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It happens ‘in-between’: on
the spatial birth of politics in
Arendt's On Revolution
a
Rodrigo Cordero
a
Department of Sociology and Institute of Humanities,
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
Published online: 04 Feb 2014.

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To cite this article: Rodrigo Cordero (2014) It happens ‘in-between’: on the spatial
birth of politics in Arendt's On Revolution , European Journal of Cultural and Political
Sociology, 1:3, 249-265, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2014.992115

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 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014
Vol. 1, No. 3, 249–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.992115

It happens ‘in-between’: on the spatial birth of politics in

Arendt’s On Revolution
Rodrigo Cordero*

Department of Sociology and Institute of Humanities, Universidad Diego Portales,

Santiago, Chile
Downloaded by [Rodrigo Cordero] at 09:55 07 February 2015

This paper proposes a reading of Arendt’s On Revolution that focuses on the

spatial nature of the revolutionary phenomenon. It advances an understanding
of political foundation as the ‘opening’ of a topos for political existence. I
draw on the key notion of the ‘in-between’ that Arendt uses to depict the
basic structure of the world as a space of coexistence and plurality. In the
first part, I elucidate the anti-essentialist meaning of this term. Insofar as the
‘in-between’ refers to the constitutive distance that both separates and binds
individuals together, it amounts to a social-ontological condition of political
action. Yet On Revolution also shows that the grammar of the ‘in-between’
is a historical–political achievement that must be created and secured by
human action on terms that are not given. In the second part, I reconstruct
Arendt’s account of the experience of modern revolutions and suggest that
the political task of instituting and keeping such interstitial space open is
enacted in the experience of rupture of time where the new can appear (the
temporal abyss of freedom), and in the practice of establishing lasting
institutions based on laws (the normative binding of foundation). The
relation between these moments configures what I call the politics of the in-
between.
Keywords: political foundation; space; in-between; time; law

In the experiment of the present or in the longing which appeals to the past, these
men have already formed or are forming another in-between, which in turn sets
the rules for the just and unjust.
Hannah Arendt – Denktagebuch

Introduction
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is a remarkable reflection on the meaning of the
concept and the perplexities of the revolutionary events that have defined the spiri-
tual and institutional shape of modernity. The book, to be sure, does not rank high
in the literature of political sociology that customarily addresses the causes of

