Political Renewal, Intellectual Revival

It is undeniable that we stand at a historical juncture where something new is in the process of being born – preferably not W.B. Yeats’s ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last, [which] Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’ – but something that truly offers a new beginning, free from the shackles that have arguably bound us in our vaunted ‘democracies’ for so long. To be able to understand what is at stake, there are few thinkers who could match Hannah Arendt as a source of enlightenment. 

I have to thank a graduate student of mine – Marc Smit – whose doctoral thesis addresses the question of university education in the present era, with a view to determining whether the university has both a social and economic, as well as a political task regarding students, for drawing my attention once again to the importance of Arendt in this context. His writing has sent me back to Arendt’s work, On Revolution (Penguin Books, 1990), which has a wealth to teach one as far as governance in a republic is concerned.

For present purposes Arendt’s scrutiny of what she terms ‘The revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure’ (Chapter 6) is most pertinent to this. Consider her observation, for instance, that (p. 218): ‘For political freedom, generally speaking, means the right “to be a participator in government,” or it means nothing.’

Implicit in this remark is the distinction between the social realm of civil liberties, such as free economic activity, and the political realm of freedom, which is the historical outcome of liberation from constitutional, monarchical (that is, autocratic) rule, and the establishment, in its place, of a republican democracy. According to Arendt, such liberation, in the modern era, has occurred through revolution – the American and French revolutions of the 18^th century being the most salient examples, where the latter was relatively short-lived, and the seeds for its erosion were planted in the former by replacing the means for citizens’ participation in government by representative government.  

In this chapter Arendt is at pains to bring into focus the eponymous ‘lost treasure’ of what she sees as (what might have been) a ‘revolutionary tradition,’ had it not been for the elision of the political spaces that functioned as instruments for citizen participation in political deliberation and action – what Thomas Jefferson described as ‘wards,’ known under different names from time to time, in other countries too. Here she is talking admiringly about Jefferson’s grasp of the indispensable role of these ‘little republics’ in keeping the revolutionary spirit alive (p. 253-254): 

Hence, according to Jefferson, it was the very principle of republican government to demand ‘the subdivision of the counties into wards,’ namely, the creation of ‘small republics’ through which ‘every man in the State’ could become ‘an acting member of the Common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence.’ It was ‘these little republics [that] would be the main strength of the great one;’ for inasmuch as the republican government of the Union was based on the assumption that the seat of power was in the people, the very condition for its proper functioning lay in a scheme ‘to divide [government] among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he [was] competent to.’ Without this, the very principle of republican government could never be actualized, and the government of the United States would be republican in name only.

To anyone accustomed to government by representation – as is currently the case in ‘democratic’ governments worldwide – this may come across as strange. In fact, one has become so used to thinking of democracy (which, ironically, means government by the people, or ‘demos’) in terms of representational government, through parliaments composed of our ‘representatives,’ that Arendt’s (and Jefferson’s) words would appear incongruous.

And yet, this is the way in which that great American, who was also a philosopher (among several other things), thought about a republic, that it should be a matter of government of the people, by the people, with as much participation in processes of governance as possible. And this was only possible, Jefferson thought, if the republic was broken down into smaller units – counties and wards (‘little republics’) – where every citizen could take part, directly, in deliberations concerning governance. This is why Jefferson could write to his friend, Joseph Cabell, in 1816: 

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No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate. And I do believe that if the Almighty has not decreed that man shall never be free, (and it is a blasphemy to believe it,) that the secret will be found to be in the making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence by a synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical. The elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics, and the republic of the Union, would form a gradation of authorities, standing each on the basis of law, holding every one its delegated share of powers, and constituting truly a system of fundamental balances and checks for the government. Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte…As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, ‘Carthago delenda est’ [‘Carthage must be destroyed’], so do I every opinion, with the injunction, ‘divide the counties into wards.’ Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments.

Reading this carefully, one is impressed by Jefferson’s conviction, that participation in, and power over, affairs pertaining to one’s own well-being brings with it a sense of responsibility which is sorely lacking under the circumstances of ‘being governed’ by one’s ‘representatives.’ The reason for this should be obvious: the further away from the concrete living conditions of citizens, the less aware ‘representatives’ are of these citizens’ needs and desires, and therefore, the less able they are to represent the latter.

Moreover, in the light of a conflation that has taken place in modernity, according to Arendt, of social (including economic) needs and political rights and freedoms, most citizens today believe (and accept uncritically) that their representatives’ role in relation to themselves is chiefly to ensure that their economic needs are optimally taken care of. After all, if one’s country’s Constitution includes a Bill of Rights, is that not sufficient to take care of, and if necessary, rectify any infringement of those (political) rights? 

