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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 1 | 2021 | 153–180 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.1.07
* Peace Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Lana Zdravković*
The Concept of Emancipation as Political Action 
(Marx, Arendt, Rancière)
Emancipation is one of the basic concepts at the junction of politics, philosophy, 
and political theory. This text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation 
and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins 
and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: 
Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifical-
ly and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political 
action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality.
1
 
In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more detail, I will 
rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history” (Begriffs-
geschichte), which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the et-
ymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis 
for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, “which 
allows us to detect the persistence, change, and novelty which are conceived 
diachronically along the dimension of meanings and through the spoken form 
of one and the same word.”
2
 Then I will, in greater detail, link this “pre-history” 
with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emanci-
pation, and see how they differ and are related to each other. Furthermore, I will 
attempt to consider what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emanci-
pation we can take from these relations. 
I conclude with some critical questions regarding the different uses, under-
standings, and political potential of the concept of emancipation while taking 
into consideration the fact that concepts, too, have inherent political dynamics 
1
 This article is a result of the research project J5-1749 “The break in tradition: Hannah 
Arendt and conceptual change”, financed by the Slovenian Research Agency. I would like 
to thank Vlasta Jalušič for her extremely meticulous reading of the text and precious in-
sights, advice, and help building its argumentation. 
2
 Maria Pia Lara, The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles over the Semantics of Secularisation, 
New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 46.

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lana zdravković
that refer to their clarity, power, and use. I am particularly interested in how the 
concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation 
is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how this 
understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need 
emancipation more than ever. 
Historical Overview of the Concept of Emancipation
The early conceptualisation of emancipation – as Reinhart Koselleck develops 
in his work – can already be found in antiquity.
3
 Derived from ē manu capere, 
which literally means “to take from one’s hand,” ēmancĭpo/ēmancĭpatio in the 
Roman Republic was attached to the legal act that allowed the pater familias 
to release his son from father-related governance, enabling him to become in-
dependent and self-sustaining in a civil law sense sui generis. As a têrminus 
téchnicus of ancient Roman law, emancipation was therefore linked to a father’s 
authority and the generational hierarchy: only a father could emancipate a son 
and not vice versa; emancipation could be – but not necessarily – allowed and 
certainly not claimed. So, at the very beginning, there is an absolute and obvi-
ous connection between nature and law.
Thus, in antiquity, emancipation takes place outside the political community, 
in the private sphere of the family. By widening its meaning in the Middle Ages, 
the concept gradually loses its special Roman law meaning of a one-layer le-
gal act performed by the pater familias and becomes generally accepted as a 
mark of the naturally available condition of civil law autonomy after approach-
ing the age of twenty-five years. Linguistic use of the expression, consequently, 
becomes more flexible.
Finally, during the Enlightenment, i.e. in the late 18
th
 century, emancipation 
separates itself from the limited civil law understanding to be established as 
a philosophically, politically, and socially potent notion that gains a “revolu-
tionary conceptual potential.”
4
 The crucial semantic novelty emerges. To that 
3 Reinhardt Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation: A Conceptual-Historical Sketch”, 
trans. T. S. Presner, in Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing Hi-
story, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 248–263.
4 Ibid., p. 252.

155
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
point, the strictly transitive use of the concept – which supposes an authority 
that can allow emancipation (according to the arbitrary will of that authori-
ty) – transforms into a reflexive one, which corresponds to the development of 
the Enlightenment’s ideals that address an individual’s capability to think and 
act. Impossible to imagine within the old Roman tradition, self-emancipation 
became crucial during the Enlightenment, meaning first of all self-liberation 
from any kind of authority. Since then, emancipation as a concept could not be 
understood without involving notions of exploiting, repressing, and disrespect-
ing, therefore without an understanding of the existing condition as a condi-
tion of inequality that should (and can) be changed through resistance.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his famous opening sentence of The Social 
Contract (1762): “[m]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,”
5
 who gave 
the concept of emancipation a crucial role within the philosophical struggle for 
equality. For him, the transition from the “natural” to the “civil” condition is an 
inevitable slip into the condition of inequality that has to be faced within the 
political community. To emancipate oneself progressively means to completely 
abolish obedience, to appropriate unsuitable liberties as one’s own, to break 
the existent rules. As self-empowering was excluded from the legal language, 
it had to be constructed against the law, norms, and customs. From then on, 
emancipation could not be imagined without the concepts of revolution, free-
dom (Freiheit) and equality.
Bringing into question the domination of both god and human allows for the 
construction of the thinking and acting political subject who finds his or her 
own liberation power only within him- or herself. Immanuel Kant, in his An-
swering the Question: What is Enlightenment (1784), was the first who sketched 
out the historical-philosophical dimension of that liberation which leads to in-
dependence. Even though he did not describe enlightenment as emancipation 
but rather as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage,”
6
 he defined the 
capability to use one’s own intellect without anyone’s guidance as the ultimate 
political gesture. By making a separating line between the free (public) and pri-
5 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London, Independently 
Publishing, 2020, p. 3.
6 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”, trans. M. C. Smith, Columbia University On-
line Library, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed 22 
May 2021. 

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lana zdravković
vate use of mind, and with the battle call Sapere aude!, he opened up the space 
for autonomous thinking and acting as a crucial condition for the emancipation 
process.
The French Revolution (1789) was one of the most significant events that ema-
nates the idea of emancipation as a struggle against domination in praxis. In-
fluenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and rationalist natural law, it 
put into force two basic liberal principles: freedom and equality. Declaration of 
the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen (1789) proclaims a single set of individual 
and collective rights for everyone to be universal and valid in all times and at all 
places, which is clear already from the first paragraph: “Men are born and re-
main free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the 
general good.” Inspired by the American Revolution (1765) and the United States 
Declaration of Independence (1776), which claims that “[…] all men are created 
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, 
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it also linked 
the concept of emancipation and that of revolution as an important method of 
changing forms of governance into a more democratic one. 
Since 1830 onwards, emancipation has been 
employed everywhere: first, in order to acquire individual and personal equal 
rights with respect to pregiven civil and legal conditions. Second, it was used 
for the purpose of making possible equal rights for groups: classes, social strata, 
women, particular churches and religious groups, entire peoples. Third, eman-
cipation aimed at freedom of rule and equal rights for all of humanity, for the 
world, or for the emancipating time, as one could empathetically say then.
7
 
But – and here Koselleck sees the limit of the concept – the more concretely 
the concept was linked to a certain group, the harder it was to achieve. Social, 
economic, religious, or natural obstacles, being hard to overcome in a pure-
ly legalistic way, were accumulated wherever Catholics, Jews, women, slaves, 
workers, etc., requested equality. Emancipation, in order to be effectual, thus 
needs to be thought as something that is a repeatable demand.
8
 Hence, eman-
7 Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation”, p. 255.
8 Lara, The Disclosure of Politics, p. 140.