*Email: rodrigo.cordero@udp.cl

© 2015 European Sociological Association

 250 R. Cordero
success and failure of modern revolutions; it actually challenges the very terms
upon which this type of analysis is made (Fine, 2001; Walsh, 2008). At its
centre lies Arendt’s concern with the question of whether ‘freedom’ can still be
considered to be, as she believes it should, the primary and ultimate goal of poli-
tics. While facing the consequences of the totalitarian destruction of human life
and the cold war reduction of politics to ideology and violence, Arendt’s
account of the equivocal course of the French and the American Revolutions
seems to follow quite closely the story of a ‘defeated cause’ (Tassin, 2007). For
if we stick to the historical record, the revolutionary quest for ‘the foundation of
a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear’ has often
ended in tragedy or oblivion rather than in a worldly and tangible reality
(Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 125). However, what motivates Arendt’s writing is not
sheer despair but, rather, the conviction that ‘revolutions [still] are the only
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events which confront us directly with the problem of beginning’ (p. 21).
In order to understand what the ‘problem of beginning’ consists in, we need
to ask what is actually begun by the deeds of revolutionary actors. Arendt’s dis-
tinctive answer – that ‘the central idea of revolution is the foundation of
freedom’ (p. 125) – is not easy to grasp, as it brings together apparently incom-
patible attributes of political life: an idea of political freedom as the potential of
human action for spontaneous ‘new beginnings’, and a conception of political
foundation as the concerted act of establishing a body of ‘lasting institutions’.
The point of this ‘central idea’, though, is not to outline a normative theory of
revolutions that reconciles both moments, but rather to direct our reflection to
their conflictive and uncertain relation in political reality. The phrase actually
expresses a fundamental difficulty that haunts modern politics, namely, the
absence of a proper foundation (Lefort, 1988; Marchart, 2007). At the
moment of revolutionary beginning, actors and observers are equally confronted
with the striking fact that there is no ‘political substance’ or ultimate ‘ground’ to
which they may hold on, for they deal ‘not with anything substantial but with an
apparition’ (Arendt, 2006/1961, p. 4). The ‘apparition’ Arendt talks about has
nothing to do with the revelation of some transcendent truth or the discovery
of a hidden historical law, but with the ability of individuals acting together to
‘call something into being which did not exist before’ (Arendt, 1998/1958,
p. 150). Still, if what is called into being in the event of revolution is nothing
‘substantial’, what is it then?
In this paper, I want to focus on what I consider to underlie Arendt’s approach
to this troubled question about political foundation: the idea that politics is a
‘spatial construct’. If we follow her meditation on the foundation of freedom,
we may venture to say that what defines the revolutionary birth of politics is,
quite literally, the ‘opening’ of a topos for political existence, the drawing of a
grammar for life in common, the grounding of a space for freedom. Her insistence
on this point throughout the pages of On Revolution is far from trivial as it estab-
lishes a way of understanding political foundation as an act of spacing. This means
that the political can only be founded upon an opening ‘gap’, the space of a fissure
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 251
that both separates and binds us together, and which must be sustained and
renewed since politics ceases wherever this gap no longer exists. In many of
her writings, Arendt calls this interstitial space the ‘in-between’ (Zwischen).1
Although this notion is not the explicit focus of attention in Arendt’s book, it
does exert a pivotal presence in her conceptual and historical account of
modern revolutions. My argument, simply put, is that the construction of a
space ‘in-between’ human beings turns out to be the political goal of revolution
and, at the same time, is the existential condition that makes revolution possible
as an experiment in political freedom. But what sort of thing is this space
exactly and why is it significant for revolutionary politics?
In what follows, I propose a reading of this central notion of the ‘in-between’
on two planes in Arendt’s reflection on the foundation of politics. Firstly, I argue
that the ‘in-between’ is the social-ontological premise of her understanding of
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politics as a space of plurality; that is, the indispensable ground upon which pol-
itical actions gain meaning and power. Thus, the ‘in-between’ entails a non-sub-
jective, relational conception of the human world, which from the start is
structured as a space of sociation and coexistence. Yet this does not mean that
the ‘in-between’ is a fixed terrain. In Arendt’s account, the ‘in-between’ is an
emergent domain, a historical–political achievement that must be created and
secured by human action on terms that are not given. Under this form, the
‘in-between’ is actually the key to a peculiar ‘phenomenology’ of the political
creation of a common world that unfolds at the heart of On Revolution (Fine,
2014).2
Following this interpretation, the ‘in-between’ appears as an emergent onto-
logical domain that requires human effort to be maintained open and alive. The
event of revolution amounts to a critical reopening of the world that enacts this
space in a twofold manner: in the actual experience of rupture of time, it opens
a space where something ‘new’ can appear, and in the practice of establishing
lasting social relations, it institutes a space based on laws. The constellation of
both moments, the temporality of freedom and the legality of foundation, config-
ures what I propose to call the politics of the in-between.
A central implication of this reading of On Revolution, one that we should not
overlook in the present time, is that constituting and preserving politics as a space
‘in-between’ compels us to acknowledge that the human world is a place without a
principle of closure. This absence of a final foundation is a factor that may explain
why the formation of a unanimous whole is often a desired political goal and why
sheer violence, while threatening our ability to live in common, may appear as a
necessary means to ensure its full realization. And yet the very absence of absolute
principles is also, according to Arendt, what sets in motion the subjective desire to
gain political freedom and what ultimately grounds the objective right to resist a
world that turns into a suffocating totality. In this light, the event of revolution
reveals a compelling truth about political life: that the space ‘in-between’ is
perhaps the only sphere where human beings have ‘the right to expect miracles’
(Arendt, 2005, p. 114). After all, to found freedom means to institute a place
 252 R. Cordero
and form of life in which, even if only for a short time span, we can become pol-
itical actors and freedom can appear again.

In-between: a social ontology of politics

To begin tracing the meaning of the ‘in-between’, we can direct our attention to
some of Arendt’s texts from the 1950s, the period immediately after the writing
of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and before the publication of On Revolu-
tion (1963). In December 1952, Arendt writes in her thought diary
(Denktagebuch):

As soon as there are many men, a specific de-deified sphere begins. This sphere is
precisely what God could not create … because in the plurality the in-between is
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established as a merely human realm, not ideal, which from the idea as such
cannot be foreseen or mastered. (Arendt, 2006, p. 265)

In a later fragment from the unfinished project Introduction to Politics (Einführung

in die Politik) – intended to be a two-volume book, On Revolution being one of
them (Kohn, 2005) – Arendt expands her explanation of the nature and signifi-
cance of the ‘in-between’:

[W]henever human beings come together – be it in private or socially, be it in public

or politically – a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and sep-
arates them from one another. Every such space has its own structure that changes
over time and reveals itself in a private context as custom, in a social context as con-
vention, and in a public context as laws, constitutions, statutes, and the like. Wher-
ever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-
between space [Zwischen-Raum] where all human affairs are conducted. (Arendt,
2005, p. 106)

