The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy

Patchen Markell

American Political Science Review, 2006, vol. 100, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: This article presents a novel critical account of a key concept in democratic theory, “rule,” via an unorthodox interpretation of Hannah Arendt's work. Many theorists treat democracy as one type of regime; others, stressing the importance of unruliness to democratic politics, challenge the reduction of democracy to a form of rule. Although this debate remains caught within conventional oppositions between order, closure, and continuity; and interruption, openness, and novelty, Arendt shows this whole matrix of oppositions to be an artifact of the dominance of a hierarchical understanding of rule. Her unusual critique of rule and her distinctive account of the meaning of “beginning” draw attention to an important dimension of political activity that lies off these axes of opposition, shedding new light on democratic agency and the forces that obstruct it.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:100:y:2006:i:01:p:1-14_06

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().