European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

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Revolutionary constitutions: Arendt's inversions of

Heidegger

Hauke Brunkhorst

To cite this article: Hauke Brunkhorst (2014) Revolutionary constitutions: Arendt's inversions
of Heidegger, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1:3, 283-298, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2014.992120

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.992120

Published online: 04 Feb 2015.

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 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014
Vol. 1, No. 3, 283–298, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.992120

Revolutionary constitutions: Arendt’s inversions of Heidegger

Hauke Brunkhorst*

Institute of Sociology, University of Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany

Hannah Arendt’s most ingenious philosophical idea was to transform

Heidegger’s ontological difference of being (Sein) and existing (Seiende).
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Whereas for Heidegger existing was founded in being as the origin of all
meaning, for Arendt existing, in the form of the concrete historical praxis
of ‘political animals’ in space and time (as she suggests in Vita Activa),
founds being. This is exemplified in modern revolutionary praxis as in the
French and American Revolutions (as she suggests in On Revolution). The
problem then becomes that of maintaining the original revolutionary power
in a power-founding constitutional order.
Keywords: being in the world; communicative power; evolution; normative
learning; emancipation

1. Introduction
In the first part of this paper, I will discuss some differences between Arendt and
Heidegger. I shall argue that the main difference is not the replacement by Arendt
of the concept of ‘thrownness’ with the concept of ‘natality’ but, rather, her over-
coming of Heidegger’s philosophy of origin of an immemorial Being (Sein). This
is achieved through a negative critical theory of the memorial and historical revo-
lutionary origin of modern political power and its constitutional implementation
(1). This theory, however, lacks an evolutionary perspective. Therefore, I shall
try to add some evolutionary elements to Arendt’s arguably anti-evolutionary con-
ception of revolution (2). If we distinguish between ‘revolution’ and ‘evolution’,
the critical aspect of her theory of revolutionary constitutions becomes clearer.
Against this background, I turn to the development of her concept of power and
her critique of power-limiting constitutionalism (3) as well as, finally, to her
idea of a ‘power-founding constitution’, which is based on the living power of
the people. Power-founding constitutions are designed to maintain revolutionary
power in times of evolutionary constitutional incrementalism (4).