The passages cited suggest that the ‘in-between’ is, strictly speaking, a space that
‘comes into being’ among human beings, as it emerges from the existential con-
dition of being together in the world as a ‘plurality’ of individuals through the
mediation of speech and action (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 199). In Arendt’s
thought, the ‘in-between’ is thus equivalent to the world and, in turn, the world
can only exist structured as an ‘in-between’. This means that the world, as a
space that is common and does not belong to anyone in particular, relates
people to each other precisely because it creates a gap that separates them.
Thus, the ‘in-between’ is the essential principle that makes social life possible,
as it constitutes the middle ground where we can ultimately appear before, act
with, be seen by and move among others, as well as the abyss that reveals that
society is not founded on an essence, centre or final ground. This conception
immediately prevents us from indulging in the idea that the world is a solid
unity and essential whole; it is, rather, akin to the shape of a fragile crystal that
requires care to ensure its luminosity and permanence. The interstitial space of
the ‘in-between’ atrophies whenever the plurality of its members is dismantled,
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 253
either by their radical fusion into a homogeneous mass that eliminates
singularity or by an absolute separation that condemns them to solitary
existence. The materialization of both possibilities is the core of Arendt’s
critique of capitalist mass society and her analysis of the ‘originality’ of totalitarian
terror.
As Arendt describes it in The Human Condition, the ‘in-between’ is far from
being reducible to an empirical, physical space. To be sure, material things give the
world its distinct ‘objectivity’ and ‘durability’ as they generate ‘specific worldly
interests’ which lie ‘between people and therefore can relate and bind them
together’ (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 182). Without the ‘stabilizing’ function of this
world of material things and human artefacts, there would be only the ‘eternal
movement’ of nature, but neither objectivity nor remembrance (p. 137).
However, this material constitution does not exhaust the meaning of the world
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‘in-between’, it is actually ‘overgrown with an altogether different in-between

[that] owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one
another’ (p. 182). This ‘in-between’ configures what Arendt calls ‘the “web” of
human relationships’, which, ‘for all its intangibility, is no less real than the
world of things we visibly have in common’ (p. 183). We can see in these
remarks that the ‘in-between’ is a category that designates a world of relationships
constituted by the presence of others rather than by a substantive identity that
draws us back to an original unity and forth to a common destiny. It entails a
radical social ontology in which our individual existence is, right from the begin-
ning, coexistence and sociation with other individuals capable of speech and
action. The ‘in-between’, therefore, names the constitutive distance between indi-
viduals where a specifically human life can begin and where life in society
becomes worth living. Insofar as the world appears different to every person
according to their position in it, there is room for symbolization, meaning-
making and judgement, that is to say, for words to be heard, deeds to be seen
and events to be discussed and remembered. So the ‘in-between’ indicates that
the world is an open space of ‘perspectives’ in which it becomes possible to recog-
nize that ‘both you and I are human’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 14).
The social-ontological category of the ‘in-between’ allows Arendt to rethink
the origin of politics and the relative ‘autonomy of the political’, in a way that
both distances her from the tradition of political theory and challenges orthodox
positivist sociology (Baehr, 2010; Villa, 2010; Walsh, 2011).3 As she writes, ‘poli-
tics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real
political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established
as relationships’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 95). This strong emphasis on the relational,
non-subjective foundation of political life entails a defence of politics as a
realm that relies on the human capacity to act in concert and give birth to a new
state of affairs (initium). According to this view, what is at stake in politics is
not biological life, particular interests or subjective ideas, but the existence of a
public world where freedom can make its appearance (Arendt, 1998/1958,
pp. 246–247).
 254 R. Cordero
In On Revolution, Arendt is emphatic that the domain of the ‘in-between’
‘does not automatically come into being wherever men live together’ (Arendt,
1990/1963, p. 19). As a ‘de-deified’ and ‘non-ideal’ space, the real existence of
the ‘in-between’ is ‘a product of human effort’ and a ‘property of a man-made
world’ (p. 31). In other words, ‘the in-between is the truly historical–political’
(Arendt, 2006, p. 171), which is to say that, despite its strong ontological connota-
tion, this space must be instituted and maintained by human action on terms which
are not given.

The politics of the ‘in-between’: temporality and legality

Now, the revolutionary road to a new grammar for political existence is paved with
perplexities and dangers. As Arendt’s comparative analysis of the French and the
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American revolutions shows, ‘the foundation of freedom has always been uncer-
tain, if not altogether futile’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 29). We may attribute the par-
ticular course of a revolution towards glittering success or blunt failure to a
constellation of historical, cultural and social conditions; Arendt’s own account
is full of insights. Yet the uncertainty that haunts revolutions is rooted in ‘[t]he
absence of a maker’ in the political realm and therefore in ‘the extraordinary
frailty and unreliability of strictly human affairs’ (Arendt, 2000/1964, p. 180;
see 1998/1958, chap. 5). In this regard, it is an error to believe that revolutions
are the sort of phenomena that can be carefully planned in advance, like an archi-
tect’s design for a building, or executed according to predefined roles like a play-
wright’s script. As revolutions depend on the power that arises from acting
together, neither the architect nor the playwright represents for Arendt an adequate
figure to account for the creation of the non-tangible space ‘in-between’.
In Arendt’s theorizing of the birth of politics as a spatial construct, the ‘in-
between’ is directly linked to the play of faculties inherent in human action: the
faculty of achieving the ‘unlikely’ through spontaneous action and the faculty
of establishing relationships through the practice of ‘mutual promising’. While
the former interrupts the course of time and so opens an abyss in historical experi-
ence, that is, the fleeting moment of liberation that breaks with the existing order of
things, the latter sets into motion the constitution of a political body based on the
binding power of laws, that is, the normative texture that helps to keep open and
‘regulate the realm of the in-between’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 145).

