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DOI: 10.1177/0191453706066979 2006 32: 881Philosophy Social
Criticism
Hans LindahlGive and take: Arendt and the nomos of political
community
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Hans Lindahl
Give and takeArendt and the nomos of politicalcommunity
Abstract Appealing to the original meaning of the Greek term
nomos,Hannah Arendt claims that a bounded legal space is
constitutive forpolitical community. Can this seemingly
anachronistic claim be substan-tiated in the conceptually strong
sense that every polity the Greek city-state as much as a
hypothetical world state must constitute itself as anomos? It is
argued that whereas Arendt falls short of justifying this claim,a
reflexive reading of nomos can do the trick: the space of
politicalcommunity is necessarily bounded because no polity is
imaginable that doesnot raise a claim to an inside as the
communitys own space. A world state,were it ever to be founded,
would globalize nomos, not suppress it. Whencethe political
problem: how does a polity deal with its outside? This problemis
particularly pressing because Carl Schmitts defense of nomos
radicallychallenges Arendts position. A reinterpretation of her
analyses of the foun-dation of a political community suggests how
the representational structureof a politics of boundaries parries
Schmitts challenge.
Key words citizen/foreigner inside/outside nomos own/strange
reflexivity representation space
1 Introduction
The law, Hannah Arendt argues, plays a constitutive role in
politics andpolitical community. Yet this constitutive role becomes
visible only if wehark back to the original meaning of the Greek
word nomos, a meaningthat has become progressively concealed in the
course of western history.We are so accustomed, she notes,
PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 32 no 7 pp. 881901
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to understanding legislation (Gesetz) and the law, in line with
the TenCommandments, as orders and prohibitions, the only meaning
of which isto demand obedience, that we easily allow the originally
spatial characterof legislation to become forgotten. All
legislation creates first of all a spacein which it is valid, and
this space is the world in which we can move infreedom. What lies
outside this space is lawless and properly speakingwithout a
world.1
Arendt contends that the semantic transformations governing the
careerof nomos systematically block an understanding of laws
fundamentalcontribution to political community. To rid this term of
its metaphysi-cal accretions is to clear the way for a renewed
understanding of thelaw and its relation to other features of
political community to whichshe incessantly returns in her
writings: power, world, and freedom.
Arendts recovery of the originally spatial meaning of
nomosdemands justification: why should political and conceptual
priority begranted to what is, at face value, no more than an
etymologically priornotion of the law? I will argue hereinafter
that this claim can and mustbe justified in terms of the reflexive
structure of legal space. Althoughthere are important passages in
Arendts writings that point in this direc-tion, it will be my view
that she falls well short of the reflexive readingof nomos that
could justify her claim. Drawing on Arendt when I can,and taking
issue with her when I must, I propose to show that no politi-cal
community is imaginable not even a hypothetical world state that
does not close itself off as an inside over against an
outside.Moreover, and no less importantly, by closing itself off as
an inside withrespect to an outside, a community posits a space as
its own, and viceversa. This correlation is the heart of the
reflexive structure of nomos;to hold that the space of political
community is necessarily bounded isto hold that no polity is
thinkable that does not raise a claim to an insideas the communitys
own space.
The interest guiding this reflexive reading of nomos is
political asmuch as it is conceptual. In a well-known chapter of
her book on totali-tarianism, Arendt describes the extraordinarily
precarious condition ofthe stateless who do not fall within the
jurisdiction of the country inwhich they are located, yet have
forfeited the protection of any other.2Having lost a legal place of
their own, having become atopos, the state-less are anomalous in
the strong sense of anomos; in the words of theaforementioned
passage, the stateless have become lawless, without aworld. The
plight of the stateless illustrates, although it by no
meansexhausts, a strong form of exteriority called forth by the
self-closure ofa polity. Taking seriously Arendts claim that nomos
is constitutive forpolitical community requires making sense of
this exteriority and of howa polity deals with it.
Securing a reflexive reading of nomos requires steering clear of
twopitfalls. The first is an etymological inquiry into this Greek
term, an
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inquiry for which I am anyway totally unequipped. Although
referencewill be made in a general way to what etymologists take to
be its initialmeaning, this term will function primarily as a
guidepost orienting aninquiry into the modes of appearance and
genesis of the bounded spaceof a polity. The second trades in the
notion of a public space for thatof a public sphere. On this view,
Arendts references to a public spaceand a space of appearances are
not only largely metaphorical but theyalso conceal that, in
modernity, the public becomes a virtual communityof readers,
writers, and interpreters.3 Whether or not the publicbecomes
de-spatialized depends, however, on what it could mean toclaim that
a bounded space is constitutive for political community. Thisclaim
merits assessment on its own terms, despite and even becauseof the
fact that Arendts discussion of nomos often slips into
ametaphorical mode.
2 Nomos and the problem of spatial unity
Arendts recovery of nomos seems anachronistic and
embarrassinglyparochial to her contemporary readers. Citing
Cornford, she remindsus that, for the Greeks, nomos never entirely
lost its original meaningof a range or province, within which
defined powers may be legiti-mately exercised.4 The spatiality
implied in the notion of a range isclosely related to the
substantives noms and nom, and the relatedcompound adjective
ennomos. If the substantives denote both pasturageor feeding place,
and dwelling place or quarters, the adjective, whichlater means
keeping within the law, law-abiding, has the oldersense of
quartered or dwelling in a country, which is, as it were,the
legitimate range of its inhabitants.5 Moreover, as both Cornfordand
Arendt point out, these different terms are related to the
verbnemein, which means to distribute, to possess (what has been
distrib-uted), and to dwell.6 In this line of thinking, Arendt
emphasizes thatthe law of the polis was quite literally a wall,
without which there mayhave been an agglomeration of houses, a town
(asty), but not a city, apolitical community. This wall-like law
was sacred, but only the in-closure was political.7 But Arendt goes
much further, generalizing theoriginal Greek understanding of the
law to a constitutive feature ofpolitical community as such: all
legislation creates first of all a space inwhich it is valid . . .
(emphasis added). What justifies this strong claim?
