Refounding Denied: Hannah Arendt on Limited Principles and the Lost Promise of Reconstruction

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” contains a critique of white constitutionalism. A close reading of Arendt’s comments on the failure of Reconstruction to durably found Black citizenship reveals that the anti-Blackness of her account does not consist in ignoring the racialization of constitutional order but, to the contrary, in a dismissal of Black politics due to the limitations of a white constitutional heritage. In “Civil Disobedience,” Arendt thus stood on the edge of an insight that she failed to develop more fully: Black movements had brought to light the limitations that racial domination places on the “augmentation” of America’s founding principles. For Arendt, the notion of the “principle” is meant to mediate the novelty of action with the durability of order. But to the extent that she views American institutions as defined by the “inherited crime” of slavery, feedback across temporal strata—between a principle in past, present, and future—is structurally blocked. The symbolic whiteness of citizenship undermines institutional durability, as it generates a crisis of constitutional authority for all. Tracing the sources behind Arendt’s pessimistic vision, the article demonstrates echoes between her account and the literature on which she relied: Tocqueville; Stanley Elkins; and, possibly, W. E. B. Du Bois. It concludes with a reading of Arendt’s commentary on Reconstruction as the attempt to recover a lost moment of foundation, an unredeemed promise of refounding.