Arendt Studies Volume 2, 2018

pp. 37–44
doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies201824

Human Condition of Plurality

Adriana Cavarero
Università degli Studi di Verona

I n recent times, after the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the
United States, Hannah Arendt’s book on The Origins of Totalitarianism
has seen an exceptional increase in sales. As Zoe Williams, in February 2017,
pointed out in The Guardian, “commentators have been referencing the work
since Donald Trump’s election in November but rarely has this spurred so
many people to actually buy a copy.”1 Yet, interviewed in the same article,
excellent Arendtian scholar Griselda Pollock rightly suggested that, in light
of the current populist turn of Western liberal democracies, our interest in
Arendt’s texts should rather focus on The Human Condition. This is especially
true for the phenomenon dubbed as ‘digital populism,’ a recent form of pol-
itics characterized by the use of social media for fueling and spreading the
typical populist drives for nationalism, xenophobia, anti-immigration, and
anti-establishment stances.2 By reformatting the traditional populist topic
of direct democracy versus representative democracy, and by addressing
“the generic internet user as the new prototype of the ‘common man’ of
populism,” digital populism puts a particular emphasis on the networked
participatory form of politics it claims to enact, i.e., a form of disintermedi-
ate and horizontal interconnection, also working as a means for permanent
consultation, that presents itself as ‘true’ and even ‘absolute’ direct democ-
racy.3 The old rhetoric of the ‘will of the people’ and its supposed immediate

Zoe Williams, “Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons From Hannah

1

Arendt,” The Guardian, 1 February 2017.

2
Jamie Bartlett, Jonathan Birdwell, Mark Letter, The New Face of Digital Populism
(London: Demos, 2012); Alessandro Dal Lago, Populismo digitale (Milano: Raffaello
Cortina, 2017).
3
Paolo Gerbaudo, “Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism, the Generic Internet
User and Interactive Direct Democracy,” in Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests,
Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, ed.

© Arendt Studies. ISSN 2474-2406 (online) ISSN 2574-2329 (print)

Adriana Cavarero

relation with the voice of the leader allows the ‘people of the web’ to easily
enter the contemporary populist jargon. Within this digital scenario, how-
ever, notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘the’ people, it is the concept of the
individual to resurface and adapt to the authoritarian environment. On the
one hand, the atomized individual of modernity re-inscribes itself under the
rubric of the ‘networked individualism’ that digital populism refers to as the
constitutive element of direct democracy; on the other hand, the traditional
authoritarian, if not para-fascist attitudes of the far right populist leader,
by exploiting the disintermediate connection with ‘followers’ or ‘friends,’
finds in internet users a fertile ground for manipulation and disinforma-
tion online.4 Thus, in more than one sense, we could say that the expected
virtuous marriage of democracy with the internet has eventually begotten
a dangerous progeny that combines an emphasis on networked participa-
tory culture, a revival of authoritarianism and a nurture of the typical fruits
of populist resentment and anger. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt
offers insightful theoretical frames for comprehending how these fruits
keep roots, grow, and bloom. This is why her masterpiece on totalitarianism
does deserve the large attention that today it gets. In The Human Condition,5
however, Arendt crucially engages with the issue of interactive political par-
ticipation and, even if she never mentions it with this name, she ponders on
direct democracy and reframes its concept in ways that radically and, so to
speak, preventively contrast the very notion of direct democracy that digital
populism emphatically calls on.
In The Human Condition the word ‘democracy’ is mentioned only in
passing and never qualified with the adjective ‘direct.’ Although Arendt’s
definition of politics in terms of a plurality of human beings acting in concert
is explicitly modeled on that democracy of the ancient polis which modern
political vocabulary specifies as direct, she avoids confronting this type of
lexical distinctions. Arendt rather engages in producing a new and anom-
alous vocabulary that intentionally leaves the traditional terminology and
conceptuality apart. One of the central categories of The Human Condition
is natality, a very anomalous item within the traditional political inventory;
on the political space of appearance she depicts, there are not individuals or
citizens, but unique human beings and actors; neither is there ‘the people’

Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs (Basingstoke: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 67–87.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315764832.
4
Alice Marwick, Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation
Online,” Data and Society, 15 May 2017, https://datasociety.net/output/media-manip-
ulation-and-disinfo-online/.
5
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1st edition (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1958), 175–247. Page citations in the text (HC followed by the page
number) are to this version.

