Arendt Studies Volume 2, 2018

pp. 51–60
doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies201821

Plurality

Wolfgang Heuer
Freie Universität Berlin

W hat impresses me most in The Human Condition is Arendt’s concept

of plurality. Radically different from our liberal understanding of
plurality, it has far-reaching consequences. Because it is a carefully consid-
ered and justified alternative to our concept, it has enduring significance; it
is not a utopia but a highly plausible heterotopia, albeit difficult to realize.
Or the other way round: our political and social conditions allow such a
plurality in exceptional cases only, making Arendt’s writings a persistent
critique of our circumstances.
I assume that many are strongly tempted to examine the multifaceted
world Arendt spreads out before us for its “feasibility,” to adopt what suits
and indeed omit whatever seems unsuitable. Similar to her theory of the ba-
nality of evil, Arendt’s sharp distinction between the political and the social,
her critique of the French Revolution and the anti-political appreciation of
labor in Marx do not fit into the mainstream. Our constant chatter of plural-
ity and communication in the liberal world of today makes her definitions
seem more familiar to us from a cursory reading than they are in reality; her
images and the open endings to her chapters and subchapters, which are
complete essays in themselves, have the air of being supplements, deeper
thoughts, and at times even modifications of our liberal world. Here, it is easy
to overlook the provocative or deliberately leave it out. Only on closer inspec-
tion and juxtaposed with our ordinary understandings, only when compared
with Rawls and Habermas1 and, of course, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss does
it become effective and reveal the richness of Arendt’s perspectives.
Arendt was well aware that her writings would have a long-term effect
and from time to time quoted from a poem by Christian Morgenstern: “Korf
makes up some jokes / That are only understood hours later.” Civil society,
1
See Wolfgang Heuer, “Hannah Arendt. Ein Zuhause für den zivilen Ungehor-
sam,” INDES. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft (2018).

© Arendt Studies. ISSN 2474-2406 (online) ISSN 2574-2329 (print)

Wolfgang Heuer

which has since flourished, undoubtedly came closer to Arendt’s jokes. But
given the prevailing liberal reality and practical politics, are they genuinely
understood?
Last year, I was invited by the University of Freiburg to talk about “The
Idea of Federalism—Hannah Arendt on the Future of Europe” and to or-
ganize a two-hour workshop. My plan for the workshop was to read out
loud the chapter on “Action” from The Human Condition, one paragraph after
another, one participant after another, and to discuss the content step by
step. We never got past the third paragraph. We were so fascinated by the
density of the text and its statements, and of course by the experience of
reading together. Each reading and rereading opened up new perspectives,
each specific question on the text produced new aspects, as if we had never
read the text before. I was inspired to try this common reading aloud by
Fred Dewey of Los Angeles, who gathers people into reading groups outside
the university and organized for example, a three-month reading journey
in Berlin, working through various writings by Arendt at different points
in the city.2 His idea is to empower young people to think for themselves, to
read Arendt’s work discerningly without pre-knowledge as philosophers or
political theorists, to listen and to come to a common judgment. This we call
plurality in practice.
The chapter on “Action” begins with a striking definition: “Human
plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold
character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could nei-
ther understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for
the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men
were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is,
was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make
them understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical
needs would be enough.”
This interaction of equality and distinction is extended later in the chap-
ter to include the sameness of the working world, where the labor process
cancels out the distinctiveness of two workers, merging them into a third
person. Here Arendt also speaks of political equality as the opposite of
cultural distinction. Political equality is not inherent. It is brought to the
individual via laws and the constitution, and differs from human equality
in the face of death.
Arendt’s description of the foundations of human existence determined
four basic human conditions: natality, mortality, worldliness and plurality.

2
Fred Dewey, “From an Appparent Contradiction in Arendt to a Working Group
Method,” in Hannah Arendt: Lektüren zur Politischen Bildung, ed. Waltraud Meints,
Tonio Öftering, and Dirk Lange (Springer Verlag 2018); The School of Public Life, Door-
mats, vol. 4 (Errant Bodies Press, 2014).