157
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
cipation is an obvious example of ambiguity that Koselleck claims is necessary 
for a concept to be clear. Marx, Arendt, and Rancière will offer different answers 
to that ambiguity.
However, it is clear that from the 19
th
 century on, emancipation has established 
itself as an ultimate request to, in principle, abolish any kind of domination of 
people over people. Power can now only be accepted as the self-rule of those 
who are emancipated, and emancipation is increasingly understood as a pro-
cess of liberation – from legislative, social, political, and economic depend-
ences – which creates the hope that, by the abolishment thereof, there will be 
an era without domination (Herrschaft), which became the counter concept of 
emancipation. The concept gained the status and shape of a slogan, “a catch-
word, one that admittedly presupposed or evoked a minimal consensus about 
the equal rights of all human beings”
9
 and that could be appropriated by the 
socialist viewpoint (in favour of common property as a potential means of abol-
ishing economic domination), the liberal viewpoint (in favour of the rule of law 
and individual liberty), or by the radical-democratic viewpoint (in favour of the 
sovereignty of the people).
10
 
In the following chapter, I will focus on the theorisation of the concept of eman-
cipation in the works of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière, au-
thors who were thinking about emancipation on different levels and to different 
extents, according to their understanding of politics itself, giving the concept a 
different place and value in their works but still taking it as an important con-
cept for thinking politics, the political subject, and the political community. 
 
K. Marx, H. Arendt, J. Rancière
K. Marx: Emancipation as Revolution
It was Karl Marx who took the concept of emancipation as a guiding concept for 
the class analysis of society and developed it as the central concept of the 19
th
 
century, contrasting it with the concept of domination and understanding it as 
the struggle of one class over the other in the name of generic humanity. “The 
claim that emancipation presupposed the critical question of domination was 
9 Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation”, p. 255.
10
 Cf. ibid.

158
lana zdravković
brand-new and unique in the history of concepts, and it was Marx who gave it 
its full sense of disclosure.”
11
 Marx’s potent theorisation made the concept of 
emancipation more comprehensive among the general population, who could 
recognise it as a potential framework to express their demands for equality at 
every (economic, political, cultural) level. 
Already in his early text On the Jewish Question (1844)
12
, where he critically ap-
proached The Jewish Question and The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Chris-
tians to Become Free by Bruno Bauer from the same year, Marx differentiates 
between political and general human emancipation, clarifying this distinction 
together with his critique of religion, arguing that Bauer is mistaken in his 
assumption that in a “secular state” religion will no longer play a prominent 
role in social life; we can see from recent history and the present how right he 
was. Political emancipation is subordinated to human emancipation, as it is an 
emancipation of bourgeois society from politics and the bourgeois state from 
religion, not of the human as such. “The political emancipation of the Jew, the 
Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state 
from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general.”
13
 However, this pro-
cess, according to Marx, still does not bring about real human emancipation. 
“The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the 
11
 Lara, The Disclosure of Politics, p. 68.
12
 A number of scholars and commentators regard On the Jewish Question as anti-Semitic; cf. 
Paul Johnson, “Marxism vs the Jews”, www.commentarymagazine.com, accessed 22 May 
2021; Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, San Francisco, 
Encounter Books, 2003, p. 164; Hyam Maccoby, Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation 
and Continuity, London, Routledge, 2006, pp. 64–66; Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Sem -
ites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, p. 
112; Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, 
Mahwah, Paulist Press, 2004, p. 168; Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: 
Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 154–
157. However a number of others disagree; cf. David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, New 
York, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 141–142; Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope, London, Jon-
athan Cape, 1997 , pp. 98–108; Iain Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought, 
New Jersey, Blackwell Publishing, 1992, p. 496; Wendy Brown, “Rights and Identity in Late 
Modernity: Revisiting the ‘Jewish Question’”, in A. Sarat, T. Kearns (Eds.), Identities, Pol-
itics, and Rights, Michegan, University of Michegan Press, 1995, pp. 85–130; Wolfdietrich 
Schmied-Kowarzik, “Karl Marx as a Philosopher of Human Emancipation”, Poznan Studies 
in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 60 (1998), pp. 355–368. 
13
 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, Marxist Internet Archive, [1844], https://www.marxists.
org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/, accessed 22 May 2021.

159
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this 
restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man.”
14
For Marx, political emancipation does not abolish alienation; on the contrary, 
it is exactly the omnipresent condition thereof. As it is about the emancipation 
of the state and not man; man lives alienated, from himself, from other people, 
and from the society in a politically emancipated state. “The perfect political 
state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life.”
15
 As 
political emancipation supposes a rupture between state and society, it ruptures 
human life into two: the private one (the individual) and the public one (the cit-
izen). Contrary to that, human emancipation means reducing the human world 
and relations to the human himself. 
All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man him-
self. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member 
of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, 
to a citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs 
in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become 
a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular 
situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as so-
cial powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself 
in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been 
accomplished.
16
Marx’s concept of human emancipation is based on his critique of Hegel’s un-
derstanding of the bourgeois modern state, which “makes abstraction of real 
man, or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination.”
17
 Through his critique 
of religion, he also constructs a critique of Hegel’s metaphysics that idealisti-
cally claims that mind is capable of gaining universal conclusions that are com-
pletely independent of material experience, and, in general, of the mystification 
14
 Ibid.
15
 Ibid., p. 161.
16
 Ibid., p. 180.
17
 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marxist Internet Archive, [1843], https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/, accessed 22 May 2021.