This question is apposite if we bear in mind that, as Arendt
herselfnotes, the Roman interpretation of lex as an enduring bond
is, incontrast to Greek nomos, potentially boundless in its spatial
reach.Politics, for the Romans, began where it ended for the
Greeks: at thewalls of the city. Whereas nomos makes room for
internal politics, lexdoes so for external politics.8 Yet Arendt
immediately qualifies this sharp
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opposition, noting that also for the Romans, the political
domain couldonly arise and exist within the legal; but this domain
arose and wasenlarged where different peoples met each other.9
Hence, although lexenlarges the experience of action by
incorporating conflictual relationsinto the concept of law, the
legal enclosure of space conditions politicalcommunity in Rome no
less than in the Greek city-states.10 Moreover,the steady expansion
of Rome beyond its initial spatial confines firstthe city, then the
Italic peninsula suggests why nomos deserves concep-tual and
political priority over other, derivative conceptions of law.
Ineffect, given the innate boundlessness of action, nomos
. . . prevents it from evaporating into an unsurveyable
(unbersehbaren),continuously growing system of relations, [thereby
ensuring that action]conserves the durable form that makes of it a
deed that can be rememberedand preserved in its greatness, that is,
in its excellence.11
It is doubtful whether this normative argument can carry the
weightof the strong claim that the legal closure of space is
constitutive forpolitical community as such. But assuming it could,
notice that Arendtsappeal to nomos actually turns on the need to
assure immortality forhuman action. So, paradoxically, it is time,
or at least the experience oftime available to action, that, in
Arendts view, ultimately justifies thebounded spatiality of
political community. Arendts concern withreclaiming the original
meaning of nomos from forgetfulness is tribu-tary to her concern
with rescuing from oblivion the striving for immor-tality which
originally had been the spring and center of the vitaactiva.12
Whatever else we might make of this justification, this muchis
certain: it fails to ground the necessity of nomos on its own
terms,that is, as a spatial concept.
The need for such a grounding becomes even more urgent if
weconsider what is possibly Arendts most trenchant statement about
nomos:
Freedom, wherever it has existed as a tangible reality, has
always beenspatially limited. This is especially clear for the
greatest and most elemen-tary of all negative liberties, the
freedom of movement; the borders ofnational territory or the walls
of the city-state comprehended and protecteda space in which men
could move freely. Treaties and international guar-antees provide
an extension of this territorially bound freedom for
citizensoutside their own country, but even under these modern
conditions theelementary coincidence of freedom and a limited space
remains manifest.13
At one level, the passage notes that the spatial boundedness of
politicalcommunity preconditions freedom. At a deeper level, it
suggests that aclosed space conditions the very possibility of
citizenship. To put itprovocatively, citizenship depends on nomos
because if there can be nocitizens without inclusion, likewise
there can be no citizens withoutexclusion. Citizenship is
topical.
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Any attempt to ground these claims must begin by drawing
atten-tion to an aspect of nomos that remains largely implicit
throughoutArendts writings. Indeed, that political communities are
alwaysspatially limited is another way of saying that a political
communityconstitutes itself as a spatial unity. Yet, despite her
insistence on theconstitutive character of nomos for political
community, Arendt doesnot focus on the problem of spatial unity.
Why?
Part of the answer lies in the manner in which Arendt
celebratesplurality as an essential feature of politics. By
postulating that pluralityis the conditio per quam of speech and
action, and of politics in general,Arendt relegates the legal
enclosure of space to a merely prepoliticalcondition of action.14
As she sees it, nomos provides a durable struc-ture for spaces of
appearances in which men, in the plural, can discloseand
distinguish themselves through word and deed. Arendt is no
doubtcorrect to argue that political theory must account for
plurality as acondition of action. But reducing bounded space to a
precondition ofpolitics amounts to depoliticizing the spatial unity
of a politicalcommunity. This issue bears directly on the master
distinction betweenpublic and private places. Although Arendt tends
to restrict nomos topublic places, it actually embraces places
public and private. In virtueof their mutual implication and
differentiation, private and public placesare locations within a
more encompassing spatial unity. Indeed, bothpublic and private
places presuppose and refer to the totality of placesin which they
are located a range. In Cornfords words, nomos denotesa
dispensation or system of provinces, within which all the
activities ofa community are parceled out and coordinated.15
Accordingly, thedistribution (nemein) of space into public and
private places is itself apolitical act or, to put it another way,
the distinction between public andprivate places is itself
public.
In the same move by which Arendt depoliticizes spatial unity
shealso despatializes action. It is striking that the constitutive
significanceof nomos notwithstanding, Arendt nowhere engages in a
full-blownanalysis of boundary-setting or of what might be termed
the topogenesisof political community. However, power is never
merely in space;power also always spatializes, in the strong sense
of an act that, bysetting boundaries, posits a polity as a spatial
unity. Notice in thisrespect that nemein does not only involve the
distribution of placeswithin a given range of law, for this already
presupposes a prior act thatgives rise to nomos itself, namely the
self-closure of a politicalcommunity. Crucially, neither a politys
self-closure nor the distributionof public and private places can
be reduced to an act of individual self-manifestation or to the sum
of self-manifestations of a plurality of indi-viduals who act and
speak directly to one another;16 it is the reflexiveact of a
collective agent. In other words, nemein, as the act of
positing
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boundaries, is the self-manifestation of a political unity.17
Obviously,this insight neither precludes plurality nor entails
ontologizing a collec-tive self. Instead, it indicates that
justifying the spatial unity of politicalcommunity requires
elucidating the reflexive structure of nomos: acommunity closes
itself off as an inside over against an outside.18 Unlessthe move
is made to a reflexive reading of nomos, the bounded spatial-ity of
political community indeed tends to become, as Benhabib puts it,a
topographical figure of speech.19
3 From the space of appearance to the appearance of space
In short, the question concerning the appearance of space is
prior tothat of the space of appearance. The closing considerations
of 2 suggestthe key to the novel line of phenomenological inquiry
Arendt opens upwithout fully exploiting it: space appears as a
unity to the members ofa community and this means as an inside
because nomos is consti-tuted reflexively. What is, then, the
spatial unity of nomos, as revealedin the self-closure that gives
rise to an inside and an outside?
