The Emancipation of the Political-Economic
Peg Birmingham
With near unanimity, Arendt’s readers agree that she insists on a strict separation of the political and the economic in order to prevent the perversion of the political into the social. On this reading, the economic entry into the public space is the entrance of private needs, traditionally relegated to the household, into the public space, thereby perverting the public space into a social space of “administrative housekeeping.” In this chapter, I argue that a close reading of Arendt’s engagement with Hobbes does not allow for this unnuanced narrative of a sharp distinction in her thought between the economic and the political. Hobbes is for her the political philosopher of imperialism with its emancipation of the bourgeoisie, the latter a political emancipation based on a new understanding of political power. More precisely, although driven by the economic motor of capitalism, imperialism on Arendt’s account does not transform the political into the social, but instead introduces a new form of the political rooted in a new economic-political principle of unlimited expansion. For Arendt, this principle marks the decline of the nation-state and the beginning of global politics that continues unabated today. In other words, this economic-political principle marks a new form of the political and not a perversion of the political into the social. In conclusion, I argue that Arendt’s reading of Hobbes and, by extension, her persistent critique of capitalism as a political phenomenon, runs like a subterranean stream throughout her work, a stream that must be brought to the surface in order to reevaluate the relation between the economic and the political in her work.
Thomas Hobbes and Global Politics: A New Political Principle of Power
As is well known, Arendt’s discussion of imperialism occupies the second and central book of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Following her analysis of anti-Semitism and her claim that the racialization of the Jews occurred in part at the moment they lost their economic function, the second book of Origins develops the deep and complicit relationship between imperialist capitalism (which for Arendt is a tautology as, for her, capitalism is imperialistic by definition) and a global politics, whose political principle is the expansion of power.
As I claimed at the outset of this chapter, Arendt views imperialism, with its emancipation of the bourgeois class, as a political phenomenon: “The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie which up to then has been the first class in history to achieve economic preeminence without aspiring to political rule.”1 To be sure, on her reading the bourgeoisie did not turn to political interests out of a concern with politics, but instead, “turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”2 Most striking is the number of times Arendt refers to political goals when discussing the emancipation of the bourgeoisie. Rather than perverting the political into the social, this newly emancipated class moves the location of the political to the world stage. World trade requires a global politics. Arendt cites Cecil Rhodes: “‘Wake up to the fact that you cannot live unless you have the trade of the world,’ ‘that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, and not England,’ and therefore they ‘must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.’”3 Arendt does not change her mind on the political form of imperialism. In her 1976 Preface to “Imperialism,” she goes so far as to claim that without imperialism’s claim to world politics, “the totalitarian claim to global rule would not have made sense.”4
At the same time, the principle of unlimited expansion requires that imperialism move beyond a politics of the body politic. As Arendt puts it, “What imperialists wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politics.”5 Here we must be cautious. Imperialism’s lack of foundation in a body politics with limited territory and a delineated citizenry did not make it a nonpolitical space. Moreover, its disregard for the democratic principles of self-determination and consent of the governed did not make it something other than political, although certainly no longer democratic. Thus, when Arendt writes, “The concept of unlimited expansion allowing for the unlimited accumulation of capital . . . cannot be the foundation of new political bodies which need a stabilizing force,”6 she is not arguing that imperialism is apolitical; imperialism’s political aim is to move beyond the confines of the nation-state. Its aim, in other words, is a “politics without a body,” if by the latter is meant a body politic comprised of a common tradition, language, and a body of stabilizing laws. Instead, imperialism’s explicit political aim is instability. As Arendt points out, the laws of capitalism defy the traditional notion of law as boundary and limit; they introduce limitlessness and boundlessness into the laws themselves. While Arendt’s analysis raises the question of whether a concept of the political rooted in a principle of unlimited expansion is able to generate a new form of the political without at the same time containing the seeds of its own destruction, nevertheless, she never denies that imperialism gives us a new shape of the political.
