“Arendt is alluding to what has been a tragic pattern, repeated over and over again, whenever these [people's] councils have briefly come into existence. The enemies of these people’s councils have been those ‘professional’ revolutionaries who have crushed them.

Arendt’s reflections on the emergence of such councils provides a perspective for reassessing her earliest reflections on the failures of a Jewish politics in the modern age. Arendt’s hope had been that the Jewish people themselves might create such revolutionary councils, that they might-as Lazare proposed-join with other oppressed groups to fight for and secure their freedom; and that they might do this ‘without leadership and without [a] previously formulated program’. This would have been the fulfillment of the populist strain in her thinking. And this idea of a council system (where Jews and Arabs would work together) is the political alternative to an independent sovereign Jewish or Arab state. Her thought-train concerning a Jewish homeland and her thought-train concerning the council system interweave and reinforce each other.

In describing the council system, she tells us that ‘the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and spontaneous demands of the people, and they were not deduced from an ideology nor foreseen, let alone preconceived, by any theory about the best form of government’. The councils are a paradigm of a democratic institution, ‘but in a sense never seen before and never thought about’.

Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many respects. Thus, the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom, and not selected by the party machinery and proposed to the electorate either as individuals with alternative choices or as a slate of candidates…. The elected, therefore, is not bound by anything except trust in his personal qualities, and his pride is ‘to have been elected by the workers, and not by the government’ or a party, that is, by his peers and from neither above nor below.

The council system helps us to understand two interrelated concepts that are central to Arendt’s political thinking: ‘no-rule’ and political equality (isonomy). At first (or even second) glance, Arendt’s repeated insistence that politics is not a question of who rules whom but involves a ‘no-rule’ seems strange-if not perverse. But now we can understand what she means. In the councils, members meet as political equals. Even leadership is not a matter of ruling, but of acting and speaking together with one’s peers. The councils-indeed, those councils which have spontaneously come into existence in modern times-are the very institutions in which equality or isonomy is created, a political equality which is not to be confused or reduced to the false and dangerous idea of social equality. ‘No-rule’ must not be confused with the bureaucratic rule of ‘Nobody’-which Arendt took to be such a pervasive trait of modern societies” (Bernstein 1996:127-128).

Bernstein, Richard J.
1996 Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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