Although Arendt, for the reasons indicated hitherto, does
notdevelop a reflexive reading of nomos, she does point the way
whennoting that
. . . a territory, as the law understands it, is a political and
legal concept,and not merely a geographical term. It relates not so
much, and notprimarily, to a piece of land as to the space between
individuals in a groupwhose members are bound to, and at the same
time separated and protectedfrom, each other by all kinds of
relationships, based on a commonlanguage, religion, a common
history, customs, and laws.20
This passage contains various important implications for our
topic. Tobegin with, Arendt points out that territoriality is
concrete: the common-ality claimed for language, religion, history,
and the like entails the claimthat a territory is the common place
of a community. This suggests thatnomos involves two correlative
dimensions. The first is normative, andconcerns a claim about the
common interest of a polity. To be common,an interest must be
bounded, and this means that a legal order neces-sarily selects
certain interests to grant them legal protection and discardsother
interests as legally irrelevant. The second dimension is
physical,insofar as the legal orders claim to common interests is
determined bymeans of boundaries that partition space. More
precisely, the two dimen-sions of nomos manifest themselves in
boundaries, which are alikenormative and physical. This explains,
on the one hand, why boundary-crossings are normative no less than
physical events, and, on the other,why boundaries are variable,
even though their physical positioning does
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not change an inch (e.g. when import tariffs for foreign goods
areincreased or decreased, depending on which interest is
endorsed). I shallrefer hereinafter to territory as the concrete
unity of both dimensions;as manifested in the boundaries of a legal
order, this concrete unity isthe mode of spatiality captured by the
term nomos.
The concrete spatiality of nomos sheds light on a further issue
thatArendt only hints at, without developing, in the passage cited
at theoutset of this essay: All legislation creates first of all a
space in whichit is valid (emphasis added). That the boundaries of
a legal order areinextricably normative and physical means that
boundaries determinewhere persons and behavior ought or ought not
to be emplaced. A spaceof action is a legal space of action to the
extent that it reveals places asought-places. Remember, in this
context, the two meanings of thecompound adjective ennomos, namely
keeping within the law or law-abiding, and quartered or dwelling in
a country (Cornford). Aphenomenology of nomos suggests that these
two meanings are inter-nally connected: abiding, in the twofold
sense of abiding by the law andabiding in a place, is one of the
spatial modes of appearance of legalvalidity. When abiding, an
individual is emplaced, located where she orhe ought to be. A
second spatial mode of appearance of validity is tres-passing,
crossing over, in the double sense of becoming misplaced
andcrossing the law. When trespassing, an individual relates to a
place inthe form of not-where-he/she-ought-to-be. Abiding and
trespassing arethe two basic ways of defining and distributing
places within a range oflaw.
The concreteness of nomos explains, additionally, in what
sensenomos has a reflexive structure, that is, why nomos is linked
to a self-reference of community. Notice, to begin with, that a
territory is notmerely a common place; it is deemed to be the
common place of acommunity. Importantly, this sense of ownership
precedes the notion ofownership that Arendt has in mind when
opposing private places topublic places. Whereas the ownership of
private places involves propertyrights, this more fundamental sense
of ownership refers to the pri-mordial meaning of nemein as the
self-closure of a community. In thissecond sense, ownership
involves, on the one hand, the relation of aterritory to a
collective agent, that is, a collective that, claiming to actas a
whole, posits the boundaries of a territory, both those that close
itoff from other territories and those that demarcate places within
theterritory. On the other, it refers to the relation of a
territory to a collec-tive as the community of individuals that are
viewed as having a staketherein, that is, to the set of persons who
are held to be interested partiesto the territory and its
boundaries. Access to private property and topublic spaces is
legally protected because it is claimed that thecommunity as a
whole has a stake in the distribution of places made
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available by the legal order, regardless of the specific places
it assigns tospecific individuals under legally determined
conditions.
The reflexivity thesis casts the distinction between public and
privateplaces differently than Arendt does. For the one, the claim
that a terri-tory is the common place of a polity implies that the
manner in whichthis polity separates public from private places is
itself held to becommon. In this fundamental sense, private no less
than public placesare deemed to be common places. For the other,
the distinction betweenpublic and private places, between a common
and an individuals ownplace, in the restricted sense endorsed by
Arendt, remains intact. Butwhereas, for Arendt, a public place
fulfils its properly political role byproviding the scene that
allows individuals, in the plural, to appearthrough word and deed
in their unique distinctness, the reflexivity thesissuggests that
public places do not owe their political priority so muchto being
the scene of plurality as to being the locations where acommunity
constitutes and maintains itself, in and through its plural-ity, as
a unity, both spatial and personal. As opposed to private
places,public places are common in virtue of being the locations of
collectivesubjectivity and agency.
These considerations allow us, finally, to grasp the unity of
nomos.As noted at the outset of this section, nemein denotes the
act by whicha community closes itself as an inside over and against
an outside. Andwe now know that to close off a space is to qualify
this space as an ownterritory. Hence, by closing itself off as an
inside with respect to anoutside, a community posits a territory as
its own, and vice versa. Aninside and an own territory are two
sides of the same coin. Moreover,this correlation explains why, as
Arendt correctly notes, a territory isnot merely a geographical
unity. Beyond the empirical fact that not allterritories are
geographically contiguous, the essential point is that
theself-closure of a polity involves a qualitative differentiation
of space: thecommunitys inside is preferred to its outside.21 The
correlation betweenan inside and an own place, and the preference
granted to interiority,are constitutive for the spatial unity of
nomos.