On the spur of time

The suggestion that revolutionary beginnings unfold through an act of spacing
appeals to the idea that the foundation of political freedom can only take place
in and as the space of a gap. At first glance, this non-tangible gap may be difficult
to grasp given that it is a space ‘enacted on the spur of time’ (Arendt, 1990/1963,
p. 173). Whether it is the collapse of a regime and the progressive loss of authority
of its whole power structure, the momentous gathering of people on the streets and
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 255
public spaces demanding their rights or the emergence of organized struggles
against oppressive rule driven by the promise of a freedom to come, the outbreak
of a revolution is a moment that takes individuals by surprise and its actual
location is as unpredictable as a lightning flash. It is like an unexpected presence
that in the ‘blink of an eye’ (Augenblick) calls for attention and response (Friese,
2001).
The experience of revolutionary action is equivalent to the experience of a cut,
that is, the ‘infinitely improbable’ event that like a ‘miracle’ interrupts the course
of the world, breaks the steady flow of everyday life and creates an ‘interval’
between things that are ‘no longer’ and things that are ‘not yet’ (Arendt, 1998/
1958, p. 178; 2005, pp. 111–114; 2006/1961, pp. 9–11). Without this ‘abyss’ in
temporality, the men and women involved in revolutionary politics would never
be able to claim the power to achieve the unlikely (resist and bring down oppres-
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sive rule) and call forth the freedom to bring into being something that did not exist
before (founding a new political body) (Arendt, 1977, pp. 195–217). The opening
of this gap gives the impression that the revolutionaries and the revolution itself
are suspended in the middle of a temporal space where there is ‘nothing to hold
on to’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 206). In this context, the concrete dilemma for pol-
itical actors is that once the world itself is experienced as lacking solid ground,
their actions can no longer be explained as links in a causal chain or modelled
upon absolute ideas. For the extraordinary moment that breaks the mere succes-
sion between past experiences and future expectations (e.g. acts of liberation,
the abrupt downfall of political institutions or the sudden rise of novel forms of
political organization) unfolds ‘as if the initiator had abolished the temporal
sequence itself, or as if the agents were expelled from the temporal order and
its continuity’ (Arendt, 1990/1963).4
So it is understandable why the American and French revolutionaries of the
eighteenth century, deprived of the protection of traditional standards and religious
trust in authority to account for their own actions, showed such a ‘strange enthu-
siasm’ for the ‘founding legends’ of ancient Rome. For faced with the problem of
‘absolute’ beginnings, they found in Roman faithfulness to the ‘authority’ of the
‘act of foundation’ a formidable source of inspiration (Arendt, 1977, vol. II,
pp. 207–209; 1990/1963, pp. 196–199, 204–205). Arendt argues that the particular-
ity of this solution lies in the activation of a ‘memory’, a sort of epochal bilingualism
that becomes manifest in the ‘extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the
eyes of the centuries to come’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 198). Yet this comment should
not be taken as a celebration of a longing for the past, as Arendt is well aware that it
could easily turn into the pathological ‘imitation of past events’. Actually, this is
what, in her view, characterizes the failures and excesses of ‘professional revolution-
aries’ who, haunted by the belief that the act of foundation could be executed fol-
lowing the teachings of the ‘school of past revolutions’, eradicate the radical
contingency of concerted action (pp. 56–57, 258–260).5
Arendt’s main concern is how to keep open the ‘in-between’ space, without the
abyss of temporality swallowing the revolution and, with it, the sphere of action
 256 R. Cordero
and power to which it momentarily gave rise. The answer to this question comes in
the form of a tension that she discovers at the heart of revolutionary politics,
namely, that in order to allow the occurrence of new beginnings – the possibility
of subversion and interruption of the course of political–historical time – the revo-
lution needs to give stability and durability to a new form of government, which
means giving the revolution a legal-constitutional form. This implies that the con-
stitution of freedom always brings with it a necessary dose of closure that limits
the genuine occurrence of new beginnings and therefore contradicts the revolu-
tionary act. On this point, Esposito concludes that revolution ‘cannot simul-
taneously be an original rupture and constitutio libertatis’ because ‘for that to
be possible it would have to remain in a fluid state of continuous rupture’
(1999, p. 35). What Esposito overlooks, though, is that for Arendt the apparent
incompatibility of these two elements is actually a historical result of the revolu-
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tionary experience itself. She sees the clearest indication of this unsolved tension
in the dichotomous logic that dominates modern political thought according to
which the new and the permanent are unrelated opposites.
The problem, as I read Arendt’s argument, is that without understanding the
internal relationship between these two components of the revolutionary phenom-
enon – the fleeting event of political freedom and the constitution of lasting insti-
tutions of government – the costs of sharply disjoining them in political life cannot
be properly understood and confronted (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 202, 223). Seen in
this light, On Revolution is a text that takes the temporal gap opened by revolution-
ary experience as a condition and means for investigating the divorce between the
eventful beginning and the formal grounding of political life (Vatter, 2000). What
holds them together, I suggest, is that both moments are shaped by the same
grammar: the spatial grammar of the ‘in-between’.

