Abstract

My contribution aims to show how, according to Durkheim and Arendt, the self-instituting processes initiated by the American and French Revolutions put these two societies in the unprecedented condition of grounding their own authority. Durkheim and Arendt seem to agree that the problem of these self-instituted societies has consisted in understanding themselves as inescapably bound to historical transmission, on the one hand, and as fundamentally breaking with history, on the other. According to both, modern political philosophy has not been able to confront this paradox because of a false premise within its own individualistic understanding of authority. Subsequently, for both, in order to regenerate our capacity to act in common, it becomes necessary to recover a viable conception of authority and to historically locate these processes of self-institution. From this point onward, Arendt and Durkheim fundamentally diverge. The singularity of American constitution-making, according to Arendt, is what made the historical transmissibility of this revolutionary experience possible. Durkheim, for his part, argues that the French revolutionary tradition needs to be intellectually revised and politically transformed in order to be accomplished. Making modern societies’ socialist aspirations sociologically self-reflexive is what Durkheim thinks is entailed in this need.