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lana zdravković
of Hegel’s philosophy, “which descends from heaven to earth.”
18
 He intervenes 
with dialectical materialism, which flips the existing dialectics: “Life is not de-
termined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
19
 If the nature of individ-
uals depends on the material conditions, human emancipation is only possible 
by intervention into those conditions. Or, in the spirit of historical materialism, 
which is the application of dialectical materialism to society’s historical devel-
opment: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; 
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances 
existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
20
 
Marx conceives his dialectical materialism with his appeal “that man is the high-
est essence for man – hence, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all re-
lations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.”
21
 
Therefore, he cannot think human emancipation separate from the historical 
class analysis of capitalistic society, which is a society of inequality in which 
capitalists, as the ruling class, which owns the means of production, establish 
their existence by exploiting the working class or proletariat, which owns noth-
ing except its own bodies i.e. the labour force. And as the “proletariat has noth-
ing to lose but its chains,”
22
 overall human emancipation can only be achieved 
by the proletariat’s organised rebellion i.e. a revolution in which “the violent 
overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletari-
at.”
23
 What is significant is that Marx almost entirely linked the concept of eman-
cipation to the concept of revolution. As the ideas of the ruling class are in every 
epoch the ruling ideas, which are nothing more than the ideal expression of the 
dominant material relationships, revolutionary ideas also emerge from certain 
material relationships.
24
 Revolution is constructed as a class struggle of the pro-
18
 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Marxist Internet Archive, [1845], https://www.marxists.
org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/, accessed 22 May 2021.
19
 Ibid.
20
 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marxist Internet Archive, [1852], 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/, accessed 22 May 2021.
21
 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
22
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marxist Internet  
Archive, [1848], https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manife -
sto/, accessed 22 May 2021.
23
 Ibid., p. 601.
24
 Cf. Marx, The German Ideology.

161
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
letariat or “revolutionary class,”
25
 but in the name of the liberation of the whole 
of humankind. The struggle of the proletariat as a “a class with radical chains, 
a class of civil society, which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is 
the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its 
universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, 
but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it,”
26
 is the only struggle capable of 
achieving real universal human emancipation, as the proletariat “cannot eman-
cipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and 
thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the com-
plete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning 
of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.”
27
In the spirit of the famous 11
th
 thesis on Feuerbach – “Philosophers have hitherto 
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
28
 – with the 
recursion to the generic notion of the human and its constitution as an emerging 
subject of his own history, Marx’s concept of emancipation gains the character 
of a mundane-historical and philosophically deducted term of salvation that is 
constructed as revolution. Not just any kind of revolution, but the communist 
one: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an 
ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real 
movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
29
 The communist revo-
lution is therefore an intervention in the material conditions of labour and Marx 
believed that economic change would bring equality as well. “The class making 
a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, 
not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the 
whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.”
30
In that sense, the communist revolution differs from the bourgeois revolutions 
of the 18
th
 century, where the bourgeoisie acted revolutionary in its struggle 
against the aristocracy and clergy, yet it replaced feudalism with capitalism and 
put itself, as the ruling class, into a counterrevolutionary role. That is why the 
25
 Ibid., p. 59.
26
 Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
27
 Ibid.
28
 Marx, The German Ideology.
29
 Ibid., p. 41.
30
 Ibid., p. 47.

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lana zdravković
communist i.e. proletarian revolution is antibourgeois and in the first place so-
cial, as it supposes, above all, a radical change of the economic system, there-
fore, the abolishment of capitalism and not its transformation.
 
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the 
past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped 
away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollec-
tions of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution 
of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its 
own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes 
beyond the phrase.
31
For Marx, communism differs from all previous ideologies as it is internally 
revolutionary, “it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and 
intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the 
creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and 
subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.”
32
 Only in such a context 
can one completely emancipate oneself and achieve the state described by the 
motto: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
33
 
Karl Marx made an important, complex, and comprehensive contribution to the 
history of thinking the concept of emancipation, as self-liberation from domi-
nation, exploitation, and inequality. In his early works, emancipation has an 
analytical meaning, while in the later ones it became a motive, programme, and 
the goal of human action. Still, his linking of human emancipation to historical 
class analysis, where the classes are understood essentially, does not give space 
for real universal human emancipation in a political sense. As his understand-
ing of politics is economic in nature, he understands emancipation just as a so-
cial matter, overlooking that revolutionising the material conditions and seizing 
the means of production, thus changing the mode of economic production, does 
not necessarily lead to achieving political emancipation in terms of freedom and 
equality. This is what the next two thinkers will try to grasp. 
31
 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
32
 Marx, The German Ideology.
33
 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marxist Internet Archive, [1875], https://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/, accessed 22 May 2021.

