Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt

Andrew Arato 

New School for Social Research

Jean L. Cohen 

Columbia University
2009

Constellations, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2009 
Abstract:      

According to Hannah Arendt “the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” It is very clear that Arendt considers the American abolition of sovereignty to pertain to internal affairs only; first, because she explicitly says “within the body politic,” and second because she rightly implies that one of the points of forming a more perfect union by moving from a confederacy to a federal state in 1787 was to enhance external sovereignty. The task was to “reconcile the advantages of monarchy in foreign affairs with those of republicanism in domestic policy.” It would be absurd to call this a chance or careless remark, given the correspondence of its thrust with the intentions of the authors of The Federalist that had to be entirely clear to Arendt. But is it possible to leave external sovereignty untouched, while abolishing internal sovereignty?

The first part of this essay will explore the meaning of the abolition of sovereignty in Arendt’s work (I). We turn next to her conception of the American model of internal sovereignty (II) and then to the tenability of her analysis of the boundary between external and internal sovereignty in the American case (III). We provide an assessment of what is wrong with her model conceptually and historically (IV) and conclude with a proposal for a corrective in the spirit if not in the letter of her work (V).

Number of Pages in PDF File: 25

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