*Email: brunk@uni-flensburg.de

© 2015 European Sociological Association

 284 H. Brunkhorst
2. Urbanization, politicization and revolutionization of the Heideggerian
province
In On Revolution (1963) Hannah Arendt radically revised her theory of the origins
of modern society. In The Human Condition (1958) she followed Heidegger’s idea
that a kind of being in the world that has the structure of Dasein (‘being-there’/
‘performative existence’, always already-socialized human beings) is something
that operates within a meaningful world (Heidegger, 1927/1977). To operate
within this world, what is needed is an open list of skills and competencies
(Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to-hand’ or ‘know-how’) in relation to other things
and Daseins that are co-original within the same world. Heidegger’s thesis –
defended in the first part of Sein und Zeit – that ‘knowing how’ is prior to
‘knowing that’ (Vorhandenheit), is a radical refutation of the metaphysical positiv-
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ism we find in Plato or Descartes. His thesis in the second part of this work is a
radical refutation of the metaphysical historicism we find in Hegel, in which
Dasein is indissolubly individualized. Dasein is restricted by time-limits (Zeitlich-
keit, Geschichtlichkeit); it knows this to be so and is able to act in relation to itself
and its self-knowledge. Therefore, for Heidegger, Dasein has the ability to act in
relation to its, her or his entire existence, or life as a whole; it can have care (Sorge)
for its own and others’ Dasein, it can ask itself what life it wants to live (e.g. that of
an artisan in a particular society), what kind of being it strives to be (e.g. a good
guy); in brief, it can confront itself with Hamlet’s famous question: ‘To be or not to
be?’ (Tugendhat, 1986).
Heidegger usually designates the situation in which people ask this sort of
question with the term Geworfenheit (thrownness) and sometimes also with the
term Gebürtlichkeit (‘natality’) (Heidegger, 1927/1977, pp. 373–374). The situ-
ation of ‘thrownness’ or ‘natality’ is a situation that confronts Dasein with its
own freedom to make a deliberate (reflexive) individual decision, and such an
individual decision always creates something new, at least a singular story that
begins at a certain indivisible position of someone in space and time. So far
there is no difference from Arendt’s basic concept of Dasein as natality.
However, Heidegger designates the way we resolve the problems of Gewor-
fenheit (thrownness) in the German expressionist language of the early 1920s as
Sein zum Tode (being-towards-death). This means just thinking about your
future, deliberating what you expect of your entire life (Ganzsein des Daseins),
and hence what kind of person you want to strive to be and what kind of life to
strive to live, which Heidegger calls Ruf des Gewissens (the call of conscience)
(Heidegger, 1927/1977, pp. 235–267). Arendt does not deny that vorlaufende
Entschlossenheit (anticipatory resoluteness) – in which one confronts oneself
with one’s entire life embedded in a life-world and Ruf des Gewissens (the call
of conscience) – is an important conceptual invention and has important impli-
cations for the theory of freedom (going back to Kierkegaard). But vorlaufende
Entschlossenheit can be avoided by the many who prefer to stay with David Ries-
man’s ‘lonely crowd’, of which Heidegger speaks by using a substantivized
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 285
German indicator das Man (the They); that is, the average everyday-life of a
Dasein that is inauthentic (uneigentlich) because it effectively represses the
always already, latently present possibility of confronting oneself with the ques-
tion ‘To be or not to be?’. Heidegger confounds this (universal and egalitarian)
question with the dichotomy between eigentlichem (authentic) and uneigentlichem
(inauthentic) being-in-the-world, which gives it an elitist meaning. Das Man (the
They), the form of life of the many or the lonely crowd, is ‘seinsvergessen’, for-
getful of its own thrownness into being-in-the-world. Only the authentic few can
withstand the anxiety of facing contingent thrownness.
Arendt can avoid the elitist distinction between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenti-
city’ precisely because she traces the foundation of natality (Geworfenheit or
Thrownness) back to the situation of a Dasein that articulates a negative operation,
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as does the baby who rejects the food offered to her: ‘It is the function … of all
action … to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and
therefore predictably’ (Arendt, 1969, p. 31). Action is the disappointment of an
expectation, it ‘always happens against’ habitual ‘probability’. Action and
language are so closely intertwined that ‘speechless action would no longer be
action because … the action he [the actor] begins is … disclosed by the word,
and … it becomes relevant only through the spoken word’ (Arendt, 1959/1989,
pp. 178–179). Performative speech acts (‘the spoken word’) are constituted by
the competence to ‘say “Yes” or “No”’, to ‘agree or disagree with what is factually
given, including [the speaker’s/actor’s] own self and his existence’, and to let this
faculty ‘determine what he is going to do’ (Arendt, 1981a, p. 68). There is no
being without negation (p. 51). This is, as Duns Scotus first argued, the ultimate
reason why the ‘willing ego’ ‘constitutes’ the ‘thinking ego’ (p. 43, see pp. 31,
37, 120–140, 195–196). Thus, Hegel and Marx are right in saying that man’s
ability to act negatively ‘reverses’ the ‘ordinary time sequence – past–present–
future’ precisely through ‘man’s denying his present’ (p. 41). It is the ‘future as
the Will’s project that negates the given’, and ‘the power of negation … is
derived from the Will’s ability to actualize a project: the project negates the
now as well as the past and thus threatens the thinking ego’s enduring present’
(p. 36).
Willing is possible only through the possibility of saying ‘No’: ‘If the Will did
not have the choice of saying “No” it would no longer be a Will’ (Arendt 1981a,
p. 69). Therefore, the starting point of Arendt’s ‘natality’ is a Dasein (Ego) that
negates something because its action is understood by another Dasein (Alter
Ego) as a negation of something. As we find later in Levinas, Dasein begins
with Alter Ego’s first action, and the first action is constituted by the possibility
of saying ‘No’. The ‘No’ is ‘implied’ ‘in every Yes’ (p. 83). Therefore not only
‘obedience presumes the power to disobey’ (p. 83; my emphasis) – and this nega-
tive notion of power is at the very origin of Arendt’s distinction between power
and violence (see below) – but also ‘justice’ necessarily presumes ‘experiencing
injustice’ (p. 93). With this turn to the interrupting and negative use of language,
Arendt gives thrownness – and this is the first contrast to Heidegger – the
 286 H. Brunkhorst
normatively egalitarian meaning that a new beginning (Heidegger’s Vorlaufende
or anticipatory resoluteness) is ‘guaranteed by each new birth’ as the ‘supreme
capacity’ of ‘every man’ (Arendt, 1948/2004, p. 479; Fine, 2014). This capacity
is present in all of his or her actions/speech acts, no matter how authentic they are.
Arendt – this is the second contrast – turns the interrupting, negative use of
language into the very condition of possibility of an act of Dasein that is really
universal, and not just pseudo-universal as was Heidegger’s Sein, which merely
conceals equivocations in the meaning of ‘to be’ (a word that does not even
exist in all languages) (Tugendhat, 1992). There is nothing universal in ‘Being’
or ‘to be’, but there is no use of ‘to be’ (and no symbolic expression at all) that
cannot be negated. There is no comprehensible language without negation.
Only negation – that is, the operation that interrupts what otherwise would have
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proceeded predictably – is universal.

