Revolutionary Authority

Incomplete Draft: Please do not cite or quote without permission

Roy T. Tsao

rtsao@pratt.edu

March 2021
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“[W]ith the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the American Revolution is over….
There is one fact which justifies us in saying that the emancipating revolution is now ended.
The rash violation of justice which unleashed it has been both pun-ished and expiated. For to
the glory of human nature be it said that, as long as justice is disregarded, the avenging spirit
lives on, and there can be only one way of ending all questions: that is to solve them in
accordance with justice.”

—Georges Clemenceau, writing to France from the U.S., 1870.1

1.

My aim in this paper is to identify, and raise some questions about, a puzzling

obscurity in what Arendt has to say about the legitimation of revolutionary government in On

Revolution. What’s puzzling, in brief, is how little she has to say about this. To be sure, she

has a great deal say about the American revolutionaries’ great success in founding a new, and

thenceforth enduring, constitutional government, and their French counterparts’ failures in that

regard. She makes much of the difference between power and authority, and devotes an entire

chapter to the perplexities facing both sets of revolutionaries on with respect to the latter. And

yet she never quite gets around to addressing what might seem the obvious question: on what

grounds can a newly-established government - or a long established government - validly

1
Georges Clemenceau, American Reconstruction ed. Fernand Baldensperger (L. MacVeigh/Dial Press:
1928), 299-300. The book consists in the dispatches on American politics that Clemenceau wrote for the
radical newspaper Le Temps from 1865 to 1870. See also Georges Clemenceau, Lettres d’Amerique, ed.
P. Weil and T. Macé (Passés/Composés: 2020).
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exercise coercion? There are one or two moments in On Revolution in which it sounds almost

as if Arendt means to imply that the legitimation of government might be secured — and

sustained indefinitely — on no other principle than the mutual confidence and public-

mindedness of those individuals who are engaged in setting it up. There are moments in which

she seems almost to imagine that if only a government born in that spirit were to give ample

voice to those sharing that mutual confidence, they’d be sure to get ready compliance from the

less-happier many… No, I don’t mean to insinuate that Arendt is quite so naïve as all that. My

immediate point is just to observe that, at very least, the issue is left a bit under-theorized.

As I say, I’ve got some questions. But I’d better explain where my questions are

coming from. It’s not just that one might have expected a bit more theoretical articulacy on

this issue from a theorist of revolution, and it’s not just that in the absence of this, I find it

hard to share Arendt’s seeming assurance that legitimation takes care of itself, in her notions of

revolutionary government. Rather, my puzzlement comes from my sense that Hannah Arendt

should have been the first to see, and be troubled, by the very difficulties over legitimation that

she passes by. I might as well admit to having felt some vexation over this, for some time. But

lately I’ve started to wonder: maybe she did see those difficulties, and was somehow troubled

by them, more than she let on — maybe that’s why legitimation remains persistently under-

theorized in her work.

It’s just a hunch, and in this short paper I am able to do no little more than get to the

brink of it. To get even that far, we need to start with an extended detour, going back a dozen

years prior to On Revolution — to The Origins of Totalitarianism. For it’s in Origins that we

find Arendt not only intensely concerned with the issue of legitimation, but also acutely alert to

the sort of difficulties to which I’ve alluded, the very ones with which she seems to be
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unconcerned in On Revolution (and not only there). The disparity to which I refer is connected

with the prominence given to the idea of human rights in the earlier book. As the much-lesser

prominence of that idea in much of Arendt’s writing after Origins is of course a well-worn

theme among commentators, I hasten to add that my reason for taking this detour involves

more than pointing out the discrepancy. The purpose my detour through what I take to be the

political theory of Origins — what I’ll call the politics of human rights — is to draw attention

to Arendt’s profound sense in that book of the inescapable predicament involved in sustaining

a just political order — the genuine predicament in assuming responsibility for others, along

with the moral disfigurement suffered in the attempt to shirk that predicament’s burden. It’s

against this background that I wish to set Arendt’s peculiar opacity over the matter legitimation

in On Revolution (and elsewhere, too). My hunch - to leave it at that - is that there might be a

story to tell, connecting the two.

