology, but also to becoming a Luddite. There is a danger to being anti-scientific, but also to viewing the world through a strictly scientific lens.

Arendt and Bookchin would not have thought that “man was the highest being there is” like the Romans, partly expressed in the word humanitas.²⁵ They would agree with Aristotle’s assessment of that belief as being “atapos or ‘absurd.’”²⁶ However, they both held as true that the human spirit, our capacity for thought and action, was more than worth fighting for and protecting. The value of bridging the intellectual legacies of Bookchin and Arendt cannot be understated. Together, these thinkers help us more clearly perceive the obstacles to freedom and provide us with a framework for confronting them. They both soberly understood the fragility of our built world. It is increasingly clear that the failure to meet the challenges of our time could be world-ending. Taken together, Bookchin and Arendt show us a path forward.

References

Arendt, Hannah. “The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin.” 1962. <http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156>.

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Berkowitz, Roger. “The Power Behind the Revolution.” Hannah Arendt Center, 2020. <https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-behind-the-revolution-2020-06-04>.

Berkowitz, Roger. The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2021.

Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Chico: AK Press, 2005.

Bookchin, Murray. The Next Revolution. London: Verso Press, 2015.

Bookchin, Murray. Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992.

Colón, Herson-Hord, Horvath, Martindale, & Porges. “Reimagining Revolutionary Organizing: A Vision of Dual Power.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. 2017.

Symbiosis. “Vision and Strategy.” 2019. <https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org/>.

Footnotes