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She avoided the essentialism that defines human beings as “that’s the way
they are” or, to speak with Rousseau, as free, equal and well born, but en-
slaved and alienated by society. Arendt maintains that conditionality merely
represents the physiological frame for action in terms of possibilities; indeed,
she holds that human beings are born politically unequal and that politics
alone provides them with the opportunity to achieve equality.
Her first definitions of equality and distinction reveal Arendt’s way of
thinking: her refusal to think in either-or categories or hierarchies in order to
imagine coexistences such as quality and distinction, the network-like shape
of human action, activities such as labor, work and action, thinking, willing
and judging, and finally plurality, which differs from individuality, duality
and collectivity.
Without plurality there would be no speech or action, but simply in-
formation and behavior. I refer to the pluralism Arendt describes here as
qualitative pluralism. It allows for a specific form of speech and action, and
is distinct from the familiar numerical, quantitative pluralism of the many
and the masses. Secondly, this kind of pluralism emerges in the course of
intersubjectivity, of in between people, and is utterly different from the mod-
ern age subjectivism so familiar to us. It does not represent an extension of
the subject, but characterizes the place where relationships between subjects
are formed. This is a place of disclosure, without which speech and action,
and intersubjectivity would be impossible; thirdly, this place could not be
maintained without the power that common speech and action creates, and
fourthly, this plurality with its place of disclosure, intersubjectivity and power
calls for an institutional, republican form of durability. Not only should the
latter guarantee a limitation of power through Montesquieu’s separation of
powers, it also assumes a federal form of power-building and power-sharing, in-
cluding at territorial level, with a basic right to its non-hegemonic extension.
What is the significance of theses four aspects for a critique of the liberal
concept of plurality?

1. Some Aspects of the Difference between

Quantitative and Qualitative Pluralism
I refer to the distinction between our common concept of pluralism and
Arendt’s concept as one between quantitative and qualitative pluralism.
Our Western societies are marked by a quantitative pluralism of agents in a
society of production and exchange. Individualism, behaviorism and free-
dom from external interference are key values in this society. According to
Arendt, they culminate in foolish pride, the worship of genius and the kind
of intellectuals she so detested for their claim to leadership as professional
thinkers. At stake here, depending on the type of trade, is the exchange
of information, the realization of interests, the use of behaviors, improper

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Wolfgang Heuer

advantage over competitors and the establishing of multiple networks for

personal benefit. Commercial society (Adam Smith) and its utilitarian way
of thinking and acting is partially tempted to restrict plurality, “competi-
tion,” to its own advantage: with the help of corruption, cartellization, and
concealment of product defects. The path from here to violence is short and
ranges from blackmail and state guaranteed trade wars to the creation of
parallel mafia structures.
Hence Arendt’s distinction between society and the economy, on the one
hand, and politics, on the other. Hence her distinction between political ac-
tion as acting together, on the one hand, and caring action for or criminal
action against each other, on the other hand, both of which pursue private
interests but fail to create an open place of disclosure that would translate
into qualitative plurality. Hence Arendt’s rejection of thinking as the logic of
pure conclusion which leads to self-distruction and world-distruction.3
The global “Corporate Social Responsibility” movement that began
in 2000 as a UN response to the delimitation of markets and borders on a
global scale attempts to reconcile both levels of plurality, the market and
the commonweal. It requires considerable persuasion to convince compa-
nies that far from reducing profits, prioritizing transparency, sustainability
and public welfare can in fact increase them. One example of this is the
remarkable success of the ethical union of companies in Brazil, Instituto
Ethos, which since its foundation in 1999 has represented up to 1,500 com-
panies based on voluntary membership and totaling one third of the GNP.4
The current economic crisis, however, has seen a significant drop in the
number of participating companies. An added reason for this is the lack of
confidence in a corrupt political class, which has in turn damaged the at-
tractiveness of ethical behavior and privatized public goods in the interests
of neoliberalism. Society and the economy are in need of a sound policy of
public spiritedness that will defend the realm of plurality and forge ahead
as a good example.
The extreme openness of the plurality envisaged by Arendt poses a con-
siderable challenge, both intellectually and in terms of acceptance. In her
view, plurality contains three characteristics associated with action: unpre-
dictability, irreversibility and the absence of authorship. The comparison she
drew between spontaneous action and the uncertainty of human existence
and her characterization of action as a second birth credits unpredictability

3
Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950–1973, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann and Ursula
Ludz (Piper, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 214–215 (June 1952).
4
Wolfgang Heuer, “El poder de los insensatos: libertad y responsabilidad para
una economía sustentable,” in Discursos politicos, identidades y nuevos paradigmas de
gobernanza en América Latina, ed. by Angela Sierra Gutierrez (Barcelona: Laertes,
2015), 81–112.

