Principles of An-Archy: Hannah Arendt, Reiner Schürmann, and the Politics of the Many

Facundo Vega’s project, Principles of An-archy: Hannah Arendt, Reiner Schürmann, and the Politics of the Many, compares Arendt’s and Schürmann’s shared but unacknowledged interest in ‘principles’ and ‘beginnings’ inherent to politics. Vega considers how both drew from and reformulated Heidegger’s philosophy of inception in order to analyze what Arendt and Schürmann understood as moments of freedom in history. Despite their attention to Heideggerian ‘principles’ and ‘beginnings’ of politics, Arendt and Schürmann, Vega argues, underestimated Heidegger’s condemnation of the vulgarity of the many.

For Heidegger, political founding amounted to extraordinary moments illustrated by the ontological status of the ruler; for Arendt and Schürmann, political founding, by contrast, was enacted by human plurality and the many, which cannot be inscribed into the history of Being and the body of the leader. Principles of An-archy thus speaks to our contemporary political milieu in its frustrated attempts to consolidate ‘the combined power of the many’. This kind of combined power, also known as democratic an-archy, offers a unique resource for challenging the return of exceptionalism in the form of populist leadership and great men.