The contrast that distinguishes Arendt and Heidegger becomes deeper if we
explain it in the context of the ‘history of Being’ (Seinsgeschichte). As Heidegger
argues (and as others, notably Hegelian Marxists and American pragmatists, also
argue), Arendt suggests that something went wrong both with and within the
history of being. This, at least partly, should be explained by the fact that a
capacity that was internal to action/speech acts was repressed at the origin of
Western thinking. The use of the word ‘origin’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism
(afterwards Origins) is due to this Heideggerian idea of Seinsgeschichte (history of
Being). The last sentence of Arendt’s famous book of 1948 reveals what is
repressed by metaphysical positivism/historicism, and that is man’s ‘freedom’
that is ‘identical’ with his ‘capacity’ to initiate a ‘new beginning’, hence natality;
and the most radical, most aggressive and most oppressive form of this repression
is totalitarianism (Arendt, 1948/2004, pp. 478–479). Metaphysical positivism
turned the history of Being in the wrong direction, supporting alienation, reifica-
tion, exploitation and oppression. Exploitation and oppression did not matter
much for Heidegger but – and this is the third contrast – they did for Arendt,
the Hegelian Marxists and American pragmatism (both of whom she nonetheless
disdained).1
More important is another difference. The forgottenness of being consists not
only in the repression of our capacity to initiate a new beginning, but also in the
reduction of (creative, innovative, world-disclosing) being (Sein) as a whole to that
which exists as a singular entity (Seiendes in the meaning of ‘to be’). This thesis
can be reread in linguistic terms as the reduction of the referent of language as a
whole to the referent of singular terms used in specific statements, or as the
reduction of the performative use of language (which is always already innovative
and soaked in negativity) to assertoric statements (which are merely reproductive,
representing affirmatively what already exists) (Rorty, 1984, p. 14). For Heideg-
ger, the assimilation of our performative use of language to representative state-
ments, or of praxis to technique, can be changed only by invoking the creative,
poetical disclosure of Being at the origin of Western thinking that is beyond occi-
dental rationalism and Western civilization. This de-concealing invocation
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 287
(Entbergung) of immemorial (unvordenklich) Being is meant to prepare us – or at
least the few of us who know, the élites, the best poets (Dichter), the greatest phi-
losophers (Denker) and the most advanced political leaders (Staatengründer) – for
the return of the original epoch of poetic existence (dichterisches Wohnen) (Hei-
degger, 1980, 1962/1978, 1957/1986).
Even if the difference between poetic existence and that of the technically gov-
erned masses makes some sense for Arendt (and, for instance, for Adorno), her
concern is different. What is forgotten in the history of Being (Seinsvergessenheit
or forgotteness of Being) is not so much the poetic origin of Being that is beyond
occidental rationalism and Western civilization, even beyond interruptive nega-
tion; but rather – and this is the fourth contrast – the origin of political community
that already exists within negation, rationalism and civilization. What is at stake
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for Arendt is the (more prosaic) origin of solidarity. It comes to the fore in
common political action that is beyond oppressive and coercive rule and
beyond technical manipulation. Hence, what we should recover is the politics of
a community of equal citizens (isonomia) that was once realized in urban
Greece two and a half thousand years ago. Western thinking, therefore, should
try to recollect the old political freedom repressed under the conceptual regime
(Begriffsherrschaft) of metaphysical positivism. With this fourth turn against Hei-
degger, Arendt comes ever closer to the position of Hegelian Marxists and Amer-
ican Pragmatists who combined the poetic with the political and normative
dimensions of language to create a modern, post-Christian and secular language
of solidarity; that is, the language of universal, egalitarian, political and human
emancipation (Brunkhorst, 2005). Moreover, in going back to Augustine’s Chris-
tian ‘Initium ut esset homo creatus est’ instead of Heidegger’s pagan Pre-
Socratics, Arendt takes the same track out of the metaphysical and positivist
wrong track of onto-theology as did Marx and Dewey, Benjamin and Adorno
(Arendt, 1948/2004, p. 479). Whereas Heidegger seeks to emancipate the think-
ing, poetry-writing and state-founding few from theology in order to un-conceal
the original truth of ontology, Marx, Dewey, Benjamin, Adorno and Arendt
seek to emancipate from the domination of ontology the many addressees of the
theological message of a new beginning of a great egalitarian community.
This way, Arendt not only urbanized the Heideggerian province (as did
Gadamer, according to a famous speech given by Habermas) but she also politi-
cized it. The original Being of Dasein is that of the political being, the Aristotelian
zoon politicon, but this time based on the ‘portentous’ universalizing ‘power of the
negative’ (Hegel). It was this portentous power of the negative that motivated
Arendt’s final turn westwards from Greek to Roman politics (which she studied
through the negativist lens of Machiavelli and the revolutionary lens of Jefferson
and Madison), and from a history of Being of the past to – and this is the fifth con-
trast – the history of Being of the present and the future that is the history of
modern revolutions.
The revolutionization of Heidegger’s Province (that brings her close to Hei-
deggerian Marxists such as Marcuse, Sartre and Kosic – the only one she
 288 H. Brunkhorst
quotes – or Petrovic) finally emancipated Arendt’s political theory (a term she did
not like) from its Heideggerian origins. For Arendt, it is the French and in particu-
lar the American Revolutions that constitute the very origin of a ‘Being’ that could
be used to correct the wrongs of metaphysical positivism and historicism and to
recover and recollect the potential of the political Being-in-the-world that is
revolutionary.