163
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
H. Arendt: Emancipation as a Precondition for Politics
Hannah Arendt does not develop the concept of emancipation exhaustively in 
any single work, but elaborates on it in several – including The Human Condi-
tion (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), and On Revolution (1963) – while 
relating it to concepts such as revolution, liberation, politics, action, new begin-
ning, and especially freedom. Already in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 
she is occupied with concern for rescuing human action and politics from what 
she, together with Kant, named “radical evil”, i.e. the production of superfluous 
people and the abolition of plurality and humanity as such, which in her opin-
ion is the goal of the totalitarian form of government, with the concentration 
camp as the paradigmatic place for totalitarianism.
34
 Her understanding of the 
concept of emancipation needs to be seen in this light.
Like Koselleck, Arendt elaborates the concept of emancipation within the his-
torical context and as a differentiated concept: as a quest for equality, rebellion 
against domination, and demand for justice. For her, emancipation is basically 
“liberation from” any kind of tyranny, while liberation and freedom are not con-
sidered to be the same. Opposing the liberal definition of freedom as “freedom 
of choice” or an act of “free will”, she rather connects freedom with the radical 
equality of acting humans, which is her perception of politics as such. There-
34
 Even though Arendt herself abandoned the concept of “radical evil” introduced in The 
Origins of Totalitarianism, and since the introduction of the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A 
Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) she used the concept of the “banality of evil” to explain 
that thoughtlessness is rather banal than radical – and consequently most of her interpret-
ers have done the same – Zoran Kurelić never gave up using the concept of radical evil, 
understanding it as crucial for her entire work. “Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and 
concentration camps led her to believe that totalitarianism unleashed a type of absolute 
evil which is exactly the opposite of what human life is. This is why she calls it radical.” 
(Zoran Kurelić, “Does the World Need Humanity”, Filozofski godišnjak – Glasnik Instituta 
za filozofiju Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu, 21 (2008), p. 123) This kind of evil is the 
opposition of humanity as such as “the idea that everything is possible makes the end of 
humanity possible” (Zoran Kurelić, “Telos of the Camp”, Croatian Political Science Review, 
46 (3/2009), p. 151), and thus is always radical for Kurelić, who lucidly uses the concept of 
radical evil also for creative interpretations and theorisations of other contemporary phe-
nomena in the field of politics, philosophy, and art (cf. Zoran Kurelić, “Raining Snakes”, 
Croatian Political Science Review, 49 (1/2012), pp. 24–40; Zoran Kurelić, “From Hellholes to 
Hell: On Political Agency in Purgatory”, Croatian Political Science Review, 56 (3–4/2019), 
pp. 137–153.). For an analysis of radical evil in Arendt and Kant, cf. Richard J. Bernstein, 
“Reflections on Radical Evil: Arendt and Kant”, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 85 
(1–2/2002), pp. 17–30.

164
lana zdravković
fore, for Arendt, freedom represents the crucial concept that enables the eman-
cipation of people striving in political action. It is based on the human capacity 
to initiate the beginnings of something new together with others: “[t]he raison d’ 
être of politics is freedom and its field of experience is action.”
35
Yet such moments of action – when freedom appears – are not very common in 
human history. Moreover, there are no guarantees that political action and thus 
freedom would appear at all – on the contrary, there is a tendency towards its 
extinction, especially with the emergence of elements of total domination. Poli-
tics as such is an inter-human phenomenon and also “infinite improbability,”
36
 
a kind of “worldly miracle”
37
 only humans are capable of “producing” when 
they act together, which is a part of her wider conceptualisation of the human 
condition or vita activa.
38
 One of the key works in which Arendt explores how 
politics as freedom emerges and constitutes a new beginning, a new govern-
ment and its institutions, is emancipatory action, is her book On Revolution. 
Through the analysis of two historically important revolutions, the American 
(1776) and French (1789) Revolutions, she rethinks the basic elements of ac -
tion that bring about politics, at the core of which is the notion of freedom. For 
Arendt, revolution as a concept and event does not exist before the Modern Age 
(starting at the end of the 18
th
 century); it is the only struggle that aims not to-
wards liberation (negative freedom), as in the case of insurrection, but rather to-
wards the constitution of a new political body (positive freedom). Unlike Marx, 
who distinguishes between social and bourgeois revolutions, for her the distinc-
tion between a political revolution whose aim is “freedom for all” and a social 
revolution whose aim is liberation from an oppressive government or poverty, is 
crucial. Contrary to Marx, who claims that the state apparatus and classes are to 
be abolished via revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, Arendt sees 
exactly the act of a new beginning, “an act of establishing” – constitutional act, 
permanent institutions, and the framework of the state as a key revolutionary 
35
 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, New York, The 
Viking Press, 1961, p. 146.
36
 Ibid., p. 170.
37
 Ibid.
38
 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, 
pp. 12–17.

165
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
achievement guaranteeing the people’s emancipation in terms of gaining and 
maintaining their rights – as political beings, i.e. citizens.
The most important thing in a revolution is thus the establishment of a new 
political body that guarantees freedom; the French Revolution did not succeed 
due to pressure arising from the misery of the people, while the American Rev-
olution, having in mind the better economic position of the soon-to-be states, 
did. A problem arises, according to Arendt, if the core of the revolution is not 
liberation from tyranny, but from urgency; so instead of the people’s misery and 
mercy for unhappy people, loving freedom is the only relevant aim of the revo-
lution. As the goal of the American Revolution was to establish freedom and that 
the revolutionary government would found the republic through a constitution-
al assembly, Arendt understood the American Revolution, which resulted in the 
production of a constitution, as an example of a successful revolution. On the 
other hand, she criticised the French revolutionaries for transforming the quest 
for freedom and new political institutions into social question (economic ine-
quality, poverty) – and, by doing so, sacrificing freedom to the imperative of ur-
gency, i.e. necessity. As “the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates be-
yond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means 
leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom,”
39
 
Arendt shows how the French Revolution ended up in Robespierrian terror or a 
“despotism of freedom”
40
 instead of establishing institutions that should guar-
antee equality. The same critique applies to the concept of revolution of Marx – 
“the greatest theorist the revolutions ever had”
41
 – as well as all the other revolu-
tions that followed the French pattern and put urgency, i.e. necessity, foremost. 
No revolution has ever solved the ‘social question’ and liberated men from the 
predicament of want, but all revolutions, with the exception of the Hungarian 
Revolution in 1956, have followed the example of the French Revolution and used 
and misused the mighty forces of misery and destitution in their struggle against 
tyranny or oppression.
42
39
 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, London, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 112.
40
 Ibid.
41
 Ibid., p. 61.
42
 Ibid., p. 112. Here we can also mention the “velvet revolution” and others that occurred 
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which resulted in the end of “communist rule” in many 
countries around the world, including in Central and Eastern Europe. (Cf. Vlasta Jalušič 