How are we to understand the mutual implication between an
insideand a claim to an own place? A certain ambiguity in the
notion of anown space highlights the fact that there are two
different forms ofinside and outside. First, the distinction
between the inside and theoutside of a political community is
correlative to the contrast betweena communitys own territory and
foreign territories, territories to whichother polities lay claim
as their own. The opposition between internaland external affairs,
which is the staple fare of nation-state politics,alludes to this
contrast. Yet there is a second divide between an insideand an
outside, which is correlative to the contrast between an ownplace
and a strange place. The latter relates to individuals who are
not
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in-legal-place, yet are not simply misplaced in virtue of not
being wherethey ought to be; instead, they are displaced, that is
to say, they claima legal place of their own for which there is no
place within the distri-bution of places made available by a
region. Thus, different forms ofboundary-crossings are at stake:
whereas misplacement trespasses aboundary, displacement
transgresses it. Whereas trespassing rendersconspicuous the
familiar unity of a totality of legal places as assigninga certain
place to an individual, and which the individual does notoccupy,
transgression renders conspicuous a region as a totality of
legalplaces in which an individual has no place. Strange places
reveal anoutside in a strong sense of the word, namely a where that
is elsewherethan in the distribution of places laid out by a range
of law. In thisstrong sense of an outside, all the boundaries of a
legal order, includingthose that distribute places within a
territory, are its external bound-aries. The ambiguity of nemein,
which cannot include without exclud-ing, ensures that the
commonality claimed for the boundaries of a rangeof law can always
be subverted. Accordingly, the two manifestations ofthe
inside/outside divide are mutually irreducible. The place from
whicha foreigner comes, when entering a polity, need not be
strange;conversely, a strange place need not be foreign: it can
irrupt from withinwhat a political community calls its own place.
This strong form ofexteriority could serve as the point of
departure for a critical recoveryof Arendts notion of
plurality.
The closing section of this article will examine how a polity
can atall deal with the strong form of exteriority called forth by
the reflexivestructure of nomos. First, however, we need to
consider whether thisphenomenology of bounded space, however
abridged, lends credence toArendts claim that the original
understanding of nomos is a constitu-tive feature of political
community as such.
4 Globalizing nomos
If, as noted at the outset of 2, Arendts defense of nomos
seemsanachronistic and embarrassingly parochial to the
contemporaryreader, this is above all because we live in an era
that increasingly iden-tifies itself as the era of globalization.
Whatever position one mightwant to take on the question whether
globalization is a politicaldesideratum, a world state is a
possibility that has come within thereach of humanity. From this
perspective, a leading advocate of politi-cal globalization argues
that borders, in the context of a world feder-ation, could only
mean internal differentiation.22 In fact, to the extentthat these
are mutually implicative terms, the elimination of an
outsideentails the elimination of an inside as well. The emergence
of a state
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that encompasses the whole face of the earth would mark, so it
seems,the demise of nomos.
Arendt counters this forbidding prospect with a lapidary
dictum:Nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of
hiscountry.23 The advent of a world state would mark the end of
citizen-ship, not a novel form thereof, and the end of politics,
not a new phasethereof. A citizen is by definition a citizen among
citizens of a countryamong countries. His rights and duties must be
defined and limited, notonly by those of his fellow citizens, but
also by the boundaries of a terri-tory (ibid.). Arendts defense of
nomos in her Jaspers article rests onthe argument that whereas
technology provides humanity with acommon present, this shared
present does not spring from a commonpast, nor can it ensure a
common future. Notice that, the perceptive-ness of this argument
notwithstanding, Arendt again appeals to time tojustify the
constitutive character of nomos for political community.Once more,
Arendt fails to ground the necessity of nomos on its ownterms, that
is, as a spatial concept.
The phenomenology of nomos outlined in the foregoing section
doesprovide such a justification. In effect, the reflexivity thesis
implies thatwhereas the divide between own and foreign territories
is a contingentfeature of political communities, as we know them
hitherto, the dividebetween own and strange places is constitutive
for political communityas such. Arendts description of
territoriality clears the way for thisreflexive reading of what
Cornford called a range of law. Regardlessof the organizational
principle that were to be adopted when foundinga world state, this
novel political community would have to claim thatit holds sway
over a common place. A world state would arise in theprocess of
selecting certain interests as worthy of legal protection,
andsetting boundaries that define where behavior ought or ought not
totake place. Certainly, a world state would have no outside in the
senseof foreign territories located beyond its reach, or at least
not initially.But the inclusion and exclusion of interests required
to institute the terri-tory of a world state would ensure that this
polity harbors, at leastlatently, strange places in what it calls
its own territory. Nemein, whichincludes and excludes, entails that
also a world state would have anoutside in the strong sense
referred to earlier. Accordingly, a world state,were it ever to be
founded, would be a specific historical articulation ofnomos.
This insight allows us to justify Arendts claim about the
topicalityof citizenship. Having asserted, in an earlier cited
passage, that even inmodern conditions there is an elementary
coincidence of freedom anda limited space, she drives home this
point by noting that freedom ina positive sense is possible only
among equals, and equality itself is byno means a universally valid
principle but, again, applicable only with
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limitations and even within spatial limits.24 Yet, the point is
not somuch that a world state would dissolve citizenship into
universal humanequality, as Arendt intimates, but rather that
citizenship in a world statewould institute political equality,
which, as she rightly contends, is notgiven us, but is the result
of human organization insofar as it is guidedby the principle of
justice.25 Because the genesis of political communityinvolves
selecting certain interests as worthy of legal protection
anddiscarding others as irrelevant, the world citizen is held to be
committed,as a citizen, to the interests the world state claims to
be common, henceto conserving the territorial integrity of this
community by respectingthe boundaries that establish what counts as
being in-legal-place.Accordingly, the institution of political
equality in a world state evenone that claims to be a democracy
under a rule of law that respects thefull array of civil and
political rights inevitably opens up the possi-bility of
instituting political inequality, such that world citizenship
couldultimately be withdrawn from individuals who radically contest
thepolitys claim to a common place. World citizenship no less
thancitizenship in the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire, or the
modernnation-state is necessarily emplaced citizenship.
Where, then, could individuals go, if they were to forfeit their
citizen-ship in a world state? Although the two notions of
exteriority introducedin 3 are mutually irreducible, political
asylum is a means of connectingthem: by institutionalizing the
possibility of obtaining abode in a foreignterritory, political
asylum recognizes and calls attention to the existenceof strange
places in what a polity claims to be its own territory. In
otherwords, political asylum is a technique that uses the
distinction betweenown and foreign places to counter the tendency
of political communitiesto deny (the contingency of) the divide
they set up between own andstrange places. A reflexive reading of
nomos strongly endorses Arendtsplea in favor of a plurality of
states, to the extent that this plea involvesa defense of political
asylum and of the contingency of the spatial bound-aries of a
polity. Relatedly, the realization of global freedom would
beunimaginable unless the globe becomes a bounded region nomos on
aplanetary scale. And this entails that freedom in a world state
would bean ambiguous achievement: although global freedom,
beginning with thefreedom of movement, would be unthinkable without
the concrete distri-bution of places made available by a territory,
this distribution of placesalso opens up the world state to the
charge that freedom is elsewhere, inanother world. In short, no
world state, whatever its political organiz-ation, could ever
escape the latent possibility of secession and, concomi-tantly, the
reinstatement of the distinctions between own and
foreignterritories, citizen and foreigner.