3. Evolution and revolution

Co-original with the beginnings of the American civil rights movement, the cam-
paigns against the Vietnam War, and the quickly globalized student protests in
Berkeley, Arendt revived the idea of revolution. The Cold War assumption –
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and, subsequently, the postmodern thesis – that after the great American and
French Revolutions there were only bad copies of these two major historical
events, finally discharging into the bloody totalitarian farce of the first half of
the twentieth century, and that, therefore, the French and American Revolutions
were the last revolutions of history, has been refuted by historical facts.2
If we take historical and evolutionary research on legal revolutions into
account, Arendt’s phenomenology of the praxis of revolutionary foundation fits
nicely with the, at once, factual and normative concept of the great legal revolu-
tions.3 Alas, Arendt herself was not so much interested in historical research,
much of which she considered to be mere ‘positivism’; she was even less inter-
ested in evolutionary theory, which she considered just one further step down to
historicist Seinsvergessenheit, close to fascism. The idea of revolutionary foun-
dation and constitution-making, however, fits nicely with the evolutionary role
not only of the French and American Revolutions but also of the other great
legal revolutions.4 In particular, the distinction between power-limiting constitu-
tionalization and power-founding constitutions – which she discusses only
briefly, but which is nonetheless vital for her thesis – is strongly backed and gen-
eralized by evolutionary theory of legal revolutions as well as by legal and consti-
tutional theory (Arendt 1963/1977, pp. 134–141).5 Yet, differently from Arendt,
an evolutionary reconstruction of legal revolutions must combine her theory of
constitutional foundation with a theory of normative learning processes, which
are driven by the sense of injustice (Barrington Moore) that is internal to social
class struggles and other structural conflicts. The constitutional foundation of
power and normative learning through the experience of social injustice are two
sides of the same revolutionary coin. And yet, Arendt is much more ambivalent
in relation to the French Revolution than to the American Revolution and to the
foundation of power in a pure ‘constitutional moment’ (Bruce Ackermann). It
seems that she transfigures the latter in too strong a fashion, while giving the
former insufficient credit.
With respect to class struggles, Arendt’s assessments are usually positive when
it comes to the organized workers movements of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. Even if she takes Luxemburg’s side in her debate with Lenin and rightly
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 289
criticizes the latter’s technocratic understanding of politics, Lenin, far from being a
mere forerunner of Stalin, was – in her eyes – one of the great revolutionary foun-
ders and statesmen of history. She criticizes the Jacobins, however, for their senti-
mental engagement with the poor people of Paris; she is right insofar as the
Jacobins cheated the poor, the urban and rural plebs, using all their revolutionary
influence and power to support and establish bourgeois class rule over the poor
people of Paris and their brothers and sisters in the provinces, not to speak of
the colonies (Tilly, 1995, pp. 167–171). It is not accidental that Napoleon, the
initiator and one of the authors of the first purely bourgeois civil code, started
his career as a Jacobin.
With respect to what Arendt (a little contemptuously) calls the social question,
she was less ambivalent because she – in line with Aristotle and Lenin – thought
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that this was a merely technical question (quoting Aristotle several times to the
effect that if we had machines we would no longer need slaves). Yet the social
question could become a political one through the struggle of politically organized
workers. Thus, Fine (2014) has rightly argued that one should read Arendt’s On
Revolution not primarily as a story of the two revolutions, the ‘good American’
and the ‘bad French’ one – even if Arendt tells this story, and even if this story
is deeply wrong in nearly all respects, historically and conceptually.6 If,
however, we abstract her categories from their application to concrete historical
examples, reinterpret them in the context of her other writings, and take them as
a schema to recollect the ambivalence of historical experience of the revolutions
and their results from the actors’ perspective alone, we can see how they fit
both revolutions – in terms of both their social and their political dimensions.
Arendt’s contribution to understanding the ambivalence, even negative dialec-
tic, of the great revolutions is important. Habermas has mentioned this in his early
review of On Revolution, where he rightly criticized the (deeply bourgeois) separ-
ation of political and social domination that was in the nineteenth century per-
formed with the evident intent of emancipating us from political rule through a
stabilization of the privatized (and, hence, politically not directly visible) social
rule of the capitalist class over the working class. Arendt was right to insist,
however, that social emancipation (or what Marx called ‘human emancipation’)
without political emancipation cheats us of our right to self-determination, which
was the very reason for the revolution (Habermas, 1981a, p. 227; see Fine, 2014).
Moreover, the ambivalence of the great revolutions consists in a specific dia-
lectic of enlightenment that Kant already had observed. What is normatively sig-
nificant about major social and political revolutions – such as the French or
American Revolutions – is that they transform moral insight into an existing
concept, a Hegelian idea that Kant anticipated when he observed the enthusiasm
of a politically active audience vis-à-vis the irreversibility of moral progress that
was established by the French Revolution – even if the revolution itself sunk in
a sea of blood, terror and war and was totally beaten (as was Napoleon in
1815). Kant argued that we can never justify such a bloody crime as a great revo-
lution in advance. Once the revolutionaries factually gain more power than the
 290 H. Brunkhorst
former representatives of the sovereign, their positive law becomes the only valid
one (as in Hobbes); in this case, the revolution is justified because of the irrever-
sibility of the moral progress that it has established. Kant’s solution and later
Marx’s similar solution7 still seem valid, illustrating that Arendt’s ambivalences
can be mastered conceptually if we do not, as Arendt did, neglect the normative
learning processes that are internal to all great legal and constitutional revolutions.
Yet, and here Arendt’s caveat is right, this progress, from moral insight to the exist-
ing concept that opens a new path of social evolution, was always attained at a
high price. If there was any normative ‘progress in the consciousness of
freedom’ (Hegel) established by the great legal revolutions (such as the Papal,
the Protestant or the Atlantic Revolutions), then it increased the potential of eman-
cipatory praxis together with the means, power and stability of social class rule,
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political and economic oppression, cultural hegemony and societal exclusion