2.

What I’m calling the politics of human rights, the political theory of Origins, encompasses the

following interrelated propositions: (a) that the modern state’s true raison d’être lies in

upholding the juridical status of all human beings within its territory; (b) that the actual

nation-states (of Europe) were faulty from the start, on account of the way that juridical

principle had been compromised through admixture with other, incompatible ones; (c) that the

tendency of this failure, if left unchecked, finds its natural terminus in the brutal politics of the

mob - in the politics of violent nationalism, imperialism, and racism; and (d) that concerted
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political action to counter this tendency - through the vindication of the juridical principle - is

therefore the outstanding political task of humanity, and an outstandingly difficult one at that.2

This theme is by no means limited to Arendt’s justly-famous account of the crisis of

statelessness in the book’s ninth chapter, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the Perplexities

of the Rights of Man.” To put it another way: that crisis is indeed at the center of Arendt’s

concern, but there is more at stake for her than the plight of the stateless. The crisis is not

“humanitarian,” as the term is used nowadays, but political — implicating the political order as

such, and threatening to destroy it. Her thesis is that the modern nation-state is inherently

(constitutionally, as it were) incapable of accommodating large numbers of non-naturalized,

stateless foreigners - exposing the fatal flaw at their very foundation.

For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken
down. Without this legal equality, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and
under-privileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges,
something contradictory to the very idea of the nation-state. (OT 290).

What makes this crisis “a deadly sickness” (as she puts it in the sentence just before the

passage quoted) is that under these circumstances, the juridical order degenerates into the

protection of arbitrary privilege, and with arbitrariness comes violence, in those privileges’

defense, and assertion. And the worst of it is, the syndrome inherently tends to feed on itself,

and spread, as the over-privileged and under-privileged alike are pressed by the logic of the

situation to defend, or assert, their genuine interests in no other terms. The precipitous

2
My discussion in this section revisits topics addressed in “Arendt and the Modern State: Variations on
Hegel in The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Review of Politics,66/1 (Winter 2004), 105-3138; “Arendt’s
Augustine,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge:
2010), 39-57. See also Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of
Common Responsibility (Indiana: 2006); Christian Volk, Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Poltiics, and
the Order of Freedom (2015).
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proliferation of statelessness in the twentieth century is for Arendt but the latest, potentially

fatal episode in a series of comparably organic crises to the body politic of the (European)

nation state.

Throughout Arendt’s telling of this story, she takes it for granted that the state’s

“supreme function [is] the protection of all its inhabitants no matter what their nationality,”

acting “as a supreme legal institution” — a function inherited by the constitutional kingdoms

and republics of modern Europe from the absolute monarchies of the preceding period (OT

230). The state’s form of government, and the political rights accorded its citizens, has no part

in this story, except in so far as the disappearance of absolute monarchy left a void - not so

much of authority, as of common allegiance. The fiction of a people’s unitary national origin

stepped into that void, making for the fatal confusion of legal status with national membership

that would eventually undermine the nation-state’s functioning in Arendt’s time. But well

before then, another fault line emerged, in that even the national state failed to sustain the

effective loyalty of its national citizenry, who tended to see the state as no more than the actual

or potential instrument of their class interests. As she tells it, the modern state had always had

but a weak hold its people’s allegiance even where its nominal authority seemed most secure,

and hostility to the state increasingly found its outlet in the politics of the mob — that is to say,

of lawless group aggression. For Arendt in Origins, the “mob” is a somewhat flexible

signifier, assuming varying guises in different points in her story, but its mentality and modus

operandi is always the same: domineering, willfully irresponsible, and typically (for those

very reasons) racist.

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In Origins, Arendt’s politics of human rights is a political cause - a political fight, on

behalf of the battered principle of equal justice under law. This comes across most vividly in

the culminating chapter of the book’s first part, “The Dreyfus Affair” — embodied in the

politics of that figure she calls the hero of that drama, Georges Clemenceau (95).