Finally, the correlation between these two aspects of nemein
obtainsits initial and primordial expression in citizenship. It is
no coincidence
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that the foundational act of a political community not only
separatesan inside from an outside but also identifies who counts
as a citizen.For a preference in the difference accrues as much to
the personal asto the spatial aspect of nemein: by closing itself
off as an inside overagainst an outside, a collective first and
foremost makes place for theindividuals who, as members of a
community, abide preferentially in itsterritory, i.e. who are the
preferred bearers of rights and obligations.Accordingly, not only
is citizenship always emplaced citizenship butcitizenship is also
always the primitive but never innocent form oflegal emplacement.
All other forms of legal emplacement are derivativethereof, the
right to sojourn granted by a polity to foreigners residingin its
territory no less than the myriad forms of legal emplacement inthe
course of everyday transactions. The metaphorical sense ofinclusion
and exclusion, respectively the ascription or withholding ofrights
and obligations, beginning with those accruing to
citizenship,implies the literal, spatial sense of inclusion and
exclusion, and viceversa.26 A world state would be no exception to
this state of affairs;what would distinguish its foundation from
that of a nation-state is thatthe territorially preferential status
of citizenship remains concealed untilsuch time as the spatial
boundaries of this global polity are challengedfrom a strange place
from without. In short, Arendts lapidary dictummust be inverted:
one can only be a citizen of the world in the sameway that one is
the citizen of a country.
5 Nomos and the politics of boundaries
To sum up, Arendts claim concerning the constitutive character
ofnomos for political community is well founded, provided nomos is
inter-preted in a reflexive key. No polity is possible that does
not close itselfoff as an inside over against an outside. The
corollary to this insight isthat no collective ever entirely
succeeds in stabilizing the claim to a terri-tory as its own place.
Ineluctably, every polity must engage with itsoutside by way of a
politics of boundaries; Arendts fears notwithstand-ing, the
emergence of a world state would not and could not mark thedemise
of politics. I will conclude this article by looking more closelyat
this politics of boundaries. My analysis will not be normative, or
atleast not directly so. Instead, I propose to describe the basic
features ofboundary-setting that condition the very possibility of
dealing in differ-ent ways with a politys exteriority. In
particular, attention must beshifted from nomos to nemein: how are
boundaries posited?
Although, as noted, Arendt does not engage in a full-blown
topo-genetic inquiry, her discussion of the foundation of political
communitydoes provide a vital clue as to how boundaries are
posited. Referring to
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the significance of this foundational act, she notes that we are
not bornequal; we become equal as members of a group on the
strength of ourdecision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal
rights.27 At the sametime that Arendts observation calls attention
to the reflexivity inherentto the foundation of a community, it
raises a pressing question: whatcriterion establishes who belongs
to the we that decide to bandtogether and grant themselves mutual
rights, beginning with thoseaccruing to citizenship? It will not do
to suggest that this criterion isitself the object of a prior
covenant, for this, of course, is to embark onan infinite
regress.28 Arendt is well aware of this problem, and suggestshow
action deals with it: every action, accomplished by a plurality
ofmen, can be divided into two stages: the beginning which is
initiated bya leader, and the accomplishment, in which many join to
see throughwhat then becomes a common enterprise.29 She elsewhere
returns tothe initial stage of foundation, asserting that in modern
revolutions indi-viduals took the initiative to create workers
councils.30 Although thesepassages do not refer specifically to
boundaries, they suggest that theself-closure of a political
community gets going when the initiative istaken to set boundaries.
Boundary-setting begins as a taking.
At this point, a confrontation between Hannah Arendts and
CarlSchmitts interpretations of nomos becomes inevitable, even
though, asfar as I know, neither of the two referred, whether
explicitly or impli-citly, to the others discussion of nomos.
Schmitts defense of nomos, basedon the idea that law is a unity of
order and emplacement, poses a radicalchallenge to legal and
political thinking, including that of Arendt.31 Hischallenge stems
not so much from the concrete spatiality of legal order something
Schmitt has surprisingly little to say about as from hisanalysis of
the act that founds a range of law nemein. Repeating almostverbatim
Arendts definition of nemein, Schmitt notes that this Greekverb is
usually taken to mean a sequence of acts whereby an initial actof
division and distribution is followed by exploitation, i.e. a
productiveuse and possession of what has been divided and
distributed. Thisinterpretation, as he sees it, neutralizes the
political content of nemein.For the sequence of acts that compose
it begins earlier: in the same waythat distribution precedes
exploitation, a taking precedes distribution.Not the distribution,
not the divisio primaeva, but a taking is what comesfirst. For, he
adds, no human being can give, distribute and apportionwithout
taking.32 This primordial act is an appropriation, a taking ofland
(Landnahme). An act that seizes land founds the law both
inter-nally and externally: internally, by making room for the
allocation ofownership and property relations, whether public or
private; externally,by demarcating a political community over
against other politicalcommunities. Schmitt does not hesitate to
draw the implications of thisinsight for a politics of boundaries:
all subsequent regulations . . . are
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either a continuation of the original basis or a disintegration
of anddeparture from the constitutive act of land-appropriation.33
This, hewould no doubt argue, is the unvarnished political content
of Arendtsinsight that founding a community requires that someone
take theinitiative.