(Brunkhorst, 2014).
And yet, there is another conceptual weakness in Arendt’s theory of the revo-
lution, in particular if we compare it with the results of social history and evol-
utionary theory. Arendt never overcame her fixation on rare constitutional
moments of history, which is a remnant of her Heideggerian philosophy of
origins (Ursprungsphilosophie). As historical research demonstrates, there is
never the one and only constitutional moment, except in revolutionary chants
and memorial celebrations. Arendt is right (especially in opposition to functional-
ist theorists such as Niklas Luhmann) to take ‘solemn declarations’ and ‘revolu-
tionary chants’ seriously, and not just treat them as ‘superfluous superstructure’
(Luhmann, 1991, p. 176; my translation). She overestimates their singularity,
however, because there are always several moments of foundation (in the same
way as there is not one source of the Rhine River at its so-called origin, but an
uncountable multitude of sources feeding the great river on its whole course).
Even constitutional moments are, as one could say with Hegel, only moments
of the whole and depend on its existence. Therefore, they appear synchronically
as well as diachronically again and again. Arendt tries to solve the problem in
two ways. The first is a rehabilitation of the category of auctoritas (Arendt
1963/1977, 200–203). Yet, this is both a misleading and an outdated category
that belongs to pre-constitutional informal rule, which is typical for a stratified
society (such as ancient Rome) and which is no longer useful in the legally orga-
nized and functionally differentiated mass democracies that emerged after the
modern constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century. The other way to
solve the problem of the permanence of revolutionary power is only briefly men-
tioned by Arendt with reference to Jefferson and in her remarks on power-found-
ing constitutions. This, however, is the more fruitful and modern way, which will
be considered in the last section of this paper.
As Ackerman (1998) has demonstrated, the American Revolution has trig-
gered a still lasting history of the diachronic plurality of constitutional
moments, such as the New Deal. All of them are part and parcel of what we
call ‘the revolutionary foundation of the American constitution’. Furthermore,
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 291
the history of legal revolutions has shown that what is new with the great revolu-
tions (and indeed a new beginning) is not the actualization of an immemorial orig-
inal history (Urgeschichte) of political being, but a radical re-interpretation of the
already existing advances that are the product of former revolutionary and refor-
mist activities. In this context, the point is that any radically new foundation that
occurred in history was enabled not only by contingent functional results but also
by the experienced and articulated contradictions of normative advances of the
immediately preceding legal revolutions and the whole historical accumulation
of normative learning processes. There is nothing originally behind them that is
then un-concealed by an authentic revolution.
The famous story of the two revolutions not only suffers from its much-criti-
cized but phenomenologically retrievable dualisms of ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’
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revolution (‘the political’ and ‘the social’) but also from the methodological
nationalism that framed the time in which On Revolution was written. Despite
her awareness of the cosmopolitan perspective, Arendt still tells her original
history of political being as a national history. Meanwhile historians have discov-
ered world history, and the occurrences in France and North America during the
eighteenth century are re-described as part of a world-revolutionary occurrence
that had its centre in the Atlantic world-region as a complex unity of economic,
political, cultural and social relations. Therefore, world historians prefer to
speak of the Atlantic Revolution as one great revolution with a synchronic
variety of revolutionary moments in Northern and Southern America, in the Car-
ibbean and Western Europe (Osterhammel, 2014).

4. Power and constitutionalism

Arendt describes modern society as a ‘rational capitalist market society’, which is
functionally differentiated from the political public (res publica). In her view, the
most powerful driving forces of modern society are capital and power. In Arendt’s
account of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the accumulation of capital and power
are both structural social processes that reinforce each other:

[A] society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition [in the German
edition Arendt uses the Marxian term: Kapitalakkumulation] had to engineer a
dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of
power generation [in German this is assimilated to Marxian language: Machtakku-
mulation]. (Arendt, 1948/2004, p. 146)

Both are based on a highly abstract, reflexive mechanism that Arendt calls ‘expan-
sion for expansion’s sake’ or ‘power for power’s sake’ (pp. 215, 217, 351).8
Anticipating modern systems theory, Arendt writes that ‘power appears as a dema-
terialized mechanism which with its every move produces more power’ (p. 418).
Arendt explains the self-radicalizing dynamic, first of modern colonial imperi-
alism and then of fascism and Stalinism, through the absence of any counter-
 292 H. Brunkhorst
power capable of regulating and controlling the unfettered expansion of capital
and power for capital’s and power’s sake.9 In the 1940s, she thought that the
only power that could cope with the reflexive mechanism constantly producing
more power was the modern nation state:

Until now the greatest bulwark against the unlimited domination of bourgeois
society, against the conquest of power through the mob and the introduction of
imperialistic politics in the structure of Western states has been the nation-state. Its
sovereignty, which once was supposed to express the sovereignty of the people, is
now threatened from all sides. (Arendt, 1976, p. 29)10

The question that emerges in this context is why the bulwark crumbled so
quickly. Hannah Arendt’s first answer in Origins is that it was because of the
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pressure of the so-called ‘mob’, the Marxian Lumpenproletariat, which in

Arendt’s – Luxembourgian – Marxism became an ever-growing surplus popu-
lation that was excluded from access to bourgeois society as well as from the
political organizations of the working class. Until the First World War, she
argues, this problem could be solved by colonial imperialism where the Lum-
penproletariat met the Lumpenbourgeoisie in the stateless heart of darkness.
Imperialism became the realm of unlimited expansion of capital and power
for capital’s and power’s sake; the result was extreme exploitation, slavery, gen-
ocide, concentration camps and all kinds of atrocities. Yet, this solution by ter-
ritorial exclusion of ‘barbarism’ from ‘civilization’ took its revenge in Europe
once the nation state crumbled in the course of the global civil war that
began at the end of the First World War and ended only in the second half of
the twentieth century. Arendt assumes that the very origin of totalitarianism con-
sists in the successful repression of any political debate, any political struggle,
let alone any political solution of the problem of an ever-growing surplus popu-
lation. In this account, the crisis of the nation state caused a bloody return of the
repressed and opened the path for totalitarianism: a category bound by Arendt to
the two cases of Germany between 1933 and 1945 and the Soviet Union
between 1929 and 1953, the year in which Stalin died, and explicitly excluding
the Soviet regime during the war period 1941–1945, which, in contrast to Nazi-
Germany, ‘was a time of temporary suspense of total domination’ (Arendt, 1948/
2004, p. XXV, Preface to Part III).
I shall leave aside the empirical and historical problems connected with an
explanation that fits at least partly with functionalist, historical and evolutionary
research into modern state-formation (Thornhill, 2011). Yet, whereas Arendt
argues that imperialism, fascism and Stalinism are enabled by the completion of
the functional differentiation of power and capital, functionalist constitutional
sociology suggests that imperialism, fascism and Stalinism were enabled by an
incomplete functional differentiation of parliamentary state-power after World
War I, and in particular by an oligarchic corporatism that integrated power and
capital at the expense of functional differentiation (Thornhill, 2011, pp. 309–310).
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 293
On the one hand, this leads Arendt to a one-sided analysis of the historical facts
and to the fatal misjudgement that the proper organized national state of the nine-
teenth century actually functioned as a bulwark against the unlimited domination
of bourgeois society and against imperialistic politics. Rather, the opposite is true.
Even if the best Western national states of the nineteenth century once might have
been supposed to express the sovereignty of the people, they no longer did, not
even in the few existing half-democratic regimes such as the USA. State-power
was based not on popular sovereignty but, above all, on administrative and coer-
cive power that became more and more differentiated, self-referentially closed,
uncontrollable and expansive. It appeared more and more as a dematerialized
mechanism, which with its every move produced more power (Reinhard,
1999).11 Arendt soon recognized that and changed her mind about the bulwark
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theory in the last part of Origins, but she nonetheless hoped that the Rechtsstaat
could tame the deadly powers of unlimited expansion. She progressively
changed from the power-limiting Greek notion of nomos (walls of the city) to
the power-founding Roman notion of lex (as a praxis of establishing pacts and
enlarging relations).12
On the other hand, Arendt rightly touched the sore spot of functional differen-
tiation because the completion of functional differentiation between power and
capital (and other functional systems) only leads to an ever-better adaptation of
functionally differentiated society to its environment, be it democratic or not.
Power-limiting constitutionalism is ‘not dependent upon the form of government’
(Arendt, 1963/1977, p. 134). The normatively neutralized increase of adaptive
capacity can be reached by many methods, all of which are able to produce a
great variety of functional equivalents; only a few are democratic and others
might even include concentration camps. But, as Arendt rightly argued, there is
no functional equivalent for the ‘living power of the people’ (1969, p. 140). As
far as it refers to this power, constitutional law must be understood as an embodi-
ment of this normatively universalizing power that cannot be reduced to the func-
tion of the structural coupling of law and politics (Luhmann, 1991).
Arendt always distrusted the power of mere moral insight as well as the power
of human rights not backed and enforced by state-power. On the other hand, she
clearly expressed her discontent with the national limits of rights (Burke’s infa-
mous ‘rights of the Englishman’), which tended to exclude the stateless surplus
populations of the twentieth century and all kinds of non-citizens placed beyond
