Description

Writer Hettie O’Brien analyses Hannah Arendt’s model of council democracy, and how Barcelona en Comú are transforming the way democracy works.

According to O’Brien, if Arendt had been alive today, she may have looked to Barcelona’s government and Europe’s fearless cities movement for examples of council democracy in practice instead of the Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets of 1905 and 1917, and the spontaneous councils of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

These contemporary projects suggest alternate answers to Arendt’s central concern: that representative democracy was always unstable and insufficient.

Photo: Maksim Shutov