166
lana zdravković
Arendt to a great extent developed her argument through a critical attitude 
toward Marx, with whom, in her opinion, our tradition of political thought – 
which had its definite beginning with Plato and Aristotle – came to a definite 
end.
43
 In a polemic with three of Marx’s well known claims, which she called 
paradoxes, i.e. “labour created man,” “violence is the midwife of every old so-
ciety pregnant with a new one,” and the famous last thesis on Feuerbach: “the 
philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, 
to change it,” she tried to show the great perplexities that he himself had antic-
ipated and which remained insoluble according to his own terms. 
If labour is the most human and most productive of man’s activities, what will 
happen when, after the revolution, ‘labour is abolished’ in ‘the realm of freedom’, 
when man has succeeded in emancipating himself from it? What productive and 
what essentially human activity will be left? If violence is the midwife of history 
and violent action therefore the most dignified of all forms of human action, what 
will happen when, after the conclusion of class struggle and the disappearance of 
the state, no violence will even be possible? How will men be able to act at all in a 
meaningful, authentic way? Finally, when philosophy has been both realized and 
abolished in the future society, what kind of thought will be left?
44
Although Arendt understands Marx as one of the crucial thinkers of the “break 
in tradition” – together with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – as regards those who 
have attempted to think against the Western political tradition, she claims that 
he has consciously overturned its hierarchy, and has finally fallen back to use 
its own tools.
45
 Marx too, like Hegel, sees world history as a continuous process 
that is determined from the future, and by overturning Hegel he “jumps” from 
theory to action, from contemplation into work. However, according to Arendt, 
with this political action, he becomes more theoretical than ever. Like Koselleck, 
Arendt is critical of Marx’s procedural way of thinking within the horizon of the 
philosophy of history and indicates how this eschatological perspective leads 
to violence, the acceleration of social “development”, and to terror. Marx sees 
and Mirt Komel, “Misliti revolucijo po Hannah Arendt ali politična znanost o ustanavljan-
ju novih oblik vladavine” (Afterword), in Hannah Arendt, O revoluciji, Krtina, Ljubljana 
2017, p. 336.)
43
 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 17.
44
 Ibid., p. 24.
45
 Ibid., p. 28.

167
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
the social revolution as the core of the emancipation of humans, while he con-
siders violence – as a powerful emanation of the will – to be a crucial assistant 
in bringing about social change. Arendt was a great critic of that idea and the 
Marxist “glorification of violence.”
46
What she identifies as the biggest inconsistency in Marx’s thought is that while 
he puts hope in a new human political actor, i.e. the proletariat, he pleads for 
the abolishment of the state, public space, and politics. On the one hand, he 
is planning for the social emancipation of labour and the working class (the 
whole society becomes a society of workers), while on the other he hopes to 
abolish labour as a necessity and establish the condition of liberation from 
labour and work. With this, according to Arendt, the core of revolution as an 
event in which – in modern times – politics as the free action of the many again 
emerges, is lost and replaced by the philosopher’s lead. Instead, a society of 
labourers and consumers emerges, which does not have an interest in politics 
and human action. Against the Marxian hope that a free society of humans 
emancipated from wage labour and labour as such would be established as a 
special realm of freedom, an anti-political society of consumers replaces the 
society of labourers. Again, as before in the course of the Western tradition, 
political action is replaced by other modes of human activity and therefore put 
in danger of becoming extinct. She believed that in Marx’s ideal society two 
different concepts, i.e. the classless society and the stateless society, are inex-
tricably combined and because of that the abolition of labour is at the same 
time an abolition of politics. That is why she questions positing communism as 
the utopian goal of history, which can lead to a rule of terror.
Criticising the French Revolution, Arendt is also critical of Rousseau, who in-
spired it, maintaining that equality is not natural, people are not born free and 
equal, but they can become so within a political community where they guaran-
tee the existence of equality to each other as responsible citizens. She contrasts 
the ancient and modern understandings of equality: 
46
 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 19. (For a more accurate understanding of Arendt’s critique of 
violence and the distinction between violence and power, cf. Vlasta Jalušič, “Zmešnjava 
pri vprašanju nasilja: oblast in nasilje pri Hannah Arendt”, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, 24 
(180–181/1996), pp. 27–53.)

168
lana zdravković
Isonomy guaranteed equality, but not because all men were born or created 
equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature not equal, and needed 
an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its nomos would make them 
equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met 
one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this 
ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal 
and become unequal by virtue of social and political (that is, man-made) institu-
tions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, 
was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue 
of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was under-
stood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not given by nature 
and growing out by themselves; they were, that is, conventional and artificial, the 
products of human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
47
 
Drawing on the Aristotelian understanding of the relation between the human 
and the political and on the presupposition that it is only within a political com-
munity that human beings can realise a fully human life by distinguishing them-
selves through public action, she constructed one of her crucial arguments, i.e. 
that there is nothing natural about politics. In Arendt’s view, we become equal 
only as political beings, i.e. members of a political community, that is, as citi-
zens, and it is only by virtue of this artificial equality that respect for persons, 
regardless of who they naturally are, can be expected. That is why, for her, “the 
right to have rights”
48
 is the most important emancipatory demand. Arendt thus 
considers political revolution to be the key political event of modern times, in 
which freedom as political collective action, representing a novel start in the hu-
man struggle for equality, could appear again. Emancipation, thus, can happen 
only if it is political and with the goal of creating a political community (state) 
among political subjects (citizens), who have the right to have rights. 
J. Rancière: Emancipation as Radical Equality
Jacques Rancière is a radical thinker of emancipation who presupposes the 
equality of anyone with anyone else; his concept of emancipation requests 
47
 Ibid., pp. 30–31.
48
 The concept is especially developed in the famous ninth chapter “The Decline of the Na-
tion-State and the End of the Rights of Man” (within Part Two: Imperialism) in Hannah 
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973, pp. 
267–305.