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 Plurality

with highly positive potential, something that Arendt herself experienced

when the Hungarian Revolution against totalitarianism broke out in 1956
unexpectedly. The uncertainty of action, which is the reverse side of free-
dom, calls for stability, the prerequisite for which is a promise made by the
actors concerned. In addition, retreating from possible deadlocks as a result
of irreversible action calls for yet another form of action: forgiveness, which
is more than punishment or revenge. The purpose of forgiving is not to re-
store justice, but rather to restore the ability to act.
This confidence in the openness of speech and action in a person who
has dealt in-depth with the disasters of total domination and the Holocaust
is impressive. Arendt focused on the freedom of human beings and their
plurality and potential as the Other in dark times. Leo Strauss adopted a dif-
ferent approach.5 Like Arendt, he fled from Germany because he was Jewish.
Like her, he saw the source of the disaster in the political weakness of the
theory and practice of liberalism and, like her, turned to classical antiquity
as the traditional place of strong politics. In contrast to Arendt, however, he
rejected radical openness about its unpredictability and irreversibility, em-
phasizing instead the role of philosophers as political advisors to the ruler
and the separation of the philosopher’s and ruler’s truth from the world of
myths and religion for the masses. From Arendt’s standpoint, less freedom
in favor of alleged security is based on limited plurality, exploitation and
violence, leading in turn to far greater insecurity.
Strauss and numerous others see freedom and security as a contradic-
tion. The temptation to restrict freedom is universal, not only with reference
to terrorism, but also in the face of unsettling world developments due to
the internationalization of markets, wars and migration. Obtaining security
by means of exclusion and withdrawal creates the illusion of “retrotopia,”
to use Bauman’s coinage.6 Retrotopian thinking dismisses the notion of
common action in our common world and promotes populism, notably
the rehabilitation of the tribal community model and a return to the con-
cept of a primordial/pristine self, predetermined by non-cultural factors
and those immune to culture. Reducing plurality to sovereignty, the use of
violence and authoritarian solutions have become popular and indeed char-
acterize the future political system of the vast economic and political region
stretching from Turkey to China, one that does not stand in the tradition of
the Enlightenment and enlightened politics and theories à la Montesquieu.7

5
Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dia-
logue,” Political Theory 18.2 (May 1990): 238–254.
6
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Poligy Press, 2017).
7
John Keane, “Die neuen Despotien. Vorstellungen vom Ende der Demokratie,”
Merkur 69, no. 790 (2015): 18–31.

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Wolfgang Heuer

When surveys conducted in 2017 found that confidence in politics and the
administration was greater in China than in Europe, it means first and fore-
most that both regions see freedom and security as opposites.8 In contrast,
Arendt’s design of an unfolding qualitative plurality, intersubjectivity and
power-building, that is the key components of active “freedom for,” creates
security through freedom; it is diametrically opposed to retrotopia.

2. Intersubjectivity
Who are the actors? Arendt’s distinction between those who initiate actions
and those who carry them out serves to explain that action calls for We not I.
Her statement that no one individual can claim authorship of a common ac-
tion clarifies that action cannot be completely planned in advance and only
then executed. It also requires people on the outside to observe, understand
and judge the event. At the same time, “no author” does not mean nobody.
Arendt considered Eichmann a nobody; critical thinking is the only way for
someone to become a person. In Arendt’s eyes, the person plays a decisive
role when it comes to speech and action, and to thinking and judging. The
person is the contrary of the conformist. Particularly touching among her
portraits in Men in Dark Times is Arendt’s description of her friend Walde-
mar Gurian and his independent spirit, friendliness and public appearance.9
Arendt is more interested in Gurian’s actions than his character, which
we tend to describe with the help of a biography. Character refers to at-
tributes, action to personality. Looking at character brings us back to the
individuals, their dispositions and talents, their strong points and faults,
while personality manifests itself in their reciprocal relationship with others.
Their actions are not based on a utilitarian means-ends relationship.
This situatedness of action, personalities and politics in the in-between,
metaphorically described by Arendt as a web of relationships, clearly dis-
tinguishes itself from the assumption that has remained unchallenged since
Descartes: the sovereign subject. The subject has a will and resolve of its own,
creative power and self-assertion, precisely what is deemed of the highest
value in economics, politics and society. The post-1968 decade in Europe
and the United States led to a shift in values towards more individualism,
autonomy and self-realization. Arendt’s intersubjectivity seems to be low
on the agenda. Although creative teamwork sounds like intersubjectivity, it
remains confined to corporate goals and profit.