Clemenceau is the only hero she names anywhere in this long, varied book, and deserves to be

seen as the hero of the book, although an equivocal one. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair

(which erupted in 1894) had already been prominent in French politics, but at the time was

long out of parliament, engaging in politics as a writer and editor. His unique importance

among the Dreyfusards, for Arendt, is the lucidity with which he saw the true stakes in the

fight:

“There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues
of a corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing society, and the clergy’s lust for power
should have been squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human
rights – the republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of
Clemenceau) by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.” (108)

Note well: “the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights.” And again, in

refrain:

“The greatness of Clemenceau’s approach lies in the fact that it was not directed against a
particular miscarriage of justice, but was based upon such ‘abstract’ ideas as justice, liberty,
and civic virtue. It was based, in short, on those very concepts which had formed the staple
of old-time Jacobin patriotism and against which so much mud had already been hurled.”
(110)

In light of her later attitude toward the original Jacobins in On Revolution, it’s worth lingering

over the fact that here she repeatedly, and unhesitatingly uses the term approvingly.
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What makes Clemenceau an equivocal figure in Arendt’s account is the fact that this

same hero of the Dreyfus affair — whose same principles made him a lucid opponent of

imperialism (OT 124-5) — would later succumb to a “blind desperate nationalism” (129-30), to

the point of embracing imperialism too, as a counter to German aggression. (She doesn’t

specifically mention, but presumably also has in in mind, Clemenceau’s part in imposing

punitive terms on defeated Germany after the First World War.) His career thus embodies the

contradiction she sees in the nation-state — to that extent, she distances herself from the “old-

time Jacobin patriotism” she identifies with him. But the effect is only to make her

understanding of the politics of human rights that much demanding: what can only be called a

full-fledged revolutionary project. As she puts it in the “Concluding Remarks” to the book’s first

edition: “Politically, this means that, before drawing up the constitution of a new body politic,

we shall have to create — not merely discover - a new foundation for human community as

such” (OT-1st ed., 436).

Arendt stresses not only the urgency of this cause, but the “crushing” difficulty of its

burdens. This, too, is a note sounded throughout Origins. . Her remarks about this are

admittedly rather obscure, and have seldom received much attention from commentators. What’s

important to stress, though, is that for Arendt the difficulty is genuine, and inescapable.

“Common responsibility” isn’t just a rallying cry, it’s a “predicament” (236, emphasis added).

It’s not just a matter of standing up to the mob, in defense of the innocent. It’s also a matter of

taking responsibility for the mob — and acknowledging their humanity, too. Because this is

what it would mean, as Arendt sees it, to uphold human rights universally: being thereby made

answerable for innumerable others’ failures to live up to that responsibility. “Even insistence

on the sinfulness of all men, of course absent from the phraseology of the liberal protagonists of
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mankind , by means suffices for an understanding of the fact… that the idea of humanity, purged

of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must

assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men, and that eventually all nations will be

forced to answer for the evil committed by others” (235-6).

Upholding the equal rights of all people means not only refraining from violating the

rights of those within one’s immediate neighborhood, or protecting the rights of a limited number

of persons under one’s watch, but also redressing wrongs committed by people over whom one

has neither power, nor authority. To acknowledge responsibility with others means accepting as

partners in rendering justice those who are no more sovereign than oneself. How can one avoid

making compromises with the compromised? How can one retain one’s moral compass, in this

situation? She closes the “Concluding Remarks” with the hope that an insight into the “bliss” of

inhabiting a world together with others might alleviate the resentment against this burden that

she associates with the mentality of the mob (and thus inoculate against the “perversions of

human self-consciousness” she identifies especially with racism). But that isn’t to say that the

burden itself is made any lighter…

3.

….So much for the politics of human rights in Origins. Without further ado, let me

now cut away to On Revolution - plunging right into the puzzle I raised at the outset,

concerning Arendt’s peculiar opacity over the legitimation of revolutionary government. She

congratulates the American Founders for having successfully established a government that

has stood the test of time, and she insists - vehemently - that this be counted as a consummate

revolutionary achievement. She sets this success against their French counterparts’ obvious

failure to do the same, and she lays at least part of the blame for that failure on the fatal
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incoherence of their attempts to secure their legitimacy. Because of this, the reader is naturally

led to expect her to offer a contrastingly robust account of how the American founding

succeeded where the French failed. But she never quite offers anything of that sort, so as I can

see. Maybe she gestures in that direction, and just doesn’t get very far in explaining herself.