A brief consideration of the treaties founding the
EuropeanCommunity, arguably the contemporary core of what Schmitt
calls theJus Publicum Europaeum, is of help in assessing his
challenge. ThePreamble to the Treaty of Rome states that the
parties to the treaty aredetermined to lay the foundations of an
ever closer union among thepeoples of Europe. Crucially, while the
six founding member statesclaimed to represent European unity, they
had received no mandate tothis effect from all possibly affected
parties, whether states or indi-viduals. The founding states are in
fact the self-proclaimed representa-tives of European unity. By
taking the initiative of founding theEuropean Community, the
signatories take, seize, Europe, disclosing itas a common
(internal) market and separating it from an externalmarket the rest
of the world. To be sure, many, as Arendt puts it,may subsequently
validate a land-appropriation, making it the point ofdeparture of a
common enterprise. But even if all the members of thecommunity were
to validate it, the land-appropriation that gives rise tothe
spatial unity of a community is never only the expression of
power,in the Arendtian sense of the human ability to act in
concert, but alsoof force, in the sense of a marginalization, both
physical and norma-tive, that lacks justification. To this extent,
Arendt falls prey to Schmittscritique.
Schmitts point does not exhaust, however, the implications of
thisconsideration for the way in which boundaries are posited.
Notice thatalthough the preamble refers to a plurality of peoples,
it also claims thatthere already was a union at the time of laying
its legal foundation inthe Treaty of Rome, a community of peoples
that, by virtue of theirshared interests, can go further together,
engaging in a process of legaland economic integration. The wording
of the preamble implies that theTreaty of Rome does not initiate
the community of European peoples;the treaty claims to build on a
prior closure, providing this communitywith an institutional
setting and specific goals. Moreover, the Preambleto the Treaty of
Rome views Europe as being itself already the productof an
aboriginal cut that separates an undifferentiated space into
twoplaces: Europe and the rest of the world. The datable act of
positing theEuropean Communitys boundaries claims to derive from a
closure lostin an irretrievable, undatable past.34
The Preamble to the Treaty of Rome aptly illustrates a
generalfeature of the topogenesis of political community: power can
only positthe empirically identifiable boundaries of a polity by
educing these from
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spatial boundaries that are not and never can be empirically
identifi-able.35 Nemein deploys a representational dynamic in the
strong, para-doxical, sense of the expression: a closure is
constituted as the originalclosure through its representations.
Hence, and Schmitt notwithstand-ing, there is no original spatial
unity that, posited directly at the foun-dation of a community, can
be distinguished from and opposed to itssubsequent representations.
From the very beginning, spatial unity ispresented mediately, in
and through its representations. In the same veinof thinking, a
politics of boundaries does not rest, as Schmitt contends,on the
simple opposition between an act that posits the boundaries ofa
novel community and subsequent acts that maintain and secure
thoseboundaries. If, as the Preamble to the Treaty of Rome shows,
the actthat posits the boundaries of a novel community moves to
maintain andsecure boundaries, the converse holds as well: the act
of maintainingand securing boundaries posits them founds anew the
spatial unity ofa community.
In the same way that Schmitts move to simply oppose an
originalclosure to subsequent acts that maintain and secure it
proves reductive,no less reductive is its corollary, namely that a
politics of boundariesaims to preserve the separation of the own
and the strange, as fixed inthe original land-appropriation. It is
here, I believe, that Arendtsanalysis of the own and the strange,
as it arises from her discussion ofstatelessness, develops a
powerful, albeit oblique, rejoinder to Schmittspolitics of
boundaries. If citizenship is the primitive form of emplace-ment,
Arendt effectively reminds us that statelessness is the
primitiveform of displacement. The crucial point is, as she sees
it, that this situ-ation undermines the legal order. For a politics
of boundaries thatreduces radical anomaly displacement to the
anomaly a legal orderunderstands misplacement ends up by
compromising nomos itself:in the process of preserving the claim to
an own territory, such a politicsof boundaries renders this
territory unrecognizable as the communitysown place.36 Although
formulated with regard to statelessness, Arendtsinsight has a
general significance for displacement. As I read her,
Arendtcounters Schmitts politics of boundaries by observing that if
thecommunitys own territory can become strange, this is because
what hecalls the original Landnahme inscribes strangeness in
ownness in thevery process of differentiating them: self-inclusion
is coevally a self-exclusion.
This insight has two important implications, both of which
pertainto the reflexive structure of nomos. The first concerns the
inside/outsidedistinction. Although no political community can
arise unless it closesitself off as an inside over against an
outside, nemein ensures that fromthe very beginning community is
also, albeit latently, outside theenclosure, as witnessed, among
others, by heterotopic calls for another
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Europe. This by no means implies that the boundaries separating
andopposing inside and outside are illusory or merely relative;
instead,boundaries call forth another experience of boundedness,
namely theexperience of community being inside out. The second
implicationconcerns the other aspect of the reflexive structure of
nomos, namely acommunitys claim to ownership of a territory. That
there is no self-inclusion without a measure of self-exclusion
entails that the questionwho is an interested party to a territory
and its boundaries is neverexhausted by any of the legal
institutionalizations of spatial unity. Thereare always persons who
can appear as having a stake in a politys terri-tory and its
boundaries other than those who are identified as such bythe legal
order. Here again, heterotopic calls for another Europe makeclear
that at stake in the reconfiguration of a European nomos is notonly
the inside/outside distinction but also the distinction
betweencitizen and non-citizen.
Notice, moreover, that the problem of time has slipped into
ourdiscussion of boundary-setting. Although Arendt is at pains to
relatenomos to time, she does so in a way that justifies the former
with refer-ence to a specific historical the early Greek
interpretation of thelatter: immortality. This approach fails to
justify nomos on its ownterms, i.e. as a spatial concept, and it
also fails to connect the spatial tothe temporal unity of a polity,
that is, to the self-constitution of acommunity as a unity of past,
present, and future. Yet Arendt pointsthe way to a more radical
understanding of the internal connectionbetween the spatial and
temporal unities of a polity in a remarkablepassage of The Human
Condition, which refers to spaces of appear-ances as predat[ing]
and preced[ing] all formal constitution of thepublic realm and the
various forms of government, that is, the variousforms in which the
public realm can be organized.37 Arendt calls atten-tion to the
fact that spatial unity, as founded in a legal order, leads
back,both logically and chronologically, to a founding space a
protospace,if you will. Think, for instance, of the places where
individuals gatherto engage in acts of civil disobedience. No legal
institutionalization ofspatial unity exhausts these protospaces,
which ensure that the nomosof political community never simply
coincides with its positivizationthrough an original Landnahme.
Hence, Arendts remark must beconstrued strictly: The law can . . .
stabilize and legalize change onceit has occurred, but the change
itself is always the result of extralegalaction, that is, of action
that, in the twofold sense of the expression,takes place outside of
nomos.38 Protoplaces are displaced.