8
Edelman Trust Barometer, https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer.
9
Wolfgang Heuer, “Who is Capable of Performing Action? Some Thoughts
on the Importance of Personality,” Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications 7
(2015): 43–55.

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 Plurality

It is in this web of relationships, this intersubjectivity, that political

phenomena such as freedom, civil disobedience, authority, power, vio-
lence and domination emerge. From the in-between perspective, freedom,
civil disobedience, authority and power materialize from reciprocal action,
while violence and domination lead to limitation of the web. It is common
knowledge that no one “possesses” freedom, authority or power, unless it
is facilitated mutually. From a subjectivist perspective, however, it would
seem that only those with certain personal preferences gain possession of
such phenomena. This approach is apolitical and usurps part of the polit-
ical realm by subtly introducing violence. Introducing the producing actor
into the public sphere, who determines his actions calmly and is “in posses-
sion” of power, replaces action with production. Hence two utterly different
activities such as craft production and the revolutionary creation of a new
society and a new human being are inextricably bound up by violent action
(“you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”). Arendt sharpens our
awareness of the dangers of politics as a result of exploitation, subjectivism,
sovereignty and the desire to produce, long before violence comes out into
the open.

3. Power, Power-sharing, and Federalism

Just as qualitative plurality can only emerge through speech and action, and
constitutes a realm of appearance, power, too, is inevitably created through
speech and action. Power originates in a web of relationships and upholds
the realm of appearance. Promises and forgiveness are also forms of pow-
er-building. Qualitative plurality is therefore inconceivable without power.
Here Arendt is closer to Foucault than generally assumed. She criticized a
tradition that saw power and appearance as suspicious, such as Christianity
and Plato, who furthermore described politics as a skill similar to that of a
helmsman.
Given that power, not unlike action in general, is not merely unpredict-
able, but can also get out of hand, Arendt found a formula for its limitation in
the course of her dialogue with Montesquieu and the US Founding Fathers:
share power to gain power. In the context of redefining the foundation of
freedom, which ultimately led to her book On Revolution, she encountered a
further form of separating power, that is, federal power-sharing at territorial
level.10 This federative form is tantamount to institutionalizing plurality.
Arendt discusses the matter on three occasions: firstly, in her proposal in
1940 for a solution to Europe’s minority problems that saw the founding of
a European federation with a common parliament, where the Jewish people

10
See here and in what follows Wolfgang Heuer, Föderationen—Hannah Arendts
politische Grammatik des Gründens (Hannover 2016).