With this background, we can turn to Arendt’s reading of Thomas Hobbes, who, she argues, “is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.”7 Importantly, Arendt argues that Hobbes’s theory of the political is driving his description of the human being. In other words, according to Arendt, Hobbes depicts the features of the human being according to the needs of the Leviathan, not the other way around. Hobbes is not giving a general psychological or even a “realistic pessimism” in his description of the human being, but instead is only reckoning with the consequences of the emerging capitalist class of the bourgeoisie. Again, Hobbes is a political philosopher who is giving a specific political picture of the human being as “belonging to a new bourgeois class as it emerged in the seventeenth century.”8 Against Engels, she maintains that this emerging class and its unlimited quest for increased money and power was not the result of accumulation and acquisition, but the beginning.9 In fact, Arendt does not tie capitalism with its imperialist aims to property, but instead, to the inaugural event of expropriation: “This system [capitalism], as is generally known, owed its start to a monstrous process of expropriation such as has never occurred in history in this form—that is—without military conquest. Expropriation, the initial accumulation of capital—that was the law according to which capitalism arose and according to which it has advanced step by step.”10 Against Marx and Engels, whose remedy is the expropriation of the expropriators, Arendt argues that property is not the culprit, but instead, the untying of wealth and acquisition from any specific location in the world, which allows for the free and unimpeded mobility of goods and capital throughout a globalized world.
As just noted, according to Arendt, by Hobbes’s ontological claim that he is reading the nature of the human being (the infamous nosce te ipsum at the beginning of Leviathan), he is in fact reading the bourgeoisie whose passions are not the foundation of a new politics. As Arendt points out, his description of the human being with no free will, no capacity for thought, but only “reckoning with consequences” and absolved of all responsibility is a description of this newly emancipated class for whom everything is based on power. The dignity of this person is his price, determined by his function and what he will be paid for the use of his power; he has no intrinsic worth or dignity and it is the “the esteem of others that determines his price,” an esteem that is dependent on the on the law of supply and demand.11
Central to Arendt’s reading of Hobbes is her claim that his understanding of power for the sake of power makes him the philosopher of imperialism. As Arendt points out, for Hobbes, everything—whether in the form of knowledge or wealth—is reduced to power: “Therefore, if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man.”12 Going further, she argues,
Thus membership in any form of community is for Hobbes a temporary and limited affair which essentially does not change the solitary and private character of the individual (who has “no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of griefe in keeping company where there is no power to overawe them all”) or create permanent bonds between him and his fellow-man.13
The sovereign power of the commonwealth, she argues, is made up of private individuals solely interested in the desire for power; it embodies the sum total of private interests:
Hobbes’ Leviathan exposed the only political theory according to which the state is based not on some kind of constituting law—whether divine law, the law of nature, or the law of social contract—which determines the rights and wrongs of the individual’s interest with respect to public affairs, but on the individual interests themselves, so that the “private interest is the same with the publique.”14
Arendt develops this point in On Revolution, arguing that Hobbes’s social contract demands that each individual “gives up his isolated strength and power to constitute a government; far from gaining a new power . . . he resigns his power such as it is and . . . he merely expresses his ‘consent’ to be ruled by the government, whose power consists of the sum total of forces which all individual persons have channeled into it.”15 The mutual transfer of power to the sovereign establishes the “principle of absolute rulership, of an absolute monopoly of power ‘to overawe them all’ (Hobbes).”16
The principle of absolute sovereignty resolves the stability issue through absolute obedience to a sovereign whose power takes the form of force. Arendt points out that for Hobbes political stability is only gained by the expansion of sovereign power wherein the state of nature is transferred to the state at whose center is the “condition of perpetual war.”17 Going further, she argues that the Hobbesian commonwealth
“acquires a monopoly in killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the power monopoly of the state . . . . And as this law flows directly from absolute power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it.”18
The military and the police become the “functionaries of violence,” whose violence constantly increases with an expanding sovereignty. Significantly Arendt reads Hobbes not as the thinker of Westphalian limited territory with its guns at the borders, but instead as the thinker of imperialism whose principle of “power for the sake of power” had from its inception globalized aims that led Leviathan to export its power and guns beyond the national borders.