Granting the importance of this insight, the key question
concerns,however, the temporal structure implicit in Arendts
discussion of thetransition leading from a founding protospace to
spatial unity asfounded in a legal order. Notice that Arendts
analysis of this transition
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interprets the foundation of a community as a simple temporal
sequencegoing from beginning to accomplishment, such that both the
unity ofspace and the unity of time unfold from and are guaranteed
by anabsolute presence and present. Certainly, no sense can be made
of newboundaries unless the act that posits them sunders the unity
of foundedspace; a protospace announces itself as an initiative
that comes fromelsewhere. But to disrupt the spatial unity of a
legal order is not yet tofound a novel spatial unity. In this
respect, the example of the Treatyof Rome suggests that the
sequence going from beginning to accom-plishment is too simple;
Arendts temporal analysis of foundation mustbe radicalized: nemein
is an accomplishing initiation. On the one hand,an initiation takes
on the form of an accomplishment because theoriginal self-closure
of a community only becomes such afterwards, inand through the
closures that accomplish it. This does not merely mean,as Arendt
suggests, that the initiative that posits spatial unity
requiressubsequent confirmations, but rather that, paradoxically,
this initiativeis only possible as the accomplishment of an
original self-closure original in virtue of not being directly
accessible. Remember that thewording of the Preamble to the Treaty
of Rome claims that there wasalready a European self-closure at the
time of signing the treaty, yet aself-closure lost in an
irretrievable past. On the other hand, the accom-plishment of a
prior self-closure can only be seen as initiating spatialunity if
it goes before community in the sense of anticipating a
viableunderstanding of a common territory. Here again, the Preamble
to theTreaty of Rome shows that the prior self-closure of Europe
can onlybecome such in the future, through the workable
anticipation of aunion among the peoples of Europe. Accordingly,
all foundation is arefoundation, an act that, paradoxically,
anticipates the past in thefuture. I would add that this
anticipation of the past in the future is awager rather than a
Schmittian decision, because positing the bound-aries of political
community involves a reasoned initiative in the face ofintractable
uncertainty about both past and future. For the past is morethan a
smooth foil upon which an anticipated spatial unity can be
retro-jected, and the future more than the projection of what
constitutes acommunitys own place. A politics of boundaries is
neither Schmittsrepetition of an original Landnahme nor the endless
and effortlessconfirmation of an anticipated commonality. The
structure of a wager,in which taking the initiative is inseparable
from taking a calculatedrisk, explains why the foundation of
political community involves notonly setting new boundaries but
also grave concern with the stabilityand durability of nomos.39
These considerations suggest, finally, a response to Schmitts
thesisthat the history of a political community progressively
unfolds ordeviates from the inner measure of an original,
constitutive act of
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spatial ordering.40 As Schmitt also puts it, no community can
givewithout having taken. In a sense, Schmitts argument is
indisputable.But the paradoxical temporality of nemein dislocates
the simpletemporal sequence going from taking to giving, from an
original Land-nahme to the distribution of rights and places,
whether public or private.Indeed, Schmitts epigram, what comes
first is a taking, is only correctwhen sharpened into a paradox:
what comes first is a retaking. Becausea community has no direct
access to its spatial origin, the boundariesof nomos are posited in
an act that, distributing rights and places, antici-pates who and
what had been included and excluded by the originalself-closure.
This, precisely, is what it means to give. In this give andtake, a
politics of boundaries separates and joins what lies insideand
outside the nomos of a political community.
Faculty of Philosophy, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The
Netherlands
Notes
I appreciate helpful suggestions by my colleagues at Tilburg,
Rafael Baroch, LuigiCorrias, David Janssens, Bart van Klink, Frans
van Peperstraten, and Bert vanRoermund. I am particularly grateful
to Andrew Schaap, who offered in-depthcommentary on my
interpretation of Arendt, and to Mireille Hildebrandt forher
comments on the notion of jurisdiction. My address is Associate
Professorof Legal Philosophy, Tilburg University, Faculty of
Philosophy, post box 90153,5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands and my
email: [email protected]
1 Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachla, ed.
UrsulaLudz (Munich: Piper, 2003[1993]), p. 122; hereinafter cited
as WiP.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
HarcourtBrace, 1951), p. 286; hereinafter cited as TOT.
3 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt
(ThousandOaks, CA: Sage, 1996), p. 200. See also Jrgen Habermas,
The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category ofBourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1989). Another commentator characterizes
Arendts work as aphenomenology of the public sphere (emphasis
added). See Dermot Moran,Introduction to Phenomenology (London:
Routledge, 2000), pp. 287ff.
4 F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the
Origins ofWestern Speculation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957),
p. 30, citedby Hannah Arendt in On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Mx:
PenguinBooks, 1990[1963]), pp. 1867; hereinafter cited as OR.
5 Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 30.6 Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p. 63, n. 62; hereinafter cited as HC.
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7 ibid., pp. 634.8 Arendt, WiP, pp. 10922.9 ibid., pp.
11415.
10 See Jacques Taminiaux, Athens and Rome, in Dana Villa (ed.)
TheCambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), pp. 16577.
11 Arendt, WiP, p. 119. See also Arendt, HC, p. 198. The
argument thatnomos allows human relations to remain surveyable is
vintage Aristotelian-ism. When considering the ideal size of a
city-state in Book VII of thePolitics, Aristotle asserts that the
same thing holds good of the territorythat we said about the size
of the population it must be well able to betaken in at one view
[eusunoptos]. See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H.Rackham (London:
William Heinemann, 1944), vol. 23, 1327a. I amgrateful to David
Janssens for pointing out this connection to me.
12 Arendt, HC, p. 21. See also Arendt, WiP, p. 46.13 Arendt, OR,
p. 275.14 Arendt, HC, p. 195.15 Cornford, From Religion to
Philosophy, p. 30.16 Arendt, HC, p. 183.17 Arendt, WiP, p. 100.
Significantly, Arendt uses this expression only rarely,
not least because of her distrust of any form of politics
premised on theunity of a political community. But the distinction
between democratic and,say, totalitarian politics cannot be posed
in terms of a simple and massiveopposition between plurality and
unity, but rather in the manner in whicha polity deals with the
inevitable claim to unity which constitutes it as acommunity.