(If so, I’ve got questions.) Maybe not. It might be that she isn’t so concerned with the issue,

in itself, beyond supplying the occasion to rehearse her critiques of those French theories she

deplores. (If so, I’ve also got questions, different ones.) Anyway, that’s the puzzle, as I see it.

Before getting into the details, I’d better say a few words about the whole America-

versus-France thing, in the interest of clearing the air. (“How could Arendt glorify the

American Revolution and revile the French?” - so the question gets posed.3). “The sad truth of

the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history,

while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of local

importance” (56). Yes, she pronounces the French Revolution a failure. But the thing is - she’s

not really arguing against anyone who thinks otherwise. The target of her polemic is a theory

of revolution that (according to her) construes certain features of that failure as paradigmatic,

disregard the rest, and posit that revolution is genuine to the extent it conforms to that pattern.

Admittedly, there are elements of her treatment of this that are problematic, even risibly far-

fetched - I’d just as well not go into it now. That said, she’s not just arguing against a straw

man. Something roughly like this was the overwhelmingly dominant theory of revolution at

the time she wrote — it was the official theory of what at the time was called Marxist-Leninist

3
Lisa Disch, “How Could Arendt glorify the American Revolution and revile the French? Placing On
Revolution in the Historiography of the French and American Revolutions” European Journal of Political
Theory10 ( 3) 350–371.
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dialectical materialism.4 It’s this that Arendt mainly wants to dislodge. For better or worse, she

sees fit to do so by way of a story about how the French revolutionaries started out with much

the same aspirations for freedom as the Americans had, but for various reasons got diverted,

and fell under the hypnotic sway of forces beyond their control, and this in turn left them

indifferent to such things as institutions and constitutions and so forth. Insofar as this didn’t

happen in the nascent U.S., Arendt deems the American case a more promising model for an

achieved revolution. The American Revolution gave rise to sturdy constitutional government,

and she would have this seen an achievement, so far as that goes. In attempting to sort out the

puzzle I’ve posed, we’d do well to hold off on presuming anything further.

The heart of the puzzle lies in the opacity of Arendt’s account of the American

founders’ achievement, insofar as their joint action not only generated collective power

sufficient to carry them through their endeavor, but also endowed the government thus

established with sufficient authority to endure. “Power and authority are no more the same

than are power and violence,” she insists. Power for her is nothing more - or less - than

effective collective capacity, the ability to get things done by joining forces. “Power comes

into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will

disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another” (OR 175).

“Authority,” by contrast, has to do with validity, and legitimation (182). (I am deliberately

limiting myself to what she says about it in On Revolution, for now.) She strongly associates

authority with perpetuation, although without ever spelling out the nature of the connection.

In a way the crux of the puzzle concerning me here is over how she conceives that connection

4
See François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion (Chicago: 1999).
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— with respect to the American founders’ achievement, such as she sees it, and also more

generally. Is there anything more to legitimation, in the founding of governments, than

organized power that somehow persists?

One reason why Arendt’s thinking on this is hard to pin down is just that in the

pertinent chapters of On Revolution, she continually shifts her attention from the one to

another. For instance, when it comes to the French, she treats their failure of power (that is to

say, their deficient effective capacity to govern) as both consequence and cause of their dodges

and difficulties over the locus of legal authority — “the source of law.” The Americans were

spared the first difficulty - the part about power - because they could organize effective

governments on the basis of still-intact local governing bodies. And being spared the first, the

Americans weren’t reduced to the same acute straits as the French when it came to

establishing lasting authority either.

