During a talk in Bozeman, Montana, last week, I was asked to give examples of when Hannah Arendt was wrong. The question is disarmingly simple. She was hardly infallible. She made mistakes.
And yet it is precisely where Arendt is said to have erred most gravely that she becomes most compelling. She is criticized for arguing that Adolf Eichmann’s antisemitism was less decisive than the thoughtless banality that enabled him to participate in genocide. She is faulted for claiming that while legal segregation must end, forced desegregation risks violating the sphere of privacy.
Was she wrong? That is the wrong question.
Arendt does not offer doctrines to affirm or reject. She provokes. Her most controversial arguments are invitations to pause — to think about what we are doing when we rush to moral certainty. They unsettle our reflexes. They disturb our confidence. They force us to examine assumptions we would prefer to leave unexamined. And for that reason, even when she unsettles me, I find her indispensable.
The question of Arendt being wrong came up again this week during the Hannah Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group discussion of her essay “Civil Disobedience.” Her core argument is that civil disobedience is the political act of an organized minority dissent from democratically legitimate actions. Civil disobedience, she argues, is political; it is not simply the act of a lone conscientious objector.
Arendt’s argument flies in the face of common sense and long-settled opinion. Our models for civil disobedience are Socrates, who chose to die for his convictions, Henry David Thoreau, who preferred prison to paying a poll tax supporting an unjust government, and Mahatma Gandhi, who would rather starve himself than support unjust colonial rule.
Against this common-sense assertion of civil disobedience as the conscientious action of moral citizens resisting unjust governments, Arendt argues that civil disobedience is rather a mobilization of organized minorities who oppose the actions of majorities that threaten the country’s basic commitment to freedom and equality. Even if the governmental action is done democratically, there are limits to what a democracy can do in a constitutional republic. Civil disobedience is a political response to the tyranny of a democratic majority; it is a political action by an organized minority and not a moral cry by a conscientious individual.
Arendt’s friend Mary McCarthy disagreed with Arendt. As Berma Klein Goldewijk, one of our Virtual Reading Group members, pointed out during the reading group and then later in correspondence, McCarthy wrote to Arendt from Paris, on October 14, 1970, shortly after “Civil Disobedience” appeared in The New Yorker. “I am not convinced,” she wrote, by “your distinction between conscientious objection and civil disobedience.” For McCarthy, it is common sense that when civil disobedients resist the draft or break the laws of Jim Crow to support civil rights, their actions are “a matter of conscience and the inner light, whether it’s practiced by one person or a group.” She tells Arendt that she understands the distinction Arendt is making between political action and conscientious objection, but adds that she is “not persuaded that it is so cut-and-dried as you make it sound.” When a civil disobedient breaks the law to protest Jim Crow, they do so from conscience. This is different, she argues, from those who resist the prohibition laws — the latter don’t break the law from conscience, but self-interest.
Even as she dissents on the question of the civil disobedient and their relation to conscience, McCarthy admits that Arendt has identified a serious question. Conscience, Arendt argues, is not political. Conscience is inward, absolute, and singular: a bond between me and my inner light. It makes a claim of absolute right that is out of place in politics, which is public, plural, and contingent. The problem of conscience in politics is that it smuggles absolutes to the political world, which must exist absent absolutes.
McCarthy understood Arendt’s argument but disagreed. She writes:
“I see that the whole question of conscience, when religious sanctions are no longer operative, makes civil disobedience a very difficult nut for the law to crack, i. e. as you say, why should my conscience be respected rather than my neighbor’s? If we all have the right and/or the duty to break the law whenever conscience urges, then how can there be any law? I can’t answer that-certainly not in this letter even try to-and yet I feel that your solution or answer is evasive. Maybe this question simply will not yield to rational analysis and can’t be disciplined into doing so.”
In a secular, plural republic, conscience collapses into opinion. While civil disobedients may be motivated to act out of conscience, politically speaking their consciences are politically sterile. There are no truths in politics. McCarthy sees the problem clearly. Where she hesitates is precisely where Arendt is most radical.
