Arendt, or the An-Archic Heart of Politics

This article claims Hannah Arendt’s place on the terrain of philosophical anarchism. Totalitarianism, it should be remembered, is the translation of total Herrschaft, which means total domination, complete arché. Arendt’s journey into the Greek polis is the discovery of the an-archic heart of politics. Where there is arché, there still dwell — as in the domestic sphere — family ties and patriarchal and hierarchical relationships. Only where subordination to arché falls away, in a democratic anarchy, are the bonds of another community established, namely the community of politics. Arendt thus intuited the link between democracy and anarchy, a connection that was made a taboo for centuries and has still not been brought to light. And she clearly saw the two great dangers of a reduction of democracy to the archic device: namely the primacy of the oiko-nomy, understood as a gigantic domestic administration, and the retreat into family-nations based on the principle of birth and descent. In both cases, a re-emergence of the arché deposes politics itself.