communal deliberation is annoying

on association in arendt and de tocqueville

It’s early December, and I’m nearly done with one of this semester’s two experiments: teaching political philosophy for the first time after a several years’ break. It’s where I started as a teacher, and it’s been a pleasure to get back to it, and with an excellent group, too, but . . . what a year to take up this particular project in this particular town. nation. you get the idea.

Last time, in 2016 that is, quite by accident I had lined up Plato’s Republic 8, the inevitable devolution of democracy into tyranny, for the day after the election. Waking up, walking to campus, holding the book that had become true—teaching that passage on that day was like having eagle-eyed tragic vision of the future. Yet the experience, as a shared one, sitting with the slowly dawning insight from the New Orleans students at the time did offer a certain kind of comfort—more than poor Cassandra, doomed to deliver true prophecy without ever being heard, ever attained. And, to be honest, there was also the pleasure of being right: that American (little-d) democrats ought to have given my favorite book a bit more credit. More on this double-edged emotion in a bit.

Flash forward to my semester planning this year. I didn’t want to think practically about either outcome yet, but I did want to make a plan for reading that would provide psychic-intellectual cushion in either eventuality. So this time I had us work on the whole of Republic 8 the week before the election, and scheduled de Tocqueville on associations and majoritarian foibles on either side of the Tuesday in question.

This worked, in one sense, not at all. Well, the Republic the week before fine, but class on Monday and Thursday of election week was, predictably given our subject, devoted by common acclimation to conversation on the events of the day.

I am very fond of my students at St. John’s (Queens, not Annapolis, no relation) for many reasons, but it was a particular pleasure to be at the epicenter of something like a fifty-fifty split in the vote in our zipcode, to have the memory of predictions and fears war with our post-election analysis, where everyone knew scores of people who had voted one way, and scores of people, the other.

There was also something funny about the set-up, however. I’m something of an outlier among my colleagues in the way I use discussion in class, that is, a lot. It usually takes much of the semester to get students used to it, and to slowly by the end see the point in learning a different way, not from the top down, but by spending a lot of time lost in the unstructured, non-bullet-pointed, mess of common conversation. The thing is, if you’re not used to it, it doesn’t feel like learning at all. You don’t always express your own point well, or jump in when you really want to, and if you do make your point well, then you have to put up with the chagrin of finding that not only does another student think the opposite, the class mood sided with him, instead! (And why didn’t the teacher step in, and why isn’t she doing her job and talking . . . you get the idea.) And if no other classes are like this, it can be hard to see why this deeply frustrating exercise resembles anything like education at all, let alone something seemingly as elevated as the Socratic kind.¹

Hence the de Tocqueville. Associations, he writes, first seemed to him foolish, “more amusing than serious.”² What would small pointless gatherings, clubs, debates, leagues, taking up minor collections, building a church steeple, have to do with politics? Why, he writes, were the members of the Temperance League not content to simply stay at home and not drink liquor with their families? Why must they parade around boasting about pledging not to drink in front of other people? But then he gets to it: it’s by doing this that Americans practice deliberating in common with each other, and it is not an accident that the helpfulness arrives when large-scale political divisions are well off the table. Making even the most minor decision about where and when the chess club should meet is not only trivial, it’s incredibly annoying. And when it gets even the smallest bit more complicated (once I was present for an eight month long debate over whether the church I was going to should have a sign with letters big enough to be visible from the street), and personality becomes involved, and worst of all, when you all have to make a decision any decision, together, acting in common with one’s fellow man can feel like nothing short of agony. Yet it’s also, de Tocqueville writes, one of the best ways Americans at that time (pre-civil war) preserved their sense of and taste for freedom rather than despotism: making decisions in an association allows you to remember and practice not only what it’s like to know what you think is best to do, letting someone else decide while you fume in the back row, or trying to beg the favor of someone more powerful as a treat, but practicing the art of argument, persuasion, and often no small amount of begging one’s fellow man, in service of some real if minor practical end. In such a place, de Tocqueville writes, “Haughtiness dissimulates; contempt does not dare come to light. Selfishness is ashamed of itself.”³

Of course, this is just the passage my class ended up not talking about, in lieu of talking about what was pressing, instead. This was the right call, though it did frustrate since I think it’s that very sense of the annoyance, banality, triviality, and human agony of being in small associations that tempts Americans et al to long for a politician who “gets things done,” as so many of the DC Democrats I used to know would say, or to slurp after successful political actors to feel, just for a bit, the power emanating off someone who after all, had acted, cravenly forgetting that action is the birthright of and possible for every human being. Not being free or practicing being free because it’s too annoying or doesn’t seem prestigious enough is surely the essence of willing slavery.⁴