the colour or social class line. In Chapter Six of Origins, Arendt denounced
Burke’s critique of the rights of man as the common source of ‘German and
English race-thinking’ (1948/2004, p. 175), and especially in On Revolution she
extended her distrust to the so-called Rechtsstaat and its liberal confinement
within power-limiting constitutionalism (Arendt, 1963/1977, pp. 134–140).
Here she describes power-limiting constitutionalism as a ‘counterrevolutionary’
turn of a revolution, whose purpose is to ‘break’ the ‘revolutionary power of
the people’ and to institutionalize ‘distrust against the people.’ (Arendt, 1974,
pp. 187, 379 note 7)
 294 H. Brunkhorst
5. Power-founding constitutions
In light of the above, what is the alternative if it is not just an empty appeal to the
moral conscience of the inner self, or the celebration of declarative speech acts
without any binding power? Arendt looked for a power of the people that is not
coercive and administrative but could be embodied in the constitution and
become the basis of lasting political institutions. Moreover, it should be a real
and effective counter-power to the expansion of capital and power, to power for
capital’s and power’s sake. It should be at least as powerful as, or even more
powerful than, the reflexive and expansive power of a modern state administration
unfettered in its imperial and total domination.
In The Human Condition and On Revolution, reflexively constituted and there-
fore unlimited power no longer appears as exclusively administrative, imperial and
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totalitarian. Arendt discovers that the general features of reflexive power, namely,
that power can only become more powerful through power and that the ‘separation
of powers makes a community more powerful than the centralization of power’,
also apply to the power created by citizens in their public assemblies and
common action (Arendt, 1974, p. 198).13
Power created by citizens in common action – that is, communicative power,
as Habermas (1981b) has suggested – can be increased only through reflexive
differentiation and decentralization.14 Communicative power can be destroyed
through ‘violence’, but it cannot be realized through ‘violence’ (Rensmann,
2014). We can make Arendt’s terminology compatible with sociology by equating
Arendt’s idiosyncratic use of ‘violence’ – which usually just means the movement
of physical bodies – with the administrative/coercive power of making binding
decisions (Arendt, 1981b, pp. 193–194; 1974, p. 196). ‘Violence’, or administra-
tive power, can be monopolized, but communicative power cannot. The living
power of the people is not at the disposal of those who are the wielders of coercive
power. Communicative power is a public affair and not a private property: ‘power
springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they dis-
perse’ (Arendt, 1959/1989, p. 194).
Yet, communicative power cannot stabilize itself. It stems completely from the
‘opinion upon which many have agreed in public’ (Arendt, 1970, p. 45). It ‘springs
up between men when they act together’, it is ‘innovative’ and ‘experimental’, it is
nobody’s private property, it is socially inclusive and therefore ‘from the start open
to all’ (Arendt, 1959/1989, p. 200; 1974, pp. 222–223; 1981b, p. 194; 1963/1977,
p. 178). In exercising communicative power, ‘unlimited power’ emerges which
without the use of ‘violence’ (here Arendt uses ‘violence’ in the usual way as
movement of bodies) ‘may engender an almost irresistible power’ that can over-
come even ‘materially vastly superior forces’ (1959/1989, pp. 200–201). But
the communicative power of the people lasts only for the ‘fleeting instant of
acting in common’; it ‘vanishes the moment they [the people] disperse’
(p. 200). One cannot rely on the ‘tremendous potential’ of communicative
power, which is as productive as it is destructive (1963/1977, p. 178). Action is
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 295
‘the most dangerous of all human capacities and possibilities’ (1974, p. 228; 1994,
p. 363). Therefore the ‘men of the Revolution’ always stare into an ‘abyss’ (1979,
pp. 30, 185ff; see Cordero, 2014).
The riddle of all revolutionary constitutions that establish the power of the
people is evident: How is it possible to stabilize their communicative power to
act in concert and conflict without repressing it, and that means stabilizing a
power that is unlimited and almost irresistible and hence can change, abolish
and create any political institution? The answer to this question can be found in
the power-founding constitution (1974, p. 183ff). Revolutionary constitutions
(such as the revolutionary American or French constitutions) are not just Bills
of Rights; they are designed not to limit but to establish, enlarge and improve
the power of the people. In democratic constitutions the meaning of the different
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lists of human and civil rights can be disclosed only through the interpretation of
the democratic Staatsorganisationsrecht – an untranslatable German word that
might be explained in American legal English as constitutional law of checks
and balances (Richard Tribe). Thus, as Hermann Heller wrote in the 1920s, the

whole system of the constitutional law of checks and balances, of reciprocal commit-
ments and determinations as election, countersignature, parliamentary legislation,
referenda, initiative, and of all the other provisions that determine the competences
of presidents, governments, legislative bodies and so on – this whole constitutional
apparatus has the one and only legal meaning to enable and guarantee that the
power of the government factually originates in, stems from, and is performed by
the people. (Heller, 1928/1971, pp. 39–40; my emphasis)15