The ‘binding power’ of law

As we have seen, there is no easy answer to the problem of how to keep the space
‘in-between’ open and alive after the ‘fleeting moment’ of revolutionary action
has passed (the temporal ‘abyss of freedom’). In principle, the demand to give
institutional shape to a political space seems to be inscribed in the longing for pol-
itical freedom that fuels the act of beginning. And yet the paradox of this space
structured as an ‘in-between’ is that, in order to exist at all, it must remain a ‘rela-
tional’, ‘de-deified’, ‘non-ideal’ and ‘open’ space. In Arendt’s opinion, classical
solutions in political and social theory dramatically fail to address the problem
of where to ground the legitimacy and permanence of a political body. To
solve the riddle, they resort to transcendent entities (such as a superior will, sover-
eign power, natural law or some other type of political substance that claims uni-
versality) that offer superior principles of ‘rule’, but which in practice do away
with the very conditions that make the birth of a space for political life possible:
the inescapable plurality and togetherness of human existence (Arendt, 2007a,
2007b).
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 257
My reading of Arendt’s analysis of the experience of modern revolutions
emphasizes that the grammar of the ‘in-between’, the intangible distance that
allows life in common, is not only simply an ontological condition but also a pol-
itical achievement that must be secured. Arendt’s major claim in this regard is that
we have no other means at hand than ‘action’ and ‘power’ to enact and maintain
this political space. This is because action, even with all its uncertainties and
dangers, is ‘the only faculty that demands the plurality of men’, and because
power, which should not be reduced to the will to command or to violence, is
‘the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space
by which men are mutually related’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 175). Actually, both
human attributes interpenetrate each other in the field of politics to the extent
that action in concert with others is the living source from which power actually
springs, while power is the relational force that keeps people together for the
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purpose of action. This co-originality means, to put it in Kantian form, that