Fortunately, the semester came back to de Tocqueville by an unlikely route: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, the sixth chapter, to be precise, “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure.” It was a new text for me this year, but a lucky one, since it brought us back to almost every major moment from the class, starting with Aristotle’s broadest sense of association as any human group, and then narrowing past de Tocqueville to a much more constitutionally-oriented sense of possibility for the smallest level of human political organization: Jefferson’s late-blooming idea, never seriously implemented or considered, to continue formal organization past the county level to the smallest scale of what he calls “the wards.”⁵

As Arendt notes, he never says what they are or what, exactly, they would do; but it is this very openended-ness that holds the possibility for generative action and thought. And as she adds, it was the failure to make a formal place in the constitution for the kind of township and town-hall activity that gave rise to the Revolution in the first place that poses a continual danger to our ability not only to find people interested in public talk and public freedom, but to hone our opinions away from the unseriousness of mass opinion, into something more like our own.⁶ She also describes, in a wealth of detail, how just this kind of small-scale club or grouping spontaneously formed itself throughout even the largest and most unwieldy of nation-states: in France in the sociétés populaires which one may also see in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, in Russia in the “soviets,” in Germany, in Hungary, and so on—only to find the revolutionary party firmly and efficiently squelching them once they were in power.

Why was this so? Arendt contends that it was not only because even the minor power of such groups inevitably clashed with party politics and how political parties hierarchically administer themselves, but because each group, council, or soviet might simply disagree: disagree over what was the best regime, whether communism was best or which form was best, over what to do and what was most pressing. But by this squelching, each newly formed government lost by accident or on purpose its best and most generative possibility for new trustworthy human actors, and truly new political creativity.

As the current year comes to a close, there is ever so much talk, from party politicians, from what Arendt might call professional revolutionaries, and indeed from people like myself who might be tempted to regard one book, Plato in my case, as the “official guide to the interpretation and annotation of all history, past, present, and future,” or substitute “I told you so” for the pride of the newly springing thought.⁷ The danger is real, and not the least because of this annoying thing, that the very means by which we think and form and act and are freely, is fundamentally and inescapably annoying, to be and think and converse with other people, who will always, always disagree, especially when it’s most important.

And so, my question is, as various people attempt to “add to the debate” by adding their isolated opinions to the discursive noise, not so much whether wards in the Jeffersonian sense are possible, or how I might go about setting up wards myself, although these are interesting and important questions. But rather, it is something like this: if wards or something like them were to spontaneously organize, would I myself be able or willing to recognize them? And would my instinct be to squelch them as soon as possible, lest they disagree with me over the nature of politics and the best regime, or would I be able to let them chaotically be themselves?

1. “How’s the Socratic method going, Mary?” one of my colleagues once asked me during finals. I said: “It’s going.”

2. Vol. 2, Part 2, Ch. 5, pg. 490, Chicago ed.

3. Vol. 2, Part 2, Ch. 4, pg. 486, Chicago ed.

4. I had to stop myself from writing an essay immediately after this year’s election in praise of small associations, because the data was too raw, my thoughts would not have been settled nor my emotions in check, but I do think this is the best immediate advice I can give: Voting is the tip of the iceberg, and adjudicating party politics from afar is by design, a waste of time, but joining a small association with, importantly, no specific political goal, is you practicing citizenship and freeing yourself from the disgust of your fellow men. I strongly suspect there is plenty of in-person associative life out there already, and the first course would be to find out where it is held, rather than tyrannically starting my own group first.

5. There were a few things in the class in between that I’m also proud of: I’d planned and went through with a sequence on nihilism, which proved almost too good at continuing the momentum of fierce talk. Beauvoir on the desire to violently will nothing, Strauss on the lack of a real “yes” or positive vision amidst the frenzied rejection of liberalism amongst the youth-nazis of his university day, and Nietzsche on the lack of real life-creativity amongst the chauvinism and anti-semites of his. All as the perfect set-up for Arendt’s hope for those in search of τὸν Βίον λαμπρὸν ποιεῖσθαι, a life of brilliant public freedom (On Revolution, Penguin classics ed., pg. 281).

6. On Revolution, Penguin classics ed., pg. 235.

7. On Revolution, Penguin classics ed., pg. 261.