nor private spheres, these masses dwell in the cursed realm of “the Social,” with the overreaching of this sphere responsible for the disappearance both of public and private in the modern world. At the same time, in apparent contradiction, she embraces the direct democratic model of workers’ councils of Hungary in 1956, in which representative governance was replaced by direct collective self-governance. Why are not these the very “masses” Arendt fears will exert undue—or perhaps any—influence? Arendt directly answers such concerns from critics who assume that a critique of “the masses” is evidence of an equal distaste for popular self-governance. “[T]he assumptions [of such criticisms] are not difficult to point out. Theoretically, the most relevant and the most pernicious among them is the equation of ‘people’ and masses, which sounds only too plausible to everyone who lives in a mass society and is constantly exposed to its numerous irritations.”65
Arendt’s thought in her earlier The Human Condition focuses on the way that different types of political or personal activity determine the values and meaning of human life; thinking in terms of such meaning-producing activity can clarify the difference between “people” and “masses.” What we do determines who we are, not only individually but also collectively; and as any sociologist could attest, collectivities come in many different forms. For Arendt, groups are not even necessarily determined by those in them, as with the “working class” of orthodox Marxism wholly determined by its given position in production; Arendt was consistently critical of orthodox Marxism for this very reason. Instead, she argues that the manner of political activity itself constitutes the agent; in this way, the passive “masses”—with all their political party representation, television watching, and mass-produced commodities—are the precise opposite of ancient Athens’s direct demos. Seen in this way, the public constituted through Gallup polls, Nielsen ratings, and mass representative voting is an extraordinarily thin public: existing only in statistical average but with little resemblance to or resonance with the thoughts and passions of those mysterious persons surveyed in its construction. This thinness, at its extreme, is precisely what I’m calling an “empty public.” More akin to the democracy of ancient Athens, in Arendt’s view, are the sorts of assemblies present in workers’ councils and revolutionary streets. She does not oppose the masses to a professional political elite, as she is often unfortunately read, but distinguishes between groups of people as a mass, and any collectivity of the same bodies constituted by political self-activity. For her, the ancient Athenian plenum offers a participatory ideal:
[T]he two-party system…has by no means enabled the citizen to become a “participator” in public affairs. The most the citizen can hope for is to be “represented,” whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions of the people are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods…but no opinion.66
Arendt considers that politics and deliberation are inseparable from and unthinkable outside participation, since “[w]henever knowing and doing have parted company, the space of freedom is lost.”67 Political deliberation, the working-out of dissensus, which can only emerge from collective activity, is the arena in which meaning is produced; outside of its commotion, only “moods,” but not actual “opinions,” are possible. That Arendt has been drastically misread by her followers on the right is nowhere as evident as in her passages on councilism, when she openly calls “for a new form of government that would permit every member of the modern egalitarian society to become a ‘participator’ in public affairs.”68
Arendt’s vision is strikingly mirrored in the “Solidarity Statement from Cairo,” written by participants in the Tahrir revolution in Egypt to advise their American counterparts. In the Egyptian revolutionaries’ formation, Arendt’s egalitarian “participation in public affairs,” and the very physical spaces that make such participation possible, are clearly more than a precondition of politics; they become the core political content of the struggle itself:
In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting—these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.69
As the next chapters will attempt to bear out, the Tahrir statement indicates a profound shift shared by contemporary movements around the world. After decades of disastrously effective demobilization strategies, contemporary social movement actors have finally found new ways to mobilize, or rather constitute, publics founded on a fundamental revulsion to those very demobilizing strategies. These publics are necessarily immediate, unmediated, by mass media or political representation. The goal of these immediate publics is less communication (of the justice of their cause or anything else) than constitution: they are forming new collective subjects through the intimacies of shared risk and power, persisting in spite of state attempts at repression, and articulating their power through this very persistence.
3 Personal interview (A).
4 Although neoliberal policies have driven social shifts and movement responses in powerfully similar ways across the globe—even in states purportedly outside the global-capitalist sphere like Syria and Iran—this study will focus, with some exceptions, on examples in the recent US context.
5 James Gilligan, Preventing Violence (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 102.
This definition of violence alone is adequate to refute the thesis of Steven Pinker’s awful The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011), based as it is on a laughably narrow view of violence, massively downplaying, for example, civilian war casualties in modernity. Nassir Taleb’s criticism of Pinker’s statistical abuses, or Stephen Corry’s bearing out of the dishonest cherry-picking justification of the “brutal savage” trope, among many others, should already have been adequate.
6 E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.
7 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
8 Michael Katz, “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 188.
9 Ibid., 189.
10 Ibid., 193.
11 Ibid., 192. My emphasis.
12 Gilligan, Preventing Violence, 122.