action without power is empty and lost, and power without action is blind and tyr-
annical. Interestingly enough, the peculiarity of action and power is that both are
highly ‘unreliable’ human attributes, so they could easily undermine the very aim
of ‘constituting a stable structure to house’ our common existence; yet Arendt’s
crucial suggestion is that they ‘combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the
making and keeping of promises’ (p. 175). This practice is a highly relevant
virtue in politics insofar as promising – the capacity of individuals to commit
themselves to living together under certain normative conditions – is a means of
dealing with ‘the ocean of future uncertainty’, a means which does not need adher-
ence to any absolute or transcendent source of authority. By establishing and
keeping mutually binding pacts, the faculty of promising weaves the normative
texture that provides stability and brings about the laws that regulate the realm
of the ‘in-between’. It does so without closing this space off since ‘the promise
is the only thing that can stabilize without suffocating’ (Kristeva, 2001, p. 235).
This grounding of the law in the human power of promising constitutes
Arendt’s particular mode of contesting a whole tradition of political theory that
roots the authority of law in the concept of sovereignty (the omnipotence of
God, the will of the people and so on). For in the absence of the normative assur-
ance of last principles, she argues, the task of foundation, the setting of a new
beginning, is inevitably coupled with the task of lawgiving. The important issue
here is that this task ‘can never be absolute’ since ‘laws residing on human
power’ are by definition ‘relative’ to a space of relations that they create and main-
tain (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 39). In her view, it is clear that, from the perspective of
a relational conception of politics as a space of plurality that lies ‘in-between’
human beings, the conventional idea of law in terms of ‘precepts and prohibitions
whose sole purpose is to demand obedience’ is inadequate and even anti-political.
Since its main core is the ruling of action rather than the assemblage of a domain
for political coexistence, this sovereign understanding of law (which underlies
natural law and positivist law) should be displaced in favour of a concept that
restores its original yet forgotten ‘spatial character’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 189). In
 258 R. Cordero
line with her reading of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, Arendt’s major claim is that,
because no political community and political existence is imaginable without
space, the creation of a space is the first task of laws as human artifice. In this
sense, we should understand the ‘in-between’ as a space of normativity and, in
turn, normativity as a mode of spacing, for ‘what lies outside this space is
lawless and, even more precisely, without world; … it is a desert’ (p. 190; see
Arendt, 2007a).
Previous to the writing of On Revolution, Arendt was very attracted to the
Greek notion of nomos as an alternative conception of the law beyond prohibition
and prescription. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Con-
dition (1958), she considers the strong spatial connotation of this term whose
literal meaning is linked to the setting of a permanent and visible ‘border’,
‘limit’ or ‘wall’ within which individuals could move and relate to one another
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with a sense of stability and commonality. This is the worldly space of the city-
state which for the Greeks, ‘because of the stabilizing force of its wall of law,
could impart to human affairs the solidity that human action itself, in its intrinsic
futility … can never possess’ (Arendt, 2007a, pp. 716–17). In other words, nomos
designates a space ‘in-between’ whose constitution, as a realm of free political
existence, is a direct result of the positing of law by a lawgiver who, in this
case, ‘resembles the architect of the city and its builder, not the politikos and
citizen’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 181).
Although Arendt praises the Greeks for emphasizing the creation of a topos for
political existence among equals (isonomia), she is rather uneasy about the inade-
quacies of this conception of law for the purposes of revolutionary politics: on the
one hand, because it places a strong emphasis on the idea of preserving politics as
a limit, since in this approach the law is what contains and gives order within
certain boundaries rather than a productive means for enlarging political space
and forging new relationships;6 on the other hand, because the concept of law
as nomos strongly suggests a pre-political, transcendent origin of law and political
community, for the legislator is the architect who comes from outside the city.7
On Revolution marks a departure from this concept insofar as Arendt’s argu-
ment about foundation becomes hereafter very much shaped by the spirit of the
Roman notion of law, lex, which means ‘“intimate connection” or relationship,
namely something that connects two things or two partners whom external circum-
stances have brought together’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 187).8 This understanding
of the law as ‘alliance’ departs from a notion of law that produces order by limiting
power, to another that generates and augments (augere) power by establishing
relations between individuals. This logic configures the structure of a political
domain that no longer requires the unifying adhesive of a higher authority, but rep-
resents a normative constellation that connects the actions of human beings while
establishing a proper distance between them. By bringing the spatial sense of laws
to the fore, Arendt wants to highlight that the creation of an ‘in-between’ space, the
drawing of a grammar for life in common upon terms that are not given, is the truly
historical–political event that defines the revolutionary birth of politics.
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 259
Now, despite the stabilizing quality that Arendt finds in the practice of prom-
ising, she is well aware that the institution of freedom is a rather ‘uncertain’, even
‘futile’ achievement. As the experience of the popular bodies of participation that
spontaneously emerged in each of the modern revolutions shows, these spaces
tend to be short-lived incarnations of freedom, often demoted by professional
party politics. What’s more, even if the formation of a Republic via a written con-
stitution is the formal condition of the great majority of nation states around the
world, the spirit that gave them birth has been quickly forgotten and government
has been reduced to the administrative-juridical rule of the few in the interest of the
many (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 238–239). This experience demonstrates not only
how difficult it is to secure the ‘in-between’ space opened by revolutionary action,
but also that, once it is established, the normative texture of this space is intrinsi-
cally fragile and inevitably threatened by the relational principle sustaining it. In
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this respect, ‘the tragedy’ for Arendt

is that the law is made for men, and neither for angels nor for devils. The laws and all
“lasting institutions” break down not only under the onslaught of elemental evil but
under the impact of absolute innocence as well. (p. 84)

It is not difficult, then, to understand that the possibility of dismantling the ‘in-
between’ is directly related to the closure of the space where things in common
are located. This is the point where Arendt observes that, oddly enough, revolu-
tionary politics, when turned into sheer violence and terror, seems to coincide
with totalitarian politics, since both end up abolishing the constitutive and necess-
ary distance between individuals. The ‘onslaught of elemental evil’ consists pre-
cisely in the totalitarian use of the means of law (reduced to the ‘law of
movement’) to sweep away the normativity that stabilizes communication
between people and to deprive individuals of legal protection to the point of
making them superfluous beings (Arendt, 2004/1951, pp. 599–600).9 On the
other hand, ‘the impact of absolute innocence’ is immediately felt in the non-tan-
gible structure of the ‘in-between’ once revolutionaries decide to elevate ‘com-
passion’ to a political virtue of the revolution and thus begin replacing the
authority of law with the boundless law of moral superiority and the tyranny of
suspicion (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 88–109).10 Yet, for all its possible distortions,
Arendt insists that law is the only resource, together with our capacity to interrupt
the course of things and dare to begin something new in the world, that we can rely
on to keep open the ‘in-between’ space and to secure the foundation of freedom.
On Revolution reminds us that, regardless of the relative success of modern
revolutions in ‘giving all the power to the people’ on paper, the radical experiences
of the twentieth century show that the existence of political freedom as a tangible
experience cannot be simply held safe like a ‘lost treasure’ in ‘islands in an ocean’
of need or in ‘oases in a desert’ devastated by violence (Arendt, 1990/1963,
p. 275–276). To be sure, these small spaces of freedom may provide shelter in
moments of political emergency and even throw some light upon the future in
 260 R. Cordero
dark times, but they cannot prevent the social world from becoming a suffocating
totality that subjects individuals to a life without alternatives. After all, revolutions
are, with all their perplexities and impurities, almost the only political events that
still can offer the possibility to reopen the world so as to make room to invoke the
basic right to redraw the normative grammar of the institutions and laws that bind
us, and the power to crystallize a new foundation for life in common in the uncer-
tain struggle to gain political freedom. This right, I should add, is not grounded in
any transcendent source but in the competence of human beings to act with others
and begin something new. And this may only happen in the emergent domain of
the ‘in-between’.

