Abstract:
Although Hannah Arendt considers authority to have vanished from the modern world, her analysis in On Revolution shows she did not accept this disappearance. In her extensive analysis of authority in the American Revolution, Arendt reconceptualizes the concept of authority, fit for a modern, secular age. This article develops Arendt’s conception of legal authority, which mediates between the constitution as founding of a polity and the constitution as written document. I argue that, for Arendt, legal authority is not harmed when the constitution is contested. On the contrary, a constitution’s authority is reaffirmed by contestation. Law and politics are therefore interdependent: politics cannot exist without the bounds of the law, while law cannot be authoritative without politics.