Arendt points in this direction in the final chapter of Life ofthe
Mind, when linking the exercise of freedom to the emergence of a
first-person plural, a We. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the
Mind/Willing (SanDiego, CA: Harcourt, 1978), pp. 2001; hereinafter
cited as LOC.
18 It may remain an open question, for the purpose of this
article, to whatextent Arendts description of action addresses the
issue of collectiveagency. While her references to power and acting
in concert no doubtevoke this issue, intersubjectivity and
collective subjectivity tend to runthrough each other in her
analyses of action. Whatever the standpoint onemay want to take on
this general point, it is in any case safe to assert thatArendt
does not elucidate nomos in terms of the reflexivity of
collectiveagency. It is noteworthy in this respect that when Arendt
takes up thegenesis of political community in a reflexive key, she
passes over in silencethe genesis of spatial unity: The only trait
that all these various forms andshapes of human plurality have in
common is the simple fact of theirgenesis, that is, that at some
moment in time and for some reason a groupof people must have come
to think of themselves as a We. See Arendt,LOC, p. 202. For a
powerful analysis of collective agency and politicalreflexivity,
see Bert van Roermund, First-Person Plural Legislature:Political
Reflexivity and Representation, Philosophical Explorations
6(3)(2003): 23552.
19 Seyla Benhabib, Models of Public Space, in Craig Calhoun
(ed.) Habermasand the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993[1992]), p. 77.
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20 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil(Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1994[1963]), p.
262.
21 As Waldenfels puts it, the act of separating an inside from
an outside bringsabout a preference in the difference. See Bernhard
Waldenfels, Viel-stimmigkeit der Rede: Studien zur Phnomenologie
des Fremden 4(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 197.
22 Otfried Hffe, Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung
(Munich: C. H.Beck, 1999), p. 303. Similarly, albeit in another
context, Habermas, in anarticle co-authored by Derrida, expresses
the hope of an internal worldpolitics. See Jrgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida, Nach dem Krieg Die Wiedergeburt Europas,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May2003, 334.
23 Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?, in her
Men in DarkTimes (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1993[1955]), p.
81. See alsoArendt, HC, p. 257.
24 Arendt, OR, p. 275. For a similar statement, see Arendt, WiP,
pp. 401.25 Arendt, TOT, p. 301. See also Arendt, OR, p. 31.26 This
insight would be the point of departure of a critical examination
of
the attempt to despatialize the notion of a public sphere. For
the one, therights to freedom of expression and association, which
are essential to thefunctioning of a public sphere, are thoroughly
topical; for the other, apublic sphere presupposes privileged
bearers of these rights the citizensof the polity. A background
question, which requires treatment in aseparate paper, is how
Arendts reference to a right to have rights (TOT,p. 296) can be
interpreted in the light of a reflexive reading of nomos.
Forcontributions to this issue, see Frank Michelman, Parsing a
Right to HaveRights, Constellations 3(2) (1996): 2008; Seyla
Benhabib, Citizens,Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World:
Political Membership in aGlobal Era, Social Research 66(3) (1999):
70944; and Seyla Benhabib,The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens
and Residents (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004).
27 Arendt, TOT, p. 301. For analyses of foundation in Arendt,
see, amongothers, Bonnie Honig, Arendt and Derrida on the Problem
of Founding aRepublic, American Political Science Review 85(1)
(1991): 97114, andAlan Keenan, Promises, Promises: The Abyss of
Freedom and the Loss ofPolitical World in the Work of Hannah
Arendt, Political Theory 22(2)(1994): 297322.
28 I am indebted here to Bert van Roermund, who has exposed a
comparableproblem in Jrgen Habermas discourse principle. See Bert
van Roermund,Law, Narrative and Reality: An Essay in Intercepting
Politics (Dordrecht:Kluwer Academic, 1997), p. 151.
29 Hannah Arendt, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, in
herResponsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:
SchockenBooks, 2003), p. 47. This passage effectively deconstructs
the sharp oppo-sition Arendt elsewhere sets up between
representation and action andparticipation. See Arendt, OR, p. 273.
For, to initiate community, a leadermust claim to act on behalf of
a group. A representational act lies at theheart of action and
participation.
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30 Arendt, OR, p. 278.31 Einheit von Ordnung und Ortung. See
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the
Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum,
trans.G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003[1950]), p. 42
(translationaltered). For the record, Arendt does mention Schmitt
in TOT, referring,among others, to his ingenious theories about the
end of democracy andlegal government (TOT, p. 339, n. 65). Schmitt,
for his part, mentionsArendt sporadically in his writings, albeit
without a specific reference toher analysis of nomos. For a general
analysis of the relation between Arendtand Schmitt, see William E.
Scheurman, Revolutions and Constitutions:Hannah Arendts Challenge
to Carl Schmitt, in David Dyzenhaus (ed.)Law as Politics: Carl
Schmitts Critique of Liberalism (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press,
1998), pp. 25280.
32 Nomos-Nahme-Name, in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Groraum,
Nomos:Arbeiten aus den Jahren 19161969 (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1995),pp. 57391. See also Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden, in Carl
Schmitt, Verfassungs-rechtliche Aufstze aus den Jahren 19241954
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,1958), pp. 489504.
33 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, p. 78 (translation altered).34
See my Inside and Outside the EUs Area of Freedom, Security and
Justice: Reflexive Identity and the Unity of Legal Space, Archif
fr Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie 90(4) (2004): 47897.
35 Returning to Arendts argument that a bounded space keeps
humanrelations surveyable (see n. 11), the surveyability of these
relations, as wellas of the boundaries introduced by nomos, depends
on a presupposedspatial unity that is empirically unsurveyable,
regardless of the size of theterritory.
36 Arendt, TOT, p. 286.37 Arendt, HC, p. 199.38 Hannah Arendt,
Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972), p. 80 (emphasis added).39 Arendt, OR, p.
223.40 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, p. 78. Notice that this passage
effectively
conjoins the two terms the Sophists sought to oppose, namely
physis andnomos, nature and convention.
901Lindahl: Give and take
at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Biblioteca Alfonso Borrero
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