In an important discussion of Hobbes in The Human Condition, Arendt elaborates on his attempt to stabilize an ever-expansive process of power. Here she focuses on the role fabrication plays in t he Hobbes’s political philosophy, which, she argues, has the effect of separating reason from the always unpredictability of human affairs: “The political philosophy of the modern age, whose greatest representative is still Hobbes, founders on the perplexity that modern rationalism is unreal and modern realism is irrational—which is only another way of saying that reality and human reason have parted company.”19 Rather than locating reality in a common world, Arendt points out that Hobbes locates it in the interiority of the passions that are “the same in every specimen of the species man-kind. Here again we find the image of the watch, this time applied to the human body and then used for the movements of the passions.”20 The orderliness and predictability of the passions is achieved through the fabrication of the great machine, Leviathan, whose head (literally) is the absolute sovereign. As the Frontispiece depicts, the Hobbesian sovereign, the mortal God, rules through the universal laws of reason—the latter understood as “reckoning with consequences”—which are nothing other than the raison d’être of the state. Here, Arendt already anticipates Foucault’s insight regarding Hobbes, namely, that he brings together a theory of sovereignty with the art of government that was linked not to the model of the family but to the economy.21 Hobbesian sovereign reason as “reckoning with consequences” means that the reason of state is no longer understood as a system of laws to which the just or rational state should adhere, but instead it is “the very being of the state and as such commands the law and suspends the law as is necessary.”22 Here Foucault is very close to Arendt’s reading of Hobbes on the intimacy of violence at the very heart of the state: there is no longer an antimony between law and violence. The sovereign machine can use both in the service of the Leviathan and in its paramount concern with the unceasing expansion of power and wealth.
Going further, Arendt points out that Hobbes’s denial of free will and his equation of freedom and necessity contributes to his balancing of a political space that is at once unceasingly expansive and, at the same time, stable. In Life of the Mind: Willing, addressing both Hobbes and Spinoza, Arendt writes: “Thus, men are subjectively free, objectively necessitated.”23 Freedom for Hobbes is understood as liberty, that is, “the absence of external impediments to motion.”24 Arendt points out that Hobbes follows the Greek understanding of freedom as movement, but departs from the Greeks with a completely different conclusion that liberty and necessity are one and the same. She cites him at length:
Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do: which because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man’s will . . . proceeded from some cause and that from another cause, in continuous chain . . . proceeds from necessity.25
Hobbes does not deny the will, but instead, only its freedom, understanding the will as the last appetite in deliberation. Insofar as the sovereign’s will is absolute, having replaced the plurality of wills that comprise the multitude, its will is the final appetite, the final deliberation that has the force of necessity. Its freedom lies in its moving without impediment (hence Hobbes’s fear of sedition, the greatest obstacle to sovereign movement), according to the force of necessity, which for Hobbes is the force of unceasing expansion for power for the sake of power. Again, on Arendt’s reading, Hobbes’s philosophy follows from his politics, especially his theory of sovereignty. While Arendt does not explicitly establish the connection, Hobbes’s stabilization of individual passions and inclinations in the absolute will of the sovereign with its force of necessity sets the stage for totalitarianism’s attempt through terror not just to stabilize, but to eradicate altogether the human capacity of unpredictability rooted in the ontological event of natality. If Hobbes stabilizes unpredictability in the absolute sovereign, totalitarianism goes further, attempting to wipe unpredictability off the face of the earth.
It may be countered that while Arendt argues that the principle of expansion “as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism . . . [and] an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action,”26 nevertheless, Arendt ultimately views it as an economic principle that has made its way into the political. Certainly, Arendt goes on in the passage just cited to point out that expansion has a “surprising originality” in the “long history of political thought and action,” and this is because “this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century.”27 Hanna Pitkin argues that Arendt’s concession that this political concept is not “really political at all” indicates that she views imperialism as a social rather than political phenomenon. For Pitkin, Arendt’s discussion of imperialism is entirely consistent with her analysis of the social in The Human Condition: the political is perverted into the social when the bourgeoisie take control of politics. Certainly, there is no lack of passages in Origins indicating that Arendt views the bourgeoisie as originating in society. Pitkin cites these passages. For example, she points to Arendt’s claim that with the bourgeoisie entering the public space, “the latent fight between state and society [became] openly a struggle for power.”28 Pitkin concludes, “The seizure of state power by the bourgeoisie that launched imperialism was clearly, to Arendt, also a victory for society over either the state or politics, or both.”29 I disagree. While Arendt clearly views the principle of expansion as originating in the economic and, further, while she sees the bourgeoisie as having their roots in society, nevertheless, their emancipation is political as is the principle of expansion that animates their “freedom.” In other words, Arendt’s analysis of imperialism argues not for society’s victory, but instead for the political transformation of the economic such that the two terms must now be hyphenated: economic-political. And with their emancipation into the political, the bourgeoisie became political actors on the global stage; their concerns were properly political: the expansion of power (now associated with wealth) and liberty (now associated with Hobbes’s understanding of movement without impediment).