Arendt’s move is to detach politics from conscience and from justice as ultimate standards. She does not deny either the importance of morality, conscience, or justice, but she does deny that conscience or justice can rule politics without destroying plurality.
For her, conscience belongs to the inner dialogue of the self with itself. Justice, also, is an insight of the single person that is transformed when one seeks to impose social justice on others.
Politics, by contrast, belongs to the public world of plurality. Once civil disobedience is understood as political rather than moral, it cannot be grounded in the inviolable authority of conscience. Conscience speaks in the singular; politics exists in the plural. If civil disobedience rests on the authority of conscience, McCarthy’s question becomes unavoidable: whose conscience prevails?
The radical force of Arendt’s argument emerges when we see that her embrace of plurality and politics shows the antipolitical force not only of conscience but also of justice. Like truth, justice carries an absolute claim. Truth is necessary, even though it stands in tension with politics. Justice, however — especially social or distributive justice — she sees as potentially destructive when elevated into a political program. The effort to “realize justice” can easily become coercive, even tyrannical, because it presumes access to a standard that overrides plurality.
That is why she insists on separating conscience from politics. And since she understands civil disobedience as political action, it cannot be beholden to absolute ideals of justice or conscience without ceasing to be political.
To my mind, this is one of the most important and least understood dimensions of Arendt’s thought. McCarthy grasps the difficulty but ultimately recoils from the conclusion. Most readers do.
McCarthy, who had read a draft of the text earlier, tells Arendt that the final version is better. Still, she thinks it is not one of Arendt’s better essays. She tells Arendt they will have to talk it through. Tragically, Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, died on October 31. She called McCarthy, who flew back from Paris for the funeral. If they ever discussed their disagreement over civil disobedience, we will never know.
Was Arendt wrong to say that civil disobedience is a political rather than a moral phenomenon? That is the wrong question. Of course, many who participate in civil disobedience are motivated by their conscience. No one would deny that. Arendt’s provocation goes to the nature of politics, especially in a pluralist and constitutional republic such as the United States. Her provocation is not about motivation. It is about authority.
Political judgment refuses all absolute claims. It seeks to build a common world without denying human plurality. In a world without bannisters, the collective practices of enlarged thinking and public judgment grow a shared world with common truths — what Arendt calls the “ground on which we stand and the sky above us.”
This is what Arendt found so compelling about civil disobedience. It is not a sermon. It is an emergency brake — and sometimes a constitutional reset — when democratic power threatens to outrun its limits and become tyrannical. While each participant in civil disobedience has their own motivations, their collective acts — breaking the law publicly, openly, and non-violently, while accepting the authority of the legal system and the Constitution — are, she argues, a collective act of dissent that is constitutionally central to any government based on consent.
We have seen this dynamic in Minneapolis during the recent wave of immigration enforcement. The immediate reaction was moral — shock, grief, anger at the spectacle of masked agents of state power and lethal force. But that impulse did not remain singular. It became political when neighbors organized. They began gathering publicly, communicating with one another, coordinating protest actions, and insisting that elected officials and institutions address what they perceived as a threat to constitutional norms and plural security. They did not claim that their moral truth must override all others. They appealed to a shared republic, invoking constitutional principles, public visibility, and collective dissent in hopes of persuading fellow citizens and leaders. That is what made it political.
Civil disobedience says: Stop and think. We are telling you that we — though not the electoral majority — are numerous, organized, and persuaded that what you are doing endangers commitments fundamental to our common life. You may win today’s vote, but if you refuse to hear us, you risk hollowing out the constitutional order that makes voting matter in the first place.
Electoral victory confers the right to govern. It does not confer the right to rule absolutely. In a republic grounded in consent, organized minorities retain the political right of collective dissent. That right is not a moral indulgence. It is a constitutional necessity. Civil disobedience is its most visible expression.
