Arendt’s Critique of Sovereignty: a Critique of Total Digitalization?

This paper aims to bridge Arendt’s critique of sovereignty (Lederman 2021) with an Arendtian-like critique of digital technology (Longo 2024). My hypothesis posits a fundamental opposition between two conceptual pairs: sovereignty and decision versus freedom and judgment. The central idea is that, drawing on Arendt, one can demonstrate how the digitalization of our lives aligns with a logic of decision at the expense of the practice of judgment (Arendt 1992). I will first show that canonical theories of sovereignty – particularly those of Thomas Hobbes (2014) and Carl Schmitt (2005) – have curiously paved the way for an automation of decision-making up to the political level. This claim may seem paradoxical, as Schmitt argued that cybernetic automation cannot replace personal sovereignty (Bates 2020). Nevertheless, as Supiot (2015) and Guilhot (2020) have demonstrated, the intellectual genealogy that runs from Hobbes to Schmitt finds an unexpectedly receptive ground in cybernetics. It is thus possible to trace a conception of decision as something automatable, stemming from the core theories of sovereignty. Next, I will show to what extent Arendt – who precisely sought to think about what is not automatable (Simbirski 2016) – can help us formulate a critique of the automation of decision-making, which appears to be a fundamental feature of digital technology and artificial intelligence (Gasser, Mayer-Schönberger 2024). The originality of this approach lies not in reiterating Arendt’s critique of automation and cybernetics, whether through her distinction between thought and rationality or her warning against the extension of life processes through industrial technology (Arendt 1998). Rather, I seek to show how her critique of sovereignty (Arendt 1970, 1990) – and therefore of the political tradition extending from Hobbes to Schmitt – can be read simultaneously as a critique of automation. In doing so, I aim to highlight that, against the paradigm of decision (sovereignty), a rehabilitation of judgment (freedom) can nourish contemporary forms of resistance to solutionism (Morozov 2013), which is itself a form of decisionism. This work extends reflections that connect Arendt’s political theory with her philosophy of technology (Yaqoob 2014, Suuronen 2018), with the originality of articulating this connection through her theory of sovereignty – a theme that has been widely explored in other contexts (Loick 2019). Furthermore, in an Arendtian spirit, it underscores that no practice becomes automated without first being made automatable, i.e. transformed into a behavior. The contemporary automation of decisions thus reveals less about the power of machines than about the sovereign solitude in which human action takes place today.