This also has the implication that the constituent power of the people never
vanishes from the legal actions of their constituted power (Böckenförde, 1986).
In sharp contrast with power-limiting constitutionalism, the only purpose of a
power-founding constitution is to establish a government not for but by and of
the people. The revolution ‘submits the constituent power to the people’ – and
the system of checks and balances here has the functions only of constituting,
organizing and stabilizing that constituent power (Arendt, 1974, p. 193).
Hence, the system of checks and balances must be designed to coordinate all
the constituted powers of a political community – legislative, judicial and execu-
tive bodies as well as federal and state powers – for two purposes: to prevent the
constituted powers from ‘destroying’ the ‘original’ and permanently constituent
communicative power of the people, and to preserve the ‘growth’ and capacity
of the constituent power to ‘engender new power’ and ‘new centers of powers’
(Arendt, 1974, pp. 196–197, 200).16 Thus, the American constitutional system
of checks and balances – Arendt argues – applies power to power, ‘confronts
power with power’ (John Adams) in a reflexive manner, not to weaken internally
differentiated political power, but ‘to make’ it ‘mightier’, to ‘make the political
community mightier than any centralized power’ ever could be (pp. 198–199).
The revolutionary constitutional ‘division of powers’ is not so much a division
as a unification of different powers: ‘e pluritate unum – but without depriving’
 296 H. Brunkhorst
the single elements – the federal states, different peoples and individual citizens –
‘of their power’ (p. 198).
In Arendt’s final theory of power, the alternative to counterrevolutionary con-
stitutionalism consists in the idea of a permanent revolution that is constitutional,
and hence prevented from depriving the people of their constituent communicative
power and destroying itself, as happened in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions,
neither of which ever established a working normative constitution (Arendt, 1974,
p. 187). Even if Arendt never sought to relate her idea of a permanent revolution
that is constitutional to ‘democracy’, or even worse (for her) to ‘mass democracy’,
and even if Arendt always preferred to speak of a self-ruled republic or isonomia
instead of ‘democracy’ (a word that she used more or less pejoratively), her idea of
a permanent revolution that is constitutional is nothing else than an explication of
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the very idea of a socially inclusive constitution of egalitarian ‘mass democracy’.

The idea of a permanent revolution that is constitutional carries a ‘meaning’ of
‘democratic self-rule and equity’ that never can be ‘reduced to any particular set of
institutions and practices’ (Marks, 2000, pp. 103, 149–150). The ‘normative
surplus’ (McCarthy, 1994, p. 21) of democratic meaning depends on different
and changing contexts and circumstances, and it always already transcends any
set of legal procedures of democratic legitimization (Arendt, 1974, p. 188ff).
There is always a meaning of democracy that cannot be ‘exhausted’ by ‘represen-
tative government’ and ‘national government’ alone (Marks, 2000, pp. 2–3).
Democracy is not, as the young Marx once wrote, the solved riddle of all consti-
tutions, but (with Susan Marks) the unsolved riddle of all constitutions. Power-
founding constitutions have to keep the riddle open, simply because it is up to
the individual and collective self-determination of the people to determine, inter-
pret and re-interpret the altering meanings of democratic self-determination, self-
rule and equity – again and again, in ever new terms of institutional design, be it
representative or not, be it national, sub-national, trans-national or supranational.

Notes
1. On the attempt to bring Hegel, Marx and Arendt together, see Fine, Political Inves-
tigations (2001).
2. See the sharp criticism of Furet, Ozouf and others in Tilly (1995, pp. 1–9).
3. A phenomenological reading of Arendt makes much sense, in particular as a resol-
ution of the much discussed contradictions of her book; on this point, see Fine (2014).
4. On the great legal revolutions, see especially Harold Berman’s works (1950/1963,
1983, 1986, 2006). For an attempt of an evolutionary reconstruction, see Brunkhorst
(2014).
5. On the fruitfulness and topicality of the distinction in constitutional theory, see
Möllers (2004).
6. Habermas (1981a), one of the first critics, is still convincing in this respect.
7. For an instructive representation and comparison of the intriguing similarities of
Kant’s and Marx’ deliberations on revolution, see Ypi (2014).
8. Luhmann uses the term reflexive mechanism for the same thing as Arendt’s demater-
ialized mechanism.
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 297
9. The original source of the self-radicalization thesis of Origins is Franz Neumann,
Behemoth (1942). The thesis became important for historical research and the expla-
nation of the Holocaust through Hans Mommsen (1976).
10. This is the translation of M. Vatter and V. Lemm from the German original.
11. This was already observed by Marx (2008) and Tocqueville (1983).
12. I wish to thank Rodrigo Cordero for this hint.
13. Arendt has added this only in the German edition (translated into English by M. Vatter
and V. Lemm). Because of her many changes, henceforth, I sometimes quote the
German edition of Origins, Human Condition, On Revolution and On Violence.
14. Arendt shares this thesis with Luhmann (1988, p. 30), for whom it is clear that ‘absol-
ute power’ in a complex society means ‘small power’.
15. Quote translated by Poul Kjaer.
16. This is also the basic idea of Habermas (1992).
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