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

disruptive
dimension of direct action, Ranciere obscures the 
prefigurative
dimensions of direct action. I 
propose to read Arendt as offering a view that captures the democratic potential of prefigurative 
direct action – a future-oriented practice that sees the enactment of collective and creative power 
as central to a vibrant democratic politics. If, “[i]nstitutionalization marks the attenuation of 
democracy” (Wolin 1996, 39), then perhaps one alternative to the cycle of 
resistance/institutionalization is to propagate the practice of prefiguration. 
Arendt, Prefiguration and Creative Power 
Arendt, like Ranciere and Piven, emphasizes the importance of collective action as the 
essential component of her democratic theory. Whereas Ranciere uses the language of politics, 
interruptions and disruptions to signal his commitments to the spontaneous collective action of 
citizens, Arendt uses the language of power and action. “[P]ower comes into being only if and 
when men (
sic
) join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for 
whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another” (Arendt 1963, 166). Thus, the presence 
of power on Arendt’s view is necessarily contingent on the “the gathering-together of people for 

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a specified political purpose” (
ibid.
174). Beyond that, power involves action, specifically 
collective action. It is the experience of acting together, of exerting collective power, through 
which people become political beings. Moreover, the experience of this 
power through action
moves people in fundamental ways. As an example, Arendt points to the American Founders 
and argues that they were initially motivated by the important, but limited desire to restore “the 
basic rights and liberties of limited government” (
ibid.
146). Though the American Founders 
were initially focused on securing private freedoms, through the experience of acting together to 
secure those “modern” freedoms, they found that the exercise of public freedom was itself of the 
utmost importance. In reflecting on those tumultuous days, John Adams noted that “it is action, 
not rest, that constitutes our pleasure” (
ibid.
24). The Founders discovered, in other words, that 
the true meaning of freedom could not be captured fully by rights and limited government, but 
entailed the experience of power that was created through collective action. 
However, unlike Ranciere and Wolin, Arendt does not consign the power of collective 
action to a form of resistance, incapable of actually governing. While the two previously 
discussed thinkers focus on the collective power of citizens to resist, to intervene and to 
challenge existing power, Arendt’s citizens play a more constitutive role – collectivities have the 
power
 
to institute, to establish and to enact. More specifically, Arendt argues that citizens can 
act together to create and to found the institutions of collective self-governance. “Political 
freedom…means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing” (
ibid.
210).
The public freedom of acting together is not, for Arendt, necessarily episodic (though historically 
it often has been), nor is public freedom best understood as mere resistance. This is implicit in 
Arendt’s distinction between revolution and rebellion. Whereas revolution is aimed at the 
“constitution of freedom” (
ibid.
25), that is, the establishment of an order in which people might 

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rule themselves, rebellion is purely negative: it is the people deciding “who should