The answer, of course, is that it is not, partly because – under conditions where one has become inured against the idea that one should take personal responsibility for the political dimension of one’s life – one’s social and economic needs have been prioritised by those in governance structures to the point where politicians could proclaim ‘freedom’ merely to mean economic freedom: the freedom to trade, buy, sell, invest, and so on. Is it at all surprising, then, that during Covid lockdowns most people allowed themselves to be cowed into compliance? Not at all. After all, the gradual erasure of the political in favour of the social has reduced those who used to be ‘citizens’ to ‘consumers’ – gutless, apolitical shadows of the kind of politically aware person Jefferson knew in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. 

Add to this the deliberate ‘conditioning’ of people to be ‘compliant’ regarding certain regulations and expectations in a variety of professions, that has been occurring in many, if not most countries for some time now, which seems, in retrospect, to have been done to prepare for what was triggered in 2020. I recall travelling to Australia to attend a conference in 2010, and being astonished by evidence of pervasive ‘compliance’ among Australians, as pointed out to me by the friends with whom I stayed – ex-South Africans who emigrated to Australia.

They drew my attention to the number of courses that professionals were expected to complete to ensure ‘compliance,’ remarking about the comparative scarcity of such mechanisms in South Africa at the time. Looking back, it strikes me that what has occurred in Australia since 2020, transforming the country into a veritable totalitarian dictatorship, would not have gone as ‘smoothly’ if it had not been for such ‘compliance training’ in the decades that preceded it.  

What would it take to revive what one might call a ‘political sense,’ comparable to what Jefferson was familiar with, in people today? This would include, crucially, a sensitivity to the erosion of one’s political freedom, which has been occurring since before its exacerbation in 2020. To some extent one can already see such a revival happening in South Africa, where there are indications of the resurrection of such a sense among individuals I know, resulting in the formation of groups exhibiting unmistakable signs of ‘political preparedness’ in the stated willingness to act beyond merely voting for candidates of political parties. 

In the US, too, indications of a renewed political sense abound at present. What seems to have been a dormant political (as opposed to social) awareness is in the process of being revived. Not only the critical (political) intellectual activities under the auspices of organisations such as Brownstone Institute testify to this; the growth of ‘patriotic’ activities (including emancipatory communications) among conservative Americans is similarly significant. In view of this observation, Arendt’s remark is relevant, that (p. 254): 

Thinking in terms of the safety of the republic, the question was how to prevent ‘the degeneracy of our government,’ and Jefferson called every government degenerate in which all powers were concentrated ‘in the hands of the one, the few, the wellborn or the many.’ Hence, the ward system was not meant to strengthen the power of the many but the power of ‘every one’ within the limits of his competence; and only by breaking up ‘the many’ into assemblies where every one could count and be counted upon ‘shall we be as republican as a large society can be.’ 

Arguably, Jefferson’s distinction between ‘the many’ and ‘every one’ pertains to that between a government where the ‘many’ exercise a veritable dictatorship through representative government, where their intermittent vote empowers those who do not represent ‘every one,’ but in the end chiefly their own interests, with notable exceptions of individual lawmakers. This is all the more the case because of the well-known practice of corporate lobbying of representatives, where, in exchange for certain favours, the latter would promote and vote for laws that favour corporate interests. By contrast, a system of governance for and by ‘every one’ rises from the ground of the ‘little republics’ to the higher, more encompassing levels, where ‘every one’ has the opportunity to participate in political life.  

The obvious objection to this idea, today, is that most countries’ populations have become too large and unwieldy to accommodate the ‘little republics’ that Jefferson regarded as the indispensable, primary units for political decision-making and action. But how much thought has gone into utilising the internet, in the guise of Skype or Zoom meetings of groups of people – specifically in the role of ‘citizens’ instead of ‘consumers’ or other interest groups – to discuss matters of political concern, with the explicit purpose to pass important decisions and initiatives for action on to bodies with greater reach?

(The writers’ meetings at Brownstone qualify as such meetings, even if they are not driven by the intention, to channel decisions to other bodies or groups.)

And if the channels for such communication do not exist, one of the first things such groups – call them ‘wards,’ for example – could do, is to work on establishing them. The point is that, to reactivate participatory political action, one has to start somewhere. 

Perhaps this is already happening in more places than one is aware of. In the small town where we live, the Covid disaster had the effect of galvanising freedom-minded people (friends, and friends of friends) into a group we simply call the Awake group. We communicate via different channels and sometimes meet in person at alternating venues to discuss topics such as the latest threats to our freedom, and what to do about them. It has been astonishing to see the growth of political awareness among the members of this group since 2020. But then, is it not the case that a looming threat is what it takes to resurrect a long-dormant, but not extinguished, human capacity – the capacity for free, and if no longer free, liberating political action?      

What Arendt understands by what I have here called ‘political life’ and ‘political action’ pertains to what she calls ‘action,’ which is inextricably bound to ‘speech,’ and is different from what she terms ‘labour’ and ‘work.’ How these distinctions apply to the questions broadly addressed here, is a topic that will have to wait for another time.