169
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
thinking the whole of the political problematics in light of the equality-inequal-
ity relationship and, for him, emancipation is actually equated with politics it-
self; he speaks of the politics of emancipation as a synonym for politics as such.   
Already in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation 
(1987), part of his early “archaeological period,” he developed the potent con-
cept of emancipation based on the innovative method of “universal teaching,”
49
 
which allows teaching others something that you do not know – axiomatically 
presupposing that “all men have equal intelligence.”
50
 Claiming that emanci-
pation means exactly “becoming conscious of equality of nature,”
51
 Rancière 
turned the Cartesian formula of equality upside down. “Descartes said, ‘I think, 
therefore I am’; and this noble thought of the great philosopher is one of the 
principles of universal teaching. We turn his thought around and say: ‘I am 
a man, therefore I think.’ The reversal equates ‘man’ with cogito. Thought is 
not an attribute of the thinking substance; it is an attribute of humanity.”
52
 Of 
course, it would be empirically wrong to claim that all intelligence is equal, but 
“the problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be 
done under that supposition.”
53
Intellectual emancipation – understood as a process in which the schoolmaster 
does not explain what is considered the ultimate truth and does not expect peo-
ple to learn by purely repeating what they hear, but as a process of encouraging 
people to use and develop their own intelligence in their own way, and that is 
exactly why the schoolmaster can be ignorant – is Rancière’s starting point for 
demanding political equality. “Equality and intelligence are synonymous terms, 
exactly like reason and will. This synonymy on which each man’s intellectual 
capacity is based is also what makes society, in general, possible. The equality 
of intelligence is the common bond of humankind, the necessary and sufficient 
condition for a society of men to exist.”
54
 All his later politics of emancipation, 
which presupposes equality, rested on this possibility: “It is true that we don’t 
49
 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. K. Ross, Stanford, Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1991, p. 18.
50
 Ibid.
51
 Ibid., p. 27.
52
 Ibid., p. 35.
53
 Ibid., p. 46.
54
 Ibid., p. 73.

170
lana zdravković
know that men are equal. We are saying that they might be. This is our opinion, 
and we are trying, along with those who think as we do, to verify it. But we know 
that this might is the very thing that makes a society of humans possible.”
55
 
In another early book, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth 
Century France (1981), Rancière develops a critical polemics with traditional 
Marxist essentialisation of the class struggle, developing a new concept of revo-
lution as not purely a revolution of forms of government (the political aspect) and 
the distribution of wealth (the social aspect), but a revolution within the distri-
bution of the sensible, i.e. aesthetic revolution. In order to challenge this claim, 
Rancière invested a decade of his life in studying the neglected archives of the 
creativity of the 19
th
-century French working class. He confirmed his assumption 
that in the time envisaged for only reproducing the body for work, workers ap-
propriated time that they did not have and used it for education, reflection, and 
imagination – for doing what was not intended to be done – and thereby emanci-
pated themselves. By breaking certain rules of decency, which were supposed to 
apply to a certain class, by expressing a voice that was not supposed to be theirs, 
and by imitating gestures for which they were not supposed to have time, work-
ers were expressing a rich political potential that was never noticed within the 
usual perception of the working class by Marxian theoreticians and historians. 
By showing that the working class has no special common denominator, that it is 
not such and such “by itself”, Rancière is eager to claim that every emancipation 
emerges from breaking the rules of the dominant order.
56
 In one of his later works, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy (1995), a part of 
his “aesthetics of politics” project, he develops his thesis on intellectual eman-
55
 Ibid.
56
 This critique of Marx will subsequently be more developed, as Rancière takes Marx as a 
crucial representative of the metapolitical understanding of politics, where “politics is un-
derstood as a lie about the reality that is called society” (Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: 
Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 
83) and goes together with his critique of Marx’s metapolitical understanding of emanci-
pation as something that happens outside of politics. Rancière defines metapolitics as the 
scientific accompaniment of politics, which places itself at the ultimate position of truth 
and the only one that is able to see beyond ideology as “false consciousness” (ibid., p. 85). 
Together with archipolitics and parapolitics, metapolitics, for Rancière, is just one of the 
three historical attempts of “political philosophy” to abolish politics itself (cf. ibid., pp. 
61–95).

171
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
cipation, understanding it as “a modern term for an effect of equality,”
57
 which 
proclaims the “equality of anyone at all with anyone else,”
58
 opening with that a 
certain “scandal of politics.”
59
 Emancipation is thus “political interlocution,”
60
 
where people understand each other as equal; it is a political situation that ena-
bles the “equality of whoever with whomever,”
61
 which can arise anywhere and 
everywhere, but it is never given in advance and in any pre-given identity, situ-
ation, or category.
Starting from Aristotle’s claim in Politics that man is a political animal because 
he has the power of speech to express thoughts (lógos), unlike all the other ani-
mals that only use a voice to express pain or pleasure (phōnē), Rancière ultimate-
ly develops an understanding of politics as a conflictual (dissensual) process,
62
 
which even before enabling perception of the useful and the harmful, good and 
evil, the just and the unjust, inevitably enables the organisation of a pólis as a 
community of equals. Namely, lógos, which is giving orders, in the first place 
presupposes that those who have to obey understand those orders, so – and 
here is the initial contradiction – it presupposes the equality of those who obey 
with those who are giving orders. “Inequality is, paradoxically, possible only 
on the bases of equality, which undermines any natural order.”
63
 That is why 
disagreement as a philosophical concept, for Rancière is constitutive for politics 
itself. Politics for Rancière, therefore, emerges as a “constitutive wrong,”
64
 when 
the poor, those without any virtue, demos, etc., or “part of those who have no 
part,”
65
 require that they be considered an equal part of the political community. 
57
 Ibid., p. 51.
58
 Ibid., p. 30.
59
 Ibid.
60
 Ibid., p. 74.
61
 Ibid.
62
 This is the core of his eighth thesis on politics, where he explains that the essence of poli-
tics is dissensus, not as a confrontation between interests or opinions, but as the distance 
of the sensible from itself. “The principal function of politics is the configuration of its 
proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The essence of 
politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one.” (Jacques 
Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory & Event, 5 (3/2001), p. 10.)
63
 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 31.
64
 Ibid., p. 37.
65
 Ibid.