As Arendt tells it, the Americans’ greater success in mustering power, compared to the

French, is to be credited not only to the still-intact institutional arrangements at their disposal,

but to the (not unrelated) fact of their much greater experience in — and therefore, confidence

in — the power inhering in making and keeping promises (OR 175). This is a familiar

Arendtian theme - already elaborated in The Human Condition (HC §28:243-5). But she

then gives it a further twist absent from her earlier treatment of promising in the previous

book):

There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making
and keeping promises. Just as promise and agreements deal with the future and provide
stability in the ocean of future uncertainty where the unpredictability may break in from all
sides, so [too] the constituting, founding, and world-building capacities of man concern
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always not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our ‘successors’ and our
‘posterities.’ (175)

Notice she doesn’t quite identify the practice of promising as a “world-building capacity.” —

and notice, too, how the second statement’s “just as… so” construction entails nothing more

than a similarity, the nature or limits of which goes unspecified. 5 I won’t try to press too hard

on that ambiguity; it suffices to observe that it’s there, and moreover that Arendt is not yet

done with her argument when she says this. The passage is found near the end of On

Revolution’s fourth chapter, which is only the first of the pair on the subject of foundation; it’s

not until a few pages after this, in the opening line of the following chapter, that she issues the

caution, “Power and authority are no more the same than are power and violence” (179). And

there she pulls back, emphatically, from the seeming implications of the passage just quoted.

The American revolutionaries’ genius for making and keeping promises - great as it was - is

not the whole story, for power as such can’t make for perpetuation, only authority.

“[W]hile power, rooted in a people that had bound itself by mutual promises and lived in
bodies constituted by compact, was enough ‘to go through a revolution’ (without unleashing
the boundless violence of the multitude), it was by no means enough to establish a ‘perpetual
union’, that is, to found a new authority. Neither compact nor promise upon which compacts
rest are sufficient to assure perpetuity, that is, to bestow upon the affairs of men that measure
of stability without which they would be unable to build a world for their posterity, destined
and designed to outlast their own mortal lives.” (182, emphasis added)

Thus, she continues, although the Americans weren’t so rudderless as the French, they too

were confronted with a version of the same challenge. “For the men of Revolution, who prided

5
Cf. Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition” College
Literature, 38/1 (Winter 2011), 15-44.
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themselves on founding republics, that is, governments ‘of law and not of men,’ the problem

of authority arose in the guise of the so-called ‘higher law,’ which would give sanction to

positive, posited laws” (182).

Before going further, let me just reiterate my observation that neither on this occasion,

nor anywhere else in this book, does she ever quite spell out the connection between the need for

sanction for positive law and assuring the lasting perpetuity of institutions. Elsewhere Arendt

more explicitly treats the attempt to give “higher” — that is to say, divine — sanction to positive

law as a device to elicit compliance when persuasion falls short, by stoking fear of divine

punishment for disobedience (BPF, 128-131). I am reluctant to assume that this is all that she

has in mind in this context, as I hesitate to infer that the issue for Arendt in perpetuating

institutions is finally just about procuring obedience, long-term. But it must be said that there’s

not much else to go on, in the text.

I won’t try to chart the winding path of Arendt’s journey in On Revolution’s fifth chapter;

here’s a rough summary. After establishing to her satisfaction that both the Americans and the

French felt the need for an “absolute” upon which authority might be founded (though it was

only the French who sought this in the concept of sovereignty), she then brings up the fact that

“neither Roman nor Greek antiquity was ever perplexed by it” (OR 186). This cues a lengthy

account of the Romans’ idea of authority, taking her deep into such matters as the Vergil’s tale of

Aeneas’ wanderings. She lingers on the American revolutionaries’ self-conscious aspiration to

be founding fathers in the classical Roman manner (203), and commends them for finding a

place for the Roman idea of authority-as-augmentation in the U.S. constitutional framework -

namely, in the independent judiciary (200). She dwells on the Romans’ characteristic aversion to
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arbitrariness (insofar as this is the mark of violence), and consequent insistence on tracing

authority to ever more remote antecedents, so that even the founding of Rome had to be

understood as a re-founding, of Troy (208). The trouble is, this wasn’t so helpful for the

Americans, steeped though they were in that legacy, because unlike the Romans, they understood

themselves to be starting something entirely new (212).

