Hannah Arendt, antiracist rebellion, and the counterinsurgent logic of the social
| Author | Will Kujala |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211009206 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Hannah Arendt,
antiracist rebellion, and
the counterinsurgent
logic of the social
Will Kujala
University of Alberta, Canada
Abstract
Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in
the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too
rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to
be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between con-
ceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding
the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought
of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the
social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social dis-
order, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between
the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of
revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and
concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among
contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they
mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made
of them.
Keywords
Hannah Arendt, Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, racism, revolution, subaltern studies,
the social
Corresponding author:
Will Kujala, 11-15 H.M. Tory Building, University of Alberta, 116 Street & 86 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada, T6G 2R3.
Email: wkujala@ualberta.ca
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211009206
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2023, Vol. 22(2) 302–323
Riots in the ghettos and rebellions on the campuses make “people feel they are acting
together in a way they rarely can.” We do not know if these occurrences are the
beginning of something new ...or the death pangs of a faculty mankind is about to
lose. (Arendt, 1970: 83–84)
Perceptive readers of Arendt have argued that her distinction between the social
and the political failed, at best, to grasp the complexity of racial politics in the
1960s, and, at worst, mystified the foundational role of racism in US politics from
its inception (Belle, 2014; Bernasconi, 1996; Norton, 1995; Owens, 2017).
Discussions about Arendt’s concept of the social in this context typically concern
the stark gap between her distinction and the reality it is supposed to illuminate.
Is the gap so great, the distinction so rigid, that the latter is unworkable? Or can it
be narrowed by making the distinction more malleable? In turn, the problem posed
by essays such as “Little Rock” (Arendt, 2003) is the link between her infamous
remarks on desegregation and Black Power and her more general political theory.
These debates thus prioritize two questions. First, is Arendt’s distinction more
malleable or flexible than it appears in her reflections on racial politics in the
1960s, such that it can be usefully retained? This question is typically answered
by way of a second: what is the relation between the ‘abuse’ of the distinction in
essays like “Little Rock” and its use in Arendt’s oeuvre as a whole?
This article argues for a shift away from these questions. Regarding the first,
I argue that at issue in Arendt’s misrecognition of, for example, school desegre-
gation as strictly social is not merely a gap between a rigid distinction and a
complex and ambiguous world, but the question of how to manage what Arendt
herself argues is an inevitable gap between concepts and political life. The problem
is not merely that the concept is inadequate but that Arendt insists on the failure of
the world to live up to it. At stake is a failure to live up to the task of political
theory as Arendt (1998 [1958]: 5) defines it: to begin on the basis of our “newest
experiences,” and therefore to “think what we are doing.” As Lefort (1988: 47)
argues, this practice of “beginning on the basis of events” results in a “constant
tension between the desire to elaborate a theory and a wish to remain free to react
to events.” The terrain therefore needs to be shifted from the question of just how
wide the gap is between concepts in the world, towards the question of how this
tension is managed.
This necessitates thematizing the gap between concept and world as itself a
terrain of political and practical intervention. This would be a critical rather
than categorical distinction between the social and the political. Arendt, and her
interpreters, typically distinguish the social and the political categorically. That is,
she tells us which events, issues, and movements are political, and which are social.
The distinction stands or falls, here, on whether its categorization adequately
comprehends these events, issues, and movements. A critical distinction between
the social and political begins from the premise that such moves of categorization
are interventions in the events they describe. This distinction offers an analysis of
how political phenomena are reread as social and vice-versa; in other words, how a
303Kujala
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