172
lana zdravković
Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way 
around; politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effect of domination by the 
rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity. The outrageous claim of the demos to 
be the whole of the community only satisfies in its own way – that of a party – the 
requirement of politics. Politics exists when the natural order of domination is 
interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.
66
Any regime of domination – defined by Rancière as “police”
67
 – defines who is 
and who is not visible in the common space and if the voice that comes out of the 
interlocutor’s mouth should be understood as meaningful speech or as noise – 
and, consequently, who should and who should not be included – “counted”
68
, 
as Rancière puts it – in a political community’s order. The essence of the police 
is not repression, but the distribution of the sensible. 
The police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share 
or lack of it. But to define this, you first must define the configuration of the sen-
sible – in which one or the other is inscribed. The police is thus first an order of 
bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being and ways of 
saying; and sees that those bodies are assigned by name by a particular place 
and task; it is an order of the visible and sayable and sees that a particular activ-
ity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and 
another as noise.
69
 
Politics, on the other hand, occurs as antagonistic towards the police and recon-
figures the political space as a space of equals; it enables an encounter – which 
is never given in advance – between two different heterogeneous processes, the 
police logic and the logic of equality. Understood as an “open set of practices 
driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and 
by the concern to test this equality,”
70
 political activity is “whatever shifts a body 
from a place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible 
what had no business of being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once 
66
 Ibid., p. 27.
67
 Ibid., pp. 43–45.
68
 Ibid.
69
 Ibid., p. 44.
70
 Ibid., p. 46.

173
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once 
only heard as noise.”
71
 
Politics is thus possible only as a consequence of the emancipatory process, 
when those who are “not counted in a space of politics,”
72
 those without a given 
name and thus invisible, take possession of speech, make themselves visible 
and perform an “improper counting of the parts of the whole community.”
73
 
Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings 
make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of plac-
ing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation, the 
contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the 
world where they are not, the world where there is something ‘between’ them 
and those who do not acknowledge them as speaking beings who count, and the 
world where there is nothing.
74
 
For Rancière, emancipation is – as also elaborated in Politics, Identification and 
Subjectivization (1995) – just a second name for politics itself. It is the process of 
a specific political subjectivisation, which presupposes the logic of heterology, 
71
 Ibid., p. 45. The amalgamation of the wrong and politics, as postulated by Rancière, is 
critically analysed by Jelica Šumič-Riha, who emphasises that the fundamental wrong, 
inseparable from politics for Rancière, is in fact another name for politics as such, 
which in fact does not allow any clear conclusion about the possibilities of the politi-
cal in situations here and now (cf. Jelica Šumič-Riha, “Aisthesis Politike (Afterword)”, 
Nerazumevanje, Ljubljana, Založba ZRC, 2005, pp. 187–188). A similar critique of the 
antagonistic image of politics in the light of the broader French post-structuralist and 
post-Heideggerian philosophical thought, which originates from Michel Foucault and 
Jacques Derrida and is carried out within or in connection with Schmitt’s understanding 
of the political, is developed also by Vlasta Jalušič (cf. Vlasta Jalušič, “Vaditi politično 
mišljenje v posttotalitarnih časih” (Afterword), in Hannah Arendt, Med preteklostjo in 
prihodnostjo: šest vaj v političnem mišljenju, Krtina, Ljubljana 2006, p. 259). For a direct 
comparison between Schmitt’s friend/enemy and Rancière’s politics/police distinction 
as constitutive of the political as such, cf. Panu Minkkinen, “Rancière and Schmitt: Sons 
of Ares?”, in M. L. Lerma, J. Etxabe (eds.), Rancière and Law, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017, 
pp. 129–149.
72
 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 25.
73
 Ibid.
74
 Ibid., p. 42.

174
lana zdravković
the logic of the other, the construction of the self as the other.
75
 In other words, 
the process of subjectivisation is a process of disidentification or declassifica-
tion.
76
 Rather than the solid identity, it is in-between: between several names, 
statuses, and identities; between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its 
denial; between the status of a man of tools and the status of a speaking and 
thinking being. Political subjectivisation is the enactment of equality – or the 
handling of a wrong – by people who are together to the extent that they are 
between. It is a crossing of identities, relying on a crossing of names: names that 
link the name of a group or class to the name of no group or no class, a being to a 
nonbeing or a not-yet-being. It always involves an impossible identification, an 
identification that cannot be embodied by he or she who utters it.
77
This is exactly why Rancière is critical of Arendt’s implicit commitment to po-
litical capacity as a given quality or destination, which lies at the heart of her 
separation of the social and the political, public and private, freedom and ne-
cessity, which is precisely what is always at stake in politics for Rancière. This 
commitment to the idea of “pure politics,” which is not to be contaminated by 
private or social life is, for Rancière, only another form of policing politics, or 
“archipolitics,”
78
 as inherent in the traditional understanding of contemporary 
democracy, unable to think politics outside the arche, i.e. governance. With two 
examples, i.e. the question of the poor in On Revolution and the question of the 
stateless in Origins of Totalitarianism, Rancière criticises Arendt’s political pur-
ism based on the opposition between two forms of life: one that is capable of 
politics, and the other only doomed to reproduction.
79
 Although some pose the 
question of whether Rancière is “a closet Arendtian”
80
 or describe him as an 
75
 Cf. Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification and Subjectivization”, in John Rajhcman 
(ed.), Identity in Question, New York and London, Routledge, 1995, p. 60.
76
 Cf. ibid., p. 67.
77
 Cf. ibid., p. 62.
78
 Rancière, “Politics, Identification and Subjectivization”, p. 63.
79
 Cf. Jacques Rancière, “Who is the subject of the rights of man?”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 
103 (2–3/2004), pp. 297–310, and Mustafa Dikeç, “Beginners and Equals: Political Sub -
jectivity in Arendt and Rancière”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 
(1/2013), pp. 78–90.
80
 Andrew Schaap, “Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière’s Critique of Han-
nah Arendt”, European Journal of Political Theory, 10 (1/2011), p. 37.