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Wolfgang Heuer

would have equal representation like every other people.11 A federation

holds the promise of putting an end to the dichotomy between majorities
and minorities. Likewise, the intention behind Arendt’s proposal for a bi-
national Jewish-Palestinian state, preferably within a Mediterranean-Middle
East federation, was to ensure equality and diversity in a broader pluralistic
community.12
Secondly, Arendt’s claim that the way in which Nation had conquered
the state in modern Europe was fatal. The federation represents a viable al-
ternative to the nation state by rejecting the concept of exclusive sovereignty
and incorporating the ideas Arendt developed on plurality and power. Fed-
eralism of this kind not only contradicts closing off the nation state to the
outside world, as witnessed in the foreign policy of the United States despite
its internal federalism, but potentially opens it to extension in a cosmopol-
itan perspective, as Kant had elaborated in his thoughts on a federation of
republics. The broad spectrum of ideas forged in France since the nineteenth
century on a Europe-North Africa Mediterranean union suggests possible
alternatives.13
Thirdly, in Arendt’s discussion of the inadequacy of the party system and
the modern representational system, she referred to councils as an original
form of self-representation. Similar to her definition of totalitarianism as a
new form of political control in the Montesquieuvian sense, she saw the old
historical forms of spontaneous self-organization as proof that other politi-
cal systems were possible and would permit the plurality, speech and action,
intersubjectivity and power she envisaged. “The councils say: we want to
participate, we want to debate, we want to make our own voices heard in
public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course
of our country. . . . A council-state of this sort, to which the principle of sov-
ereignty would be wholly alien, would be admiringly suited to federations
of the most various kinds, especially since in it, power would be constituted
horizontally and not vertically.”14 The councils facilitate network-like action,
they are more than a mere institution, they exemplify that we as indepen-
dent but interconnected actors in equality and distinctiveness have entered
into a form of federation at the spontaneous level.

11
Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question,” in Jewish Writings (Schocken Books,
2007: 124–133.
12
Hannah Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East,” in Jewish Writings
(Schocken Books, 2007: 423–450.
13
Wolf Lepenies, Die Macht am Mittelmeer: Französische Träume von einem anderen
Europa (Hanser Verlag, 2016).
14
Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts of Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises
of the Republic (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 232.

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Arendt was not alone with these ideas. Camus frequently addressed the
notion of federalism: in his study of federalist structures in traditional vil-
lages in Kabylie (Algeria), in his ideas on a French-Algerian confederation,
in his plea for a federal Europe after WWII, and in his design for a transna-
tional European-US NGO to trigger international citizen politics. His essays
on this subject have just been published and show him to be a thinker of
republican councils.15
At this point I would like to add an aspect so far unknown in the context
of Hannah Arendt: the quality of life and its public and political dimensions.
Arendt’s criticism of our world and its uncommitted public sphere, its la-
tent or open violence juxtaposed with her statements on speech and action,
intersubjectivity and power, and their institutionalizations in the form of
federations and councils indirectly emphasize the importance of partici-
pation, recognition, personal development, public friendship and, last but
not least, “the joys and gratifications of free company,” which takes priority
over “the doubtful pleasures if holding domination.”16 Bearing in mind, of
course, that all of this is about action, not passive acceptance of favorable
circumstances. These positive elements of action undoubtedly lead to en-
hanced quality of life. Studies on higher quality of life in more pronounced
federal structures have been conducted in Switzerland and are to continue.17
Finally, I would like to refer briefly to other writings by Arendt that
supplement the thread of ideas running through her collected works: “Truth
and Politics,” “Lying in Politics” and “The Life of the Mind.” Here, Arendt
touches on her thinking about speech and action, posing the all-important
question of judgment. In the context of truth and lies in politics, Arendt
examines two tendencies that are of key significance today: the apolitical
tendency to tell the truth in order to limit action and freedom, and the ten-
dency to deny the truth with the help of lies in order to act and change
the world, which is simplified by the structural similarity between action
and lie. Their common interest is to change the world and their common
space lies in our capacity for enlarged mentality. As much as factual truth
is a key component of our reality and consequently the basis of all politics,
to be defended against any form of fabrication, the current wave of “post-
truth” with its fake news, conspiracy theories and populist propaganda in

15
Lou Marin, ed, Albert Camus—écrits libertaires (1948–1960) (Indigène Editions,
2013).
16
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin
Books, 2006), 242.
17
Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and
Institutions Affect Well-being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002).
See also Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University
Press, 2000).

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the public arena and the shielded echo chamber of social media, is in the
process of departing from this reality. “Post-truth” poses a challenge for crit-
ical thought and judgment, as well as for public debate—and on the whole
for Arendt’s concept of plurality.
Arendt did not discuss the consequences of her claim that judging not
only refers to factual issues but also looks at who makes a good bedfellow,
which is a question of taste. Does that mean that we only want to talk to
and judge with people we like, people of our own convictions? Is it not so,
conversely, that only in speech and action, only in considering and judging
the diverse intersubjective perspectives do we come upon unexpected com-
panions whose integrity is as convincing as their arguments?

Translated by Sunniva Greve

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