This is where it gets tricky. Arendt initially brings the Romans’ idea of authority into

her argument as the counterfoil to the seeming need to fix law in an absolute, beyond human

contingency, and makes much of the way this way of thinking avoids the reduction of founding

with arbitrary imposition, violence. But in the end she announces that this is not, after all,

adequate to the purposes of the American founders — or at any rate, not to her purposes,

theorizing her achievement, because true revolution involves the “pathos of novelty,” with no

prior precedents. After some free-wheeling ruminations on the Americans’ modification of a

catch-phrase from Virgil as the motto of the new nation – “novus ordo saeclorum,” she then

closes the chapter with a striking, new thought. It goes like this (in part):

The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and which must save it,
as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together with it, makes its
appearance in the world. The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down
the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake the enterprise and to
bring about its accomplishment. (OR 212-3).

Just a bit more, and she comes to her close, pulling the links together:

“The principle which came to light during those fateful years when the foundations were laid
– not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of the many – was the
interconnected principle of mutual promise and common deliberation” (214).
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Arendt’s faithful readers will readily feel the assurance of conclusiveness here — the

sentences bear Arendt’s signature imprint, recognizable from previous writings. And yet -

how much has really been settled?

As this is Arendt’s final word on the matter - in On Revolution, at least - it’s

understandable that commentators would take it as a definitive conclusion, implying a

sufficient grounds for valid authority. (Thus, for instance, Andreas Kalyvas has attributed to

her a theory whereby norms immanent to deliberation and promising suffice for constitutional

legitimation).6 I’m not so sure. What’s undoubtedly true is that Arendt intends in these

formulations to dispel, once and for all, any notion that element of arbitrariness inherent in the

establishment of authority need consist in - or come down to - the imposition of violence. (As

Kalyvas and others have noted, Arendt’s argument may be understood as a veiled polemic

against Carl Schmitt.7) She sees a marvelous lesson in the fact that the American founders

comported themselves in a manner to manifest mutual confidence and joint deliberation -

setting a norm against any would-be successors would thenceforth be measured — in that their

example “stand[s] in flagrant opposition to the age-old and still current notions of the dictating

violence, necessary for all foundations and hence supposedly unavoidable in all revolutions”

(213). I don’t doubt the worthiness of that lesson. Perhaps she means to draw no further lesson

than this?

6
See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and
Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: 2008), pp. 232-254 and passim.
7
In addition to Kalyvas, ibid., see also Jason Frank, “Revolution and Reiteration: Hannah Arendt’s
Critique of Constituent Power” in Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post-
Revolutionary America (Duke: 2010), and Christian Volk, “From Nomos to Lex: Hannah Arendt on Law,
Politics, and Order,” Leiden Journal of International Law, 23 (2010), pp. 759–779.
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If the alternative is the sway of brute violence, then - granted, there’s much to be

admired in the example of a joint enterprise begun in the spirit of mutual confidence among

men who honor their promises. And it’s reasonable to suppose that an enterprise thus begun

has better prospect of staying on track in that spirit, insofar as that principle “lays down the law

for those who have joined,” and presumably those who join afterward too. But the thing about

governments - to get right down to it - is that they generally claim the authority to lay down the

law for everyone, not just those happy few who start it, and also not just for those who chance

to admire the achievements of the initiators. It’s hard to see why their confidence in one

another — or even the principle expressed in that confidence -- should suffice to validate their

authority claim to lay down the law for everyone else, in perpetuity.

What if the originators had been slaveholders? More to the point: what if their

promises - made on others’ behalf - were of a sort that perpetuated the institution of slavery?

What if the price of fidelity to the originating promises was to continue to countenance

slavery?

Maybe it’s not an accident Arendt doesn’t have more to say? Maybe it’s that she doesn’t

want to be giving an answer, after all? Maybe it’s a mistake to seek greater resolution from her

argument than she intends? Maybe the root of the opacity is a reluctance even to try to

theorize legitimation of government authority – not in the case of the American founding, at

least?

Anyway, that’s my hunch - the germ, at least, of a story I’d like to be able to tell,

connecting Arendt’s lucid apprehension of the burdens of the politics of human rights, and her
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fumbling inarticulacy (if that’s what it is) over the establishment – and perpetuation – of

legitimate government authority in the United States….