38
 Human Condition of Plurality

but ‘plurality.’ Margaret Canovan has justly stressed that Arendt “‘augment-
ed’ the world by one word: the word plurality,” and that “the most fruitful
way of reading her political thought is to treat her analysis of modernity as
a context for the interesting things she has to say about the fact that politics
goes among plural persons with space between.”6 Arendt’s commitment to
the category of plurality manifests itself in her writings of the early ’50s and
reaches its peak in The Human Condition. One could even trace a speculative
thread which goes from her initial focus on the issue of plurality of opin-
ions—the dokei moi that attests for the plurality of doxai and has in Socrates’s
politeuein its paradigm7—to her final choice of giving plurality an ontological
status as the specific characteristic of the human condition. Crucially enough,
this status calls on bodily appearance as it is first displayed at the moment of
birth and whenever we appear to others in our physical uniqueness. Based
on the fact that “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives,
or will live,” Arendt writes, “human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of
unique beings,” a condition already physically disclosed by the uniqueness
of every newborn, that is, by “the fact of natality, in which the faculty of ac-
tion is ontologically rooted” (HC, 8, 176, 247). The difference, even if not the
incompatibility, between her initial interest in the plurality of opinions and
her final assumption of plurality as an ontological status in which politics
takes root, is worth considering. If the first allows for a political interpreta-
tion of Arendt calling on dialogue, negotiation, and communicative action,
the second presents us with a radical and ontological re-foundation of poli-
tics which puts the average model of direct democracy—and all the more the
digital version of this very model—profoundly into question.
Recently, in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler
revisited The Human Condition in order to corroborate her thesis on the form
radical democracy can take when people assemble in a crowd and participate
in mass demonstrations that take place on the street or in the square—the
so-called ‘popular wave’ we have seen in the cases of the Arab Springs, Oc-
cupy movements, Indignados and the likes. At stake, in these phenomena,
according to Butler, are bodies who gather and perform politically: “bodies
congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain
space as public space,” she stresses by re-appropriating the Arendtian concept
of space of appearance decidedly in bodily terms or, better, in terms of plural
bodily performances.8 Disputable as it could seem, such a re-appropriation

6
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 281.
7
Hannah Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken,
2005), 5–39.
8
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2015), 70. See Diana Taylor, “Butler and Arendt on Ap-

39
Adriana Cavarero

is precious for shedding a light on two essential points. First, it helps distin-
guish the phenomenon of digital populism from that of the ‘popular wave’
squares, that is, forms of assembly in which, although they play an important
role for mobilization, interconnection, and communication, social media are
not the key elements. In other words, direct democracy, far from being the
outcome of networked individualism, comes into being, as Butler pointedly
argues, because plural bodies congregate and materially share a public space
of appearance. Second, it helps us in insisting on the physical trait of the Ar-
endtian space of appearance, a space whose political quality is constituted by
the in-between of incarnated unique human beings and, therefore, by those
very bodies that Butler, perhaps pushing Arendt’s intention to the extreme,
reconfigures in terms of bodily performance. After all, it is Arendt herself that,
throughout the category of natality, allows bodies to enter the picture: birth is
a biological phenomenon and those who ‘distinguish’ themselves on the pub-
lic space of appearance are human beings who actively exhibit the perceptible
corporeal uniqueness already shown at the moment of their birth.
Natality, is “the central category of political thought,” Arendt claims,
because with action “we insert ourselves into the human world, and this
insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves
the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (HC, 9, 176). Far from
endorsing the modern ontology of the individual or its current metamor-
phosis into the generic internet user, Arendt features her radical conception
of direct democracy in terms of the exhibitive distinctness of a plurality of
embodied unique human actors. At stake, in Arendt’s idea of the political,
is a special stress on the spatial proximity—if not the ‘face to face’ physical
contiguity—of an interacting bodily plurality. Her original and indeed rad-
ical version of direct democracy entails a space that is materially shared,
whereupon those present show to one another, in words and deeds, their
uniqueness and their capacity to begin new things that is the fundamental
characteristic already displayed by every newborn. Through interaction, the
plurality of human beings that perceptibly appears, from the moment of
birth on, “in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice” acquires a
political status that ‘confirms’ the insistence on physical factors of the entire
Arendtian narrative about politics. Arendt goes even further in highlight-
ing the materiality of this political space. She suggests that those who are
present and speak are not political because of what they say, but because
they say it to others who share an interactive space of reciprocal exposure.
Put differently, Arendt is first and foremost interested in the relationality
of embodied political actors, not on the contents of their discourses. As if
this very relationality and the issues it implies—equal ontological dignity

