One always begins by 'drawing a distinction', Niklas Luhmann was fond of reminding us, and Arendt begins On Revolution by drawing a distinction that throughout the treatise remains stark, pivotal, resistant, insubordinate to mediation, synthesis and sublation. It is the distinction between the social and the political. It lies at the basis of the constitutional question, and as foundational informs not just the remit of the constitutional but its very possibility: because it does not allow us to step behind it, the foundation that is, and to put it to question politically. The departure is significant and the endurance of the distinction remarkable. We find the quasi-normative function that the distinction performs replicated later and in different forms, but invariably working at the deep level of context-setting. It is, for example, famously articulated in Agamben's 'bio-political fracture'. Agamben's bios/zoe distinction mirrors Arendt's, in his insistent return to the 'zone of indistinction' between the two terms that mirrors her resistance to any kind of dialectical overcoming of the social and the political. And for him, all too impatiently, it is the endurance of the distinction that explains the travesty of 'political' projects launched to tackle need abroad: '[T]oday's democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through