Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

not
rule 
them” (
ibid.
30). In a rebellion, the people act as a check on their rulers, temporarily resisting 
egregious violations or injustices. The people rise up, but die back down, returning to their 
private lives, either exuberant from the successful realization of their power or defeated by a 
combination of exhaustion and repression. In a revolution, the people do not merely return to 
their private lives with their rights intact, but build a new order in which they actively rule 
themselves. “[T]he end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of 
freedom” (
ibid.
133). In this sense, one can understand Ranciere and Wolin as theorists of 
rebellion and Arendt as a theorist of revolution. If we conceptualize direct action as a mode by 
which citizens not only intervene and interrupt power structures, but actually authorize 
themselves to decide and to act on issues of common concern, then Arendt goes further than 
either of these two contemporary radicals. She provides theoretical basis for conceiving of 
democratic self-governance as a form of common power and collective action. 
In this respect, Arendt shares significantly more common ground with the anarchist-
inspired practice of direct action than either Ranciere or Wolin for whom a ‘police’ order is the 
necessary counterpart – in fact, the normal state of affairs – to fleeting instances of democratic 
commonality.
30
If we hold that the basic positive claim of anarchists is that people are capable of 
collectively managing their own affairs, then Ranciere and Wolin seem clearly opposed to that 
30
It should be note that while Arendt acknowledges that classical anarchists such as Proudhon and Bakunin have 
highlighted the role of decentralized and participatory councils, she quickly dismisses the possibility that what she is 
discussing has any significant commonalities with anarchism. “[T]he truth is that these essentially anarchist 
political thinkers were singularly unequipped to deal with a phenomenon which demonstrated so clearly how a 
revolution did not end with the abolition of state and government but, on the contrary, aimed at the foundation of a 
new state and the establishment of a new form of government” (Arendt 1963, 253). This dismissal, however, is 
inadequate. Arendt fails to recognize that anarchists wish to draw a distinction between a system of councils, on the 
one hand, and a state or government, on the other. While the former are institutions by which people can manage 
their own affairs, the latter are the institutions whereby some – whether they are elected or not – rule others. The 
distinction between 
governing
and 
being governed
is so essential to Arendt’s own thought that it is astonishing she 
missed it.

---

142 
claim. Arendt, on the other hand, does not. She laments what Ranciere and Wolin seem to 
celebrate – that citizens’ only option of public activity is to “preserve the spirit of resistance to 
whatever government they have elected, since the only power they retain is the ‘reserve power of 
revolution’” (
ibid.
229). However, the failure to realize public freedom in America was not a 
foregone conclusion, as Ranciere and Wolin may be inclined to claim. On Arendt’s account, it is 
not that people become unable or uninterested in governing themselves, it is that the structures 
that would facilitate self-governance were not established.
The type of institutions or arrangements of power that Arendt believes fosters public 
freedom are wards or councils. Such councils have “made their appearance in every genuine 
revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” springing up as the “spontaneous 
organs of the people” and amounting to nothing less than “an entirely new form of government, 
with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organized during the course of 
the revolution itself” (
ibid.
241). Arendt sees in moments of democratic upheaval a very real 
intention to turn spontaneously developed popular councils into organs of a new mode of 
collective self-governance. What is so noteworthy about the councils is the degree to which 
people organically adopt similar modes of organization and action. Whether in 1917 Russia, 
1956 Hungary, 2001 Argentina, or 2011 across North Africa, Europe and North America, people 
have organized themselves in decentralized, participatory and egalitarian councils. Despite 
widely disparate political tendencies in all those situations, the form of organization itself was 
largely assumed. All of these councils were created through direct action. Direct actions were 
thus expressions of political freedom that created a space for ongoing expressions of political 
freedom. Whereas, Ranciere and Wolin defend self-authorized disruptive action, Arendt takes 
things one step further. She shows that direct action is more than a form of resistance it is an 

---

143 
effort to create something entirely new: a mode of collective self-governance, a constructive 
political vision. 
Importantly, Arendt’s theory of action is not reducible to a communicative theory: speech 
and action are not identical. For example, she uses phrases like “speech and action” and “word 
and deed” (Arendt 1958, 176), suggesting that action is not simply reducible to speech. At the 
same time, though, speech and action are clearly interrelated. 
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where 
words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil 
intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy 
but to establish relations and create new realities” (Arendt 1958, 200).
In my view, prefigurative direct action exemplifies the notion that word and deed are united: our 
actions are designed to give substance to our words and are an, often explicit, attempt to establish 
(at least temporarily) new “relations” and “realities.” The prefigurative side of direct action can 
be understood from and Arendtian framework as the desire to enable 
perpetual founding
– an 
understanding of democracy in which it is always possible to build and create anew in concert 
with others. Prefigurative direct action captures the reality that the future is always open and the 
prototypical democratic act is building possible futures in the present. 
However, for direct action to be democratic and not collapse into authoritarianism, direct 
action must be, in some sense, 
self-limiting
. Arendt’s conceptualization of power carries 
precisely this self-limiting capacity. Power, on Arendt’s view, cannot be collected, transferred or 
carried around – it can only be carried out. “[P]ower cannot be stored up and kept in 
reserve…like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization” (Arendt 1958, 
200). Power depends on people acting together and it cannot last without some underlying 
ethical norm that sustains people’s commitment to it. Power cannot “be possessed like strength 
and applied like force” because it is “dependent upon the unreliable and only temporary 

---

144 
agreement of many wills and intentions” (
ibid
.
 
201). Thus, the power mobilized by direct action 
can be sustained only through people’s ongoing commitment to act together. In this sense, such 
actions have an inherently self-limiting character. Speaking of the realm of action, Arendt (
ibid. 
199) notes, “[i]ts peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does 
survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears…with the 
disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.” The intuition then is that there is something 
unique about the power of action that does not outlast the act that creates it. Moreover, 
practitioners of direct action who are committed to democracy can and should consciously 
extend these self-limiting characteristics. While the practice of direct action enables people to 
build, create and found, democratic direct actions should leave space for others to do the same.
That is to say, democratic direct action should not close off the possibility for other’s to act, to 
build, to create and to found. As I elaborate in the concluding section of the paper, prefigurative 
direct actions can amplify their democratic potential by engaging in actions that open up spaces 
for people to be(come) political actors. At the same time, not all direct actions with democratic 
potential are intended to create fully public spaces, for examples strikes or shutdowns, or efforts 
to establish squats, gardens or worker-managed factories. However, these types of actions can 
also be self-limiting insofar as the actors do not monopolize all such spaces, but leave room for 
others to engage with such spaces as they see fit.