pearance, Performativity, and Collective Political Action,” Arendt Studies 1 (2017):

171–176.

40
 Human Condition of Plurality

of each human being as unique, equal freedom and risk in espousing such a
uniqueness, common responsibility in opening up and preserving political
spaces for interaction—constituted the basic principle for endorsing or re-
jecting certain contents of the political agenda. One could perhaps observe
that, because of this perspective stressing the performative aspect of polit-
ical participation at the expense of political contents, in light of the effect
of populist ideology, Arendt’s position looks weak. Yet, her assumption of
embodied relationality as the constitutive element of direct democracy has
a remarkable strength in contrasting and dismantling the digital populism
claim about absolute democracy. The main contrast, simple as it seems, re-
gards of course the programmed absence of bodies or bodily relations within
this supposed absolute democracy. While Arendt rejects the individualistic
ontology of modern political tradition by turning its abstract and atomized
subject into an incarnated and relational subjectivity, digital populism turns
this very subject into an even more isolated and—literally—remote individ-
ual. Such individual dwells in the isolation of what Arendt calls the private
realm. The virtual agora works precisely as an immaterial web connecting
private individuals, so private and secluded that their presence in the space
of the political presupposes their physical absence. As Arendt would per-
haps argue, today we are confronted with the disconcerting phenomenon
of unrelated individuals hidden in the private realm who invade the digital
public sphere.
By pondering on this phenomenon, scholars and journalists have often
focused on the manipulative aspects inherent to the social network uni-
verse, dominated by the proliferation of fabricated stories and fake news
that famously results in conspiracy theories and widens the opportunities
for hate speech. In the so-called post-truth era, ‘cyber warfare,’ ‘weapon-
ized misinformation’ and ‘troll army’ conjure in ‘manufacturing consensus’
by means of algorithmic curations on individual feeds. As a matter of fact,
the digitalization of the public sphere has taken over not only the theme
of corporeality but also that of plurality. Rather than being an exchange
among plural subjects, the digital public sphere ends up being a compart-
mentalized, sectorialized series of cultural cliques. Researches tell us that
on facebook, twitter, and other social media people tend to remain within
their political and cultural milieus. Moreover, the structures that inform the
algorithms regulating our digital lives favor the access to communication,
news, analyses that confirm our beliefs and positions. Apart from the nu-
merous analyses on the so-called algorithmic authority, it is not by chance
that Elisabeth Noelle Neumann’s analysis on the spiral of silence today has
once more become very popular.9

