Hannah Arendt, antiracist rebellion, and the counterinsurgent logic of the social

Abstract

Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them.

A review of science teaching approaches for equity focusing on race, class, and religion from the perspectives of Freire's and Arendt's theories of education

“…She identified racism as the main destructive force in Europe but saw the United States as an exception. Through her argumentation, she actively contained the racist structures and beliefs within the United States, classifying them as social, not political (Kujala, 2023). Despite criticism, Arendt stuck to her view on segregation (Kujala, 2023) and, except for certain arguments, her convictions (Morey, 2014).…”

Refounding Denied: Hannah Arendt on Limited Principles and the Lost Promise of Reconstruction

“… 21. At the “Is law dead?” conference, the Black intellectual Harold Cruse offered a reading of the same passage from Tocqueville (Cruse in Rostow, 317), concluding that “from the very outset, the law was always dead” for Black people (p. 326). Although one might doubt whether Arendt was influenced by Cruse’s talk when she expanded “Civil Disobedience” over the summer of 1970, Kujala (2023, 304) has pointed to resonances between Cruse’s and Arendt’s distinctions between rebellion and revolution. …”