Closing remarks
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In this paper, I have read On Revolution through the pivotal notion of the ‘in-
between’, which in Arendt’s work refers to the interstitial space that separates
and binds individuals together. The ‘in-between’ configures the existential condition
and the basic structure of the world as a space of plurality. In the absence of a prin-
ciple of unity or a proper foundation, it is permanently exposed to attempts at closure
and is therefore a fragile domain that requires human effort to be maintained open
and alive. Put in this way, the ‘in-between’ is both a social-ontological condition of
political life and a historical–political achievement that must be instituted on terms
that can never be given. Indeed, it is the term that in Arendt’s work designates the
foundation of life in common and the constitution of the political as a ‘spatial con-
struct’ whose elemental structure is not sustained by any originary substance or
common identity (such as the nation, the state and the people) but by a gap that
allows a mundane assemblage of relations. This gap is coeval with the coexistence
of human beings, and politics ceases wherever this gap no longer exists.
Drawing on this formulation, the main suggestion of the paper has been that
what defines the revolutionary birth of politics is the very act of spacing. Accord-
ing to my reading of On Revolution, this meaning is inscribed in Arendt’s strong
claim that the central idea of revolution consists in the ‘foundation of freedom’. It
configures the conflicting form of what I called the politics of the ‘in-between’ that
lies at the centre of the revolutionary quest of constructing a political space: the
boundlessness of action and the binding force of mutual promises, the encounter
with the unexpected and the forging of expectations, the fleeting moment of the
new and the weaving of a durable normative texture, the temporal abyss of liber-
ation and the legal grammar of government, the pathos of revolutionary spirit and
the lex of constitutional body. However, the point of my reading has not been
simply to assert that each of these moments represents distinct modalities of the
‘in-between’, one linked to the temporality of freedom (i.e. caesural action) and
the other to the legality of foundation (i.e. lasting ties). What the politics of the
‘in-between’ elucidates is the inner aporia of the experience of revolution,
namely, that the ‘in-between’ is the ground that boosts the vitality of political
life as much as the abyss that threatens it from within.
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 261
The riddle of revolutionary politics, that one moment of the ‘in-between’ may
reverse and eventually cancel the other, reminds us of Kafka’s parable cited by
Arendt in the preface to Between Past and Future, where an individual is con-
fronted with antagonist forces: ‘the first presses him from behind, from the
origin. The second blocks the road ahead’ (Arendt, 2006/1961, p. 7). By bringing
this image to the fore, Arendt is trying to draw attention to how difficult it is to
maintain a position somewhere in the middle without either jumping out of the
‘fighting line’ or choosing one side, thereby abandoning the space ‘in-between’
freedom and foundation altogether. The issue is that, without the assurance of
any tradition, this must appear an almost impossible demand for ordinary citizens
in constitutional democracies who are neither heroes nor soldiers. And yet
Arendt’s view is that both terms (the uncertainty of freedom and the security of
foundation) have meaning and significance only in the continuous and non-solva-
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ble character of this relationship, which is why the idea that one has to choose
between them is the recipe that first undermines and then kills political
communities.
All in all, the notion of the ‘in-between’ is at the centre of On Revolution
insofar as it constitutes the true matter and radical form of Arendtian thought,
which sees the world as a human place to inhabit precisely because it does not
have a principle of final closure. This social-ontological claim, as I have argued,
does not work against the political task of instituting and keeping such space
open. On the contrary, it is the very reason why, even if the political attempt to
found freedom and secure lasting institutions proves to be a total failure, it is
from the very interstices of the non-tangible yet objective ground that lies ‘in-
between’ human beings that one may still appeal to the right to resist in word
and deed a reality that closes itself while denying freedom and human dignity.

Acknowledgements
I thank the participants at the conference Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution after 50 years,
held in October 2013 at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile), for their comments
and questions. A special mention goes to Robert Fine, Wolfhart Totschnig and Daniel
Chernilo for their suggestions and criticism.

Funding
The completion of this paper was supported by the Chilean Council for Science and Tech-
nology, Fondecyt Iniciación [grant number 11121346].