9
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

41
Adriana Cavarero

The isolated individual who participates in the virtual agora is a digital

product too, at least in as much this very isolation—or the lack of a com-
mon world that, like a table, as Arendt says, “relates and separates men at
the same time” (HC, 52)—makes the Internet user particularly vulnerable to
manipulation. Symptomatically, in terms of contents, the ideology of digital
populists is not very different from that of populism in general and far right
traditions. Hate speech regularly mingles with fear of difference, whether
this difference be racial, cultural, religious, sexual, or gendered. What is new
is the appeal to a form of direct democracy that, when it mentions the “peo-
ple” or “the will of the people,” does not intend the fascist masses but rather,
and paradoxically, the free and autonomous individual who manifests its
freedom of speech by participating in the virtual agora on the basis of an
equal access. Ghastly replica of the autonomous subject of liberal doctrines,
the free and equal individual resurfaces as the fundamental ‘value’ of digital
populism. In this sense, one could even say that digital populism finds the
‘solution’ of an old and notorious problem: direct democracy was good for
the ancient polis but it is inapplicable to the modern state, whose dimen-
sions require representative democracy. Well, by exploiting the internet’s
recent evolution in personal devices that connect everybody to everybody,
digital populism not only makes direct democracy possible but, theoretical-
ly, makes it possible on a global scale. Bodies are, of course, not requested
and will not be requested to move within this potential global scenario,
only their hands or eyes—or whatever other bodily part can act as a digit—
to connect.
Interestingly enough, Arendt’s conception of politics in terms of an in-
teracting plurality resists any form of representation. Given that it is made
up of unique human beings who engender a material relational space in
order to actively and mutually disclose who they are, plurality is un-repre-
sentable. At stake, indeed, is the physical presence of a plurality that cannot
be re-presented in its absence. In On Revolution, Arendt criticizes represen-
tative democracy for its effect of depoliticizing citizens by reducing them
to voters who ‘act’ only on the days of elections. Besides, she notices that
political spaces for plural action often open up during times of revolution,
like in the case of township meetings in the American revolution and Jaco-
bin clubs in the French revolution. Her main interest goes to republicanism
and the council system as institutional models that, instead of verticaliz-
ing the transmission of power, grant to citizens spaces of public freedom in
which to interact. In The Human Condition, however, Arendt’s approach to
the issue of politics is different and it significantly abstains from entangling
in complex questions of constitutional settings. She is not trying to adapt
the ancient model of direct democracy to the modern state’s form; after
the catastrophe of totalitarianism she is engaged in the task of rethinking

42
 Human Condition of Plurality

the ‘pure concept of what constitutes the political.’10 Her distance from the
paradigm of the modern territorial national state is exemplarily brought to
light by her conviction that politics, although it consists of the interacting
of a physical plurality, does not need a territory, even less a territory whose
borders contain the sovereignty of the state. “Wherever you go, you will be
a polis,” claims a famous sentence of Thucydides that Arendt quotes and
endorses in order to argue that the space of politics lies “between people
living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (HC,
198). Politics, in her view, is a relational space that comes into being with the
event of plural interaction and, together with it, disappears. It is contingent
and intermittent, a political experience of plurality, generated and closed
by human beings whenever and wherever they act in concert, whose form
cannot be encapsulated in any system. Rather than of direct democracy, we
could therefore speak of radical democracy and, perhaps, of a phenomenol-
ogy of the political that present us with the germinal moment of democracy
as such. Not by chance, characterized as it is by an “absolute locality”11 that
untangles its existence from the territoriality of the modern state, Arendt
gives such a scenario the anomalous name of ‘space of appearance.’
“The space of appearance,” Arendt points out, “comes into being wher-
ever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore
predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the
various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public
realm can be organized” (HC, 199). The space of appearance can neither be
guaranteed nor preserved beyond its enactment: politics, as Arendt intends
it, is an intermittent event that discloses a form of direct democracy always
in-the-making, whose germinal status is produced and re-produced, every
time anew, by the interactions of different pluralities. As it is worth noting,
at center stage in these pluralities is the reciprocal exhibition of who each
actor is, while what the actors are, that is, their social and cultural identities,
is not given any constitutive role. Arendt’s accent on uniqueness as absolute
difference of everybody from everybody else—that is the very embodied
uniqueness plurality consist of—goes together with her coherent aversion
for forms politics constructed on collective belonging, be it related to na-
tional, racial, or cultural differences. Arendt abhors forms of politics fueling
on identities, all the more national or racial identities: plurality works as an
antidote to homogeneity. Among other effects, in fact, her notion of plurality

10
The expression is used by Arendt in a letter to Karl Jaspers dated December 17,
1946, in Correspondence 1926–1969: Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, ed. Lotte Kohler and
Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1992), 166.
11
See Adriana Cavarero, “Politicizing Theory,” in What is Political Theory, ed.
Stephen K. White and J. Donald Moon (London: Sage, 2004), 54–79.

43
Adriana Cavarero

has that of neutralizing the inevitable mechanisms of expulsion and exclu-

sion that identity issues empower. To put it differently, political agendas
constructed on nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, and
the likes, are highly incompatible with Arendt’s vision of direct democracy.
In her terms, plurality demands and structurally consists of inclusion. Its
limit is the material dimension of the shared space that comes from phys-
ical proximity. Openness toward others, regardless of their belonging to a
group, a nation, a minority, a class, is its content.

44