175
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
“anti-Arendtian Arendtian,”
81
 as they both have in common opposition to un-
derstanding politics as domination, hierarchy, and governance, and “argue for 
a politics that overcomes determination through the purely social (economics, 
competition, life sustainment),”
82
 the differences persist. 
Firstly, in Arendt’s ontological understanding of politics, which is opposed to 
Rancière’s dealing with the political as a process; secondly, in Arendt’s under-
standing of the human as a speaking animal, whereas Rancière sees the human 
as a literate animal; and, thirdly, in Rancière’s critique of political philosophical 
anthropocentrism, to which Arendt still professes.
83
 
Moreover, Rancière’s critique of Arendt’s inability to recognise the political 
agency of the poor and the stateless points to “the vicious circularity of her 
conception of politics.”
84
 Thus, “whereas Arendt views ‘the human’ in human 
rights ontologically as a life deprived of politics, Rancière views ‘the human’ 
polemically as the dismissal of any difference between those who are qualified 
to participate in politics and those who are not.”
85
 Rancière’s understanding of 
emancipation is radically different than Arendt’s, as for her it is just a first (al-
though crucial) step (liberation) toward politics (freedom), while for Rancière 
emancipation is already and simultaneously politics itself, which is manifested 
through the political action of a political subject (who is and can be anyone) and 
can arise anywhere and at any time.
For Rancière, thus, intellectual emancipation connects social and political 
emancipation, i.e. it is before and after them, it is their cause and consequence. 
Happening only in the name of a certain social or political wrong, i.e. the denial 
of the equality of a certain group, class, or individual, emancipation, the heter-
ological enactment of the self as the other, is a process of counting the excluded 
one into the whole, which then always has universal consequences. 
81
 Ivana Perica, “The Archipolitics of Jacques Rancière”, Krisis. Journal for Contemporary 
Philosophy, 49 (1/2019), p. 16.
82
 Ibid.
83
 Ibid.
84
 Schaap, “Enacting the Right to Have Rights”, p. 29.
85
 Ibid., p. 23.

176
lana zdravković
Emancipation as Political Action
We have seen how the concept of emancipation has changed over historical 
time from passive to active (reflexive), and since the Enlightenment and the 
French Revolution became the ultimate generator for achieving the liberal val-
ues of freedom and equality. As one of the key concepts that presupposes an 
understanding of politics as a process of constructing a political community 
of equals, it never occurs by itself, but is inevitably intertwined with human 
action. This self-liberating process presupposes that the action of any political 
subject is emancipatory only if it is oriented towards the idea of the equality 
of/for all. In other words, political action is emancipatory only if it is simul-
taneously particular (in the name of a certain group, identity, or individual) 
and universal. Koselleck warns that the more concretely the concept of eman-
cipation was linked to a certain group, the harder it was to achieve emancipa-
tion. Marx, Arendt, and Rancière showed – with substantial disagreements, 
however – that emancipation can be achieved exactly through the politically 
constructed action of a certain group that has universal premises. Their differ-
ent understanding of political action – as emancipation – derived from their 
different conceptualisations of politics itself. 
For Marx, who thinks politics through economy, changing the modes of pro-
duction is the ultimate emancipatory action which can (and should) be carried 
out by the oppressed working class. The social emancipation (revolution) of the 
proletariat is therefore for him the ultimate political action, which is revolution-
ary and leads to a classless society and the abolishment of the capitalistic pro-
duction condition, but also to generic human emancipation. Leaving the social 
sphere outside the political conception as not only redundant but also harmful, 
Arendt on the other hand, understands politics as a space where politically ac-
tive individuals and collectives act together, believing that only stable institu-
tions (guaranteed by law, the constitution, and the state) of a political commu-
nity established on non-violent principles guarantee freedom. Emancipation 
can therefore happen only as political emancipation (revolution) by political 
beings – citizens. Exclusion from citizenship is, for her, exclusion from politics. 
The sense of politics is the freedom that we experience through our activity. For 
Rancière, emancipation and politics are synonyms, so, for him, politics can ex-
ist only as a politics of emancipation, which manifests itself as the assumption 
of the equality of anyone with anyone else; this is the core of his conception 

177
the concept of emancipation as political action (marx, arendt , rancière)
of intellectual emancipation (the revolution of the sensible). Politics is an en-
counter of two opposite processes, domination and equality, so it is always a 
tópos of a certain wrong. Unlike the proletariat or citizen, for Rancière, there is 
no certain pre-given name for the political subject as emancipation manifests 
itself as political subjectivisation, as a process of deindividualisation and de-
classification. Unlike revolution or the act of beginning, for Rancière, there are 
no protocols for emancipation prescribed in advance. It can happen anywhere 
and be done by anyone. 
On the example of these three authors, we can see that thinking emancipation 
is a complex process combining social, political, and intellectual processes of 
self-transformation that leads to the transformation of politics as such. Social 
justice is necessary, but it does not necessarily lead to political equality. Politi-
cal equal rights are necessary, but having rights does not always mean having 
the possibility (power) to exercise (enforce) them. The emancipation of women, 
refugees, Black people, or the working class can have universal consequenc-
es only if it leads to the abolishment or redefinition of the concept of patriar-
chy, nation state, racism, and capitalism/imperialism. Only in this manner can 
emancipation, although it happens in the name of some community, group, or 
individual excluded from the regime of equality, always be carried out in the 
name of the equality of everyone at the same time and in such a way that is 
always universal, no matter how particular it can be. 
It seems that, in today’s time, emancipation has become equated with equality 
and the struggle to achieve it on the social, political, and intellectual levels. 
As we are still facing patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and capitalism/imperi-
alism, it remains a crucial concept in rethinking common life as a political life 
based on equality and the methods to achieve it. It is the basis for every polit-
ical community and political subject. As identity is multiple, also emancipa-
tion could happen only as an intelligent and multi-layered process of combined 
social (equal payment, decent employment, no exploitation), political (equal 
rights), and intellectual (demanding to be treated equally in every sphere of 
life) emancipation. And the most important imperative of emancipation is that 
it is not enough if I am emancipated if not everyone is emancipated. 

178
lana zdravković
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