Notes
1. The spatiality of politics is a key aspect of Arendt’s thought which has mostly been
overlooked. To be sure, her topological understanding of the world and human exist-
ence has been widely discussed in reference to the public realm or space (Benhabib,
 262 R. Cordero
2003/1996) and the phenomenon of world alienation in modernity (Janover, 2011;
Villa, 1996). In recent discussions, the Heideggerian roots of this worldly spatiality
have been highlighted with regard to the experience of appearance (Birmingham,
2013) and the question of the place of thinking (Malpas, in press). However, a
more detailed and systematic investigation into the status of the ‘in-between’ itself
is yet to be carried out. Such enquiry into the ‘in-between’ as the human production
of a common world may prove relevant to Arendt’s relationship to sociology. In the
best tradition of Simmel, for instance, the social understood as sociation and as an
emergent domain seems to be precisely the kind of general ontology that Arendt’s
notion of the ‘in-between’ seeks to capture. For a discussion of Simmel’s sociology
of the ‘in-between’, see Pyyhtinen (2009).
2. For a reading and assessment of Arendt’s ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’, see Borren
(2013).
3. Arendt’s indictment of the social sciences, especially sociology, is mostly directed at
their attempt to produce accurate social scientific explanations based on well-crafted
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theoretical models, ideal types and conceptual analogies divorced from the normative
texture of human reality. In her view, these analytical tools deny human freedom the
moment they reduce human action to predictable behaviour and transform the contin-
gency of history into a chain of necessary causes. This critique, however reductive in
its view of sociology as a positivist discipline akin to social engineering and decision-
making, does not put Arendt at odds with sociology as a whole. It actually brings her
closer to a long tradition of a philosophically informed form of sociology. For the
development of the idea of ‘philosophical sociology’, see Chernilo (2014).
4. For further discussion and assessment of the issue of temporality in Arendt’s political
theory, see Hoffmann (2010), Marchart (2006) and Vásquez (2006).
5. On this point, Arendt is in agreement with Marx’s depiction of the predilection of the
French revolutionaries of 1798–1814 for mimicking Roman customs and words: ‘ …
just when they appear to be revolutionizing themselves and their circumstances, in
creating something unprecedented, … they nervously summon up the spirits of the
past, borrowing from them their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order to
enact new scenes in world history, but in this time-honoured guise and with this bor-
rowed language’. Besides Marx’s sarcasm, his comment aims to address the inescap-
able challenge of all revolutionary beginnings:

Like a beginner studying a new language [the revolutionary] always translates it

back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back,
and thus forsakes his native language for the new, only then has he entered into
the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently. (Marx,
1996/1852, p. 32)

In Arendt’s view, this is exactly what all ‘professional revolutionaries’ (especially, the
Marxist-Communist intelligentsia of the twentieth century) were never able to
understand.
6. Despite the emphasis of the Greek concept of law on territorial limitations and bound-
aries, Arendt finds that its spatial connotation contains an ethical core that may be
quite significant in the face of political excesses, namely the idea of ‘keeping
within bounds’. In her view, this is the actual meaning of ‘the old virtue of moder-
ation’, which ‘is indeed one of the political virtues par excellence, just as the political
temptation par excellence is indeed hubris’ (1998/1958, p. 191).
7. The trouble with the lonely figure of the architect is the great emphasis it places on
constitution-making as a process of ‘fabrication’. Within this framework, the foun-
dation of a new political community is seen as a process of making in which the
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 263
legislator is tantamount to a craftsman or artist (Arendt, 1998/1958, pp. 194–195;
2005, p. 179; see Markell, 2011).
8. For instructive discussion of this shift from nomos to lex in Arendt’s work, see Birming-
ham (2011), Volk (2010) and the contributions to Goldoni & McCorkindale (2012).
9. According to Arendt, the destruction of the worldly space ‘in-between’ is the essential
telos of totalitarian politics: ‘by pressing men against each other, total terror destroys
the space between them … It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom
which is simply the capacity of motion, which cannot exist without space’ (Arendt,
2004/1951, p. 600). The practice of putting certain categories of people outside the
protection of law (‘rightless’, ‘stateless’) is one of the manifestations of this process.
10. The experiences of the French and Russian revolutions’ descent into terror provide
Arendt with elements to substantiate her critique of the exaltation of moral inwardness
in politics and the retreat of freedom into pure and unrestricted subjectivity, for they
obliterate the aim of the revolution: the realization of right and freedom through the
‘objective’ configuration of social institutions regardless of the caprices of moral
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viewpoints. In this regard, the problem of ‘compassion’, as Arendt puts it, is that it

abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human inter-
course, and if virtue will always be ready to assert that it is better to suffer
wrong than to do wrong, compassion will transcend this by stating in complete
and even naïve sincerity that it is easier to suffer than to see others suffer.
Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men
where political matters are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant
and without consequence … it is incapable of establishing ‘lasting institutions’.
(Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 86)

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