Hannah Arendt: On Council Democracy

An excerpt from “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”, published in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Feb., 1958).

In order to understand the council system, it is well to remember that it is as old as the party system itself; as such, it represents the only alternative to it, that is, the only alternative of democratic electoral representation to the one presented by the Continental multiparty system with its insistence on class interests on the one hand and ideology, or Weltanschauung, on the other. But while the historical origin of the party system lies in Parliament, the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and spontaneous demands of the people, and they were not deduced from an ideology nor foreseen, let alone preconceived, by any theory about the best form of government. Wherever they appeared, they were met with utmost hostility from the party-bureaucracies and their leaders from right to left and with the unanimous neglect of political theorists and political scientists. The point is that the councils have always been undoubtedly democratic, but in a sense never seen before and never thought about. And since nobody, neither statesmen nor political scientists nor parties, has ever paid any serious attention to this new and wholly untried form of organization, its stubborn re-emergence for more than a century could not be more spontaneous and less influenced by outside interest or theory.

Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many respects. Thus, the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom, and not selected by the party machinery and proposed to the electorate either as individuals with alternate choices or as a slate of candidates. The choice, moreover, of the voter is not prompted by a program or a platform or an ideology, but exclusively by his estimation of a man, in whose personal integrity, courage and judgment he is supposed to have enough confidence to entrust him with his representation. The elected, therefore, is not bound by anything except trust in his personal qualities, and his pride is “to have been elected by the workers, and not by the government”l6 or a party. Once such a body of trusted men is elected, it will of course again develop differences of opinion which in turn may lead into the formation of “parties.” But these groups of men holding the same opinion within the councils would not be parties, strictly speaking; they would constitute those factions from which the parliamentary parties originally developed. The election of a candidate would not depend upon his adherence to a given faction, but still on his personal power of persuasion with which he could present his point of view. In other words, the councils would control the parties, they would not be their representatives. The strength of any given faction would not depend upon its bureaucratic apparatus and not even upon the appeal of its program or Weltanschauung, but on the number of trusted and trustworthy men it holds in its ranks. This was the reason, for instance, why Lenin felt he had to emasculate the soviets in the initial stages of the Russian Revolution; it turned out that the Social Revolutionaries counted more men trusted by the people than the Bolsheviks, so that the power of the Communist Party, which had been responsible for the revolution, was endangered by the council system which had grown out of the revolution.

Remarkable, finally, is the great inherent flexibility of the system, which seems to need no special conditions for its establishment except the coming together and acting together of a certain number of people on a non-temporary basis. In Hungary, we have seen the~imultaneous setting-up of all kinds of councils-neighborhood councils which emerged from living together and grew into county and other territorial Councils, revolutionary councils which grew out of fighting together, councils of writers and artists which, one is tempted to think, were born in the cafe’s, students’ and youths’ councils at the university, military councils in the army, councils of civil servants in the ministries, workers’ councils in the factories, and so on. The men elected were communists and non-communists; party lines seem to have played no role whatsoever, the criterion, in the words of a newspaper, being solely that there is “none among them who would misuse his power or think only of his personal position.” And this is more a criterion of qualification than of morality. Whoever misuses power or perverts it into violence, or is only interested in his private affairs and without concern for the common world, is simply not fit to play a role in political life. The same principles were observed in the further stages of election; for the councils, elected directly at the base, were urged to elect representatives for the higher bodies “without regard for Party affiliation and with due regard to the confidence of the working people.”17

One of the most striking aspects of the Hungarian Revolution is that this principle of the council system not only reemerged, but that in twelve short days a good deal of its range of potentialities could emerge with it. The council-men were hardly elected in direct vote when these new councils began freely to coordinate among themselves to choose from their own midst the representatives for the higher councils up to the Supreme Xational Council, the counterpart of normal government,-and the initiative for this came from the just revived National Peasant Party, certainly the last group to be suspected of extreme ideas. While this Supreme Council remained in preparation, the necessary preliminary steps had been taken everywhere: workers’ councils had set up coordinating committees and Central Workers’ Councils were already functioning in many areas; revolutionary councils in the provinces were coordinated and planning to set up a National Revolutionary Committee with which to replace the National Assembly. Here, as in all other instances, when for the shortest historical moment the voice of the people has been heard, unaltered by the shouts of the mob and unstifled by the bureaucracies of the parties, we can do no more than draw a very sketchy picture of the potentialities and physiognomy of the only democratic system which in Europe, where the party system was discredited almost as soon as it was born, was ever really popular. (There is, and always has been, a decisive difference between the Continental multi-party system and the Anglo-American two-party system which I cannot discuss here, but which the reader must keep in mind for a proper understanding of European events and revolutions.) The rise of the councils, not the restoration of parties, was the clear sign of a true upsurge of democracy against dictatorship, of freedom against tyranny.

References

16 See The Revolt in Hungary; A Documentary Chronology of Events, which records the story of the Hungarian revolution in a compilation of the broadcasts of the Hungarian radio stations, official and unofficial. Published by the Free Europe Committee, New York, n.d.

17 lbid.