The document discusses civil disobedience and its role in political protest, focusing on the Occupy Wall Street movement. It summarizes the views of Hannah Arendt, who saw civil disobedience as essential to challenging state authority and sustaining democracy. While OWS aims to dismantle the current system, its protests still harness the "political energy" of voluntary association that Arendt valued. The actions of OWS illuminate how civil disobedience can both draw from historical examples while inaugurating new political beginnings.

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Civil Disobedience & O.W.S.
Given Mayor Bloomberg’s clearing of Zuccotti Park just shy of the OWS two-month anniversary, and
the escalating tensions between police and protesters at Occupy sites across the country, a cluster of
questions surrounding the meaning and uses of civil disobedience come once again to the fore. In
particular the violent altercations at the University of California, Berkeley--a campus with a long legacy
of civil disobedience—force us to reconsider the role of this specific form of dissent.
Hannah Arendt considered civil disobedience an essential part of the United States’ political system.
By revisiting some of her main ideas on the issue we can more fully appreciate how the civil
disobedience carried out by the OWS movement both harnesses and re-imbues the public realm with
political energy.
Berkeley Professor Celeste Langan, participated in a civil disobedience action on the university campus,
and was treated harshly, to say the least. Her description of the encounter reminds us just what can be
involved in this form of protest:
"I knew, both before and after the police gave orders to disperse, that I was engaged in an act of
civil disobedience. I want to stress both of those words: I knew I would be disobeying the police
order, and therefore subject to arrest; I also understood that simply standing, occupying ground,
and linking arms with others who were similarly standing, was a form of non-violent, hence civil,
resistance. I therefore anticipated that the police might arrest us, but in a similarly non-violent
manner. When the student in front of me was forcibly removed, I held out my wrist and said
"Arrest me! Arrest me!" But rather than take my wrist or arm, the police grabbed me by my hair
and yanked me forward to the ground, where I was told to lie on my stomach and was handcuffed.
The injuries I sustained were relatively minor--a fat lip, a few scrapes to the back of my palms, a
sore scalp--but also unnecessary and unjustified. "
Arendt noted that the most basic, yet the most crucial quality of civil disobedience is the necessity of
joining oneself to others. This political binding to one's fellow citizens often becomes physicalized
through the specific tactics of demonstration, as Langan testified.
Bard College Professor Verity Smith, reminds us of the important distinction Arendt made between civil
disobedience and conscientious objection, the latter the expression of individual resistance, while the
former inherently a collective enterprise . “Civil disobedients,” Arendt wrote in the essay “Civil
Disobedience,” “are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association…they are thus quite in tune
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2. Disobedience,” “are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association…they are thus quite in tune
with the oldest traditions of the country.” Arendt saw civil disobedience as an invigorating and hence
indispensable element of the U.S. political system she so deeply admired. How though, does this type
of voluntary association represent what she called an “American remedy” for “the failure of social
institutions, the unreliability of men, and the uncertainty of the future”?
For Arendt, civil disobedience ultimately sustains the democratic process by interrupting the authority
and sovereignty of the state. Arendt saw undivided sovereignty as perhaps the greatest threat to
democracy. Undivided sovereignty effectively disintegrates plurality and the multiplicities within the
space of appearance that are required for authentic political life. She argues that it is not conflict but
stasis and homogeneity that deadens the body politic. Hence, by producing fissures in our political
ground, civil disobedients, according to Arendt, are actually fortifying it.
This apparent paradox takes us closer to Arendt’s conception of politics as one in keeping with the
Roman augure, which connotes a process of both restoration and of change. On Revolution provides us
with a more thorough treatment of this essential dynamic, which OWS civil disobedience also serves to
illustrate. The concepts of 'inherit' and 'invent' (to borrow Smith's terms), are not mutually exclusive but
deeply connected and often simultaneous activities involved in the process of political renewal. The
OWS civil disobedients both draw on historical precedents (such as the 1969 student protests at
Berkeley that appropriated and converted university land into the ‘People’s Park’), while also
attempting to inaugurate a novel moment. This is no contradiction, it is simply the truth of beginnings,
political and otherwise: things are born, utterly unknown and unforeseeable, from that which is entirely
established and given. This is the law of both politics and life.
This is precisely what Arendt so highly esteemed about the American Constitution and the processes it
engendered, the possibility of a document whose re-visioning was not its renunciation but its perfection.
Yet, it is this seemingly paradoxical principle that we still have so much trouble in grasping, especially
when it comes to matters of protest and civil disobedience. Pressed between bandana and baton is it
possible to appreciate that the very acts that in some sense, threaten the political nexus, are necessary for
its endurance? We have become less and less able to accept the precept that both Arendt and
Montesquieu found to be fundamental to a healthy political sphere, which Smith states as, “the startling
notion that contestation is actually a form of reverence, and even preservation.”
While we might be ready to accept Arendt’s formulation of the role of civil disobedience theoretically,
and in certain historical contexts, the present protests at Zuccotti Park and Sproul Plaza pose particular
challenges to it. I would wager that, if asked, many of those engaged in these movements would state
that they do not want to fortify but to dismantle the current political framework.While Arendt saw the
clamor of civil disobedience as part of the grander political opera, many season ticket holders are
looking to unsubscribe this season. Part of the reason Arendt’s theory of dissent doesn’t quite jive with
the OWS disobedients is because the protesters, whose voices Arendt identified as being so vital, were
culled from the upper crust. As Smith mentions “elites act to invigorate but not replace mass democratic
politics and representative institutions, acting as a kind of supplement to constituted governments so
that democratic ideals do not ossify.” The aim of many in the OWS movement is not to provide an
occasion for enhancement, but rather for the overturning, of the current system.
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=2705 20/10/15 17:12
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3. Tagged as: American Constitution, Arendt Center, Bard College, Berkeley, Celeste
Langan, civil disobedience, democracy, hannah arendt, Hannah Arendt Center, human
rights, Occupy Wall Street, on revolution, ows, police, politics, protest, revoution, Sproul
Plaza, Verity Smith, violence, Zuccotti Park
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rentia.se
July 22nd, 2015 - 10:55
It remains to be seen if this desire to overturn will be reabsorbed back into the existing ground or
continue to expand and strengthen its outgrowths. As the pitch of protest heightens, and police begin
disbanding the demonstrations, OWS still displays the energizing power of voluntary association that
Arendt trumpeted. The acts of civil disobedience are inevitably a testament to, and reveling in, the
capacity for the public assembly, a bedrock of the very democracy the movement seeks to disturb. As
J.M Bernstein remarks in his essay “Promising and Civil Disobedience”, even those acts of dissent that
aim to break away from the status quo can never unfetter from it fully. Civil disobedience, he writes, “is
always dependent on the radical past it exceeds and the repressive present it repudiates.”
And yet, as Arendt saw it, implicit in acts of civil disobedience such as those at Occupy sites, is
dissent’s opposite; consent. Which is to say that what the OWS disobedients are succeeding in doing is
making legible the consent of those who continue to subscribe to the political process they consider
malign. Their persistence in the face of police and the ensuing arrests, serve to suggest that there is an
alternative to the current form of political governance that is perhaps more worthy of our authorization
—and it involves what Arendt considered to be a distinctly American remedy.
The Hannah Arendt Center
The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a
marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an
intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of
the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.
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romulo arendt de lima anos 26.
May 16, 2012
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