Arendt’s analysis of the rise of the social in The Human Condition illuminates the difference between the perversion of the political into the social and its transformation into a new space of global politics. As is well known, Arendt characterizes the rise of the social as bringing the concerns of the household into the public space. The twin characteristics of the social are conformity and normalization:
It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.30
Rather than Hobbes’s understanding of equality as the equal ability to kill, which is then transferred to the sovereign, Arendt argues that the rise of the social views equality as conformity and uniformity. For her, this accounts for economic theory with its emphasis on statistics to be counted as one of the social sciences. Here caution again must be exercised: the social science of economic theory is not to be conflated with the political takeover of capitalism on the world stage, whose principle is the expansion of power. Instead the science of economics is concerned with “statistical uniformity” and the “leveling out of the fluctuation of behavior.”31 Significantly, Arendt views the rise of the social as inherently linked to “the already obsolete monarchal structure of the nation-state,” with its model of family life and paternal rule. For Arendt, Rousseau, not Hobbes, is the philosopher of the social, with the last book of Emile outlining the proper duties of husband and wife as preparation for citizenship as required reading.32 On the contrary, as we have seen, Arendt argues that imperialism contributes to the obsolescence of the nation-state; its aim is not conformity, but unlimited power and expansion. Only in Leviathan, Chapter 21, on civil laws, does Hobbes show any interest in domestic life, an interest driven by thinking those liberties of the subjects that fall outside sovereign command. In other words, family concerns such as diet, dress, and the education of children remain private matters and are not to be brought into the public. In this way, Hobbes continues what Arendt understands to be the Greek distinction between the public and the private when it comes to issues of the household.
If there is a meeting between the economic-political space of imperialism and the social space of conformity whose model is that of family life, it is for Arendt in the doctrine of race. As we saw earlier, imperialism moves beyond the nation-state, but does not entirely abandon its principles. The political dilemma is reconciling the nation-state’s commitment to self-determination and the consent of the governed with imperialism’s colonial domination that is inseparable from its principle of expansion. The resolution is to divide human beings into tribes with the doctrine of dominant races. Arendt argues:
The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form outline very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could carry the process of capital and power accumulation through to its logical end in self-destruction. But Hobbes at least provided political thought with the requisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law.33
And yet she goes on to implicitly distinguish the way in which the doctrine of race operates in Hobbes’s political thought from the shape it takes in the nation-state. In her analysis of the nation-state, the doctrine of race emerges from a conception of a homogeneous unified will that resembles the biological family; in her analysis of imperialism, the doctrine of race is tied to individuals being imprisoned in the “endless process of power accumulation” in which there is “no other unifying bond.”34 Certainly, the two sources cannot be separated and yet there are important differences that ought not to be lost if we are to understand the virulent rise of what could be described as a “global racism” that accompanies the increasing violence of contemporary capitalism and its ever-expansion of global power.
In conclusion, Arendt’s reading of Hobbes argues for a rethinking of her position on the relation between economics and the political. Rather than equate her understanding of the imperialism and the rise of global politics with her analysis of the rise of the social, the solution of which would be to empty the political of what are essentially private, household concerns, I have tried to show that imperialism for her introduces a new form of the political that is inescapably economic, with a new political principle of unlimited expansion of power and accumulation. Arendt’s preoccupation with this new form of the political runs throughout her work, most notably in the many places where she turns to Hobbes. Here the issue is not private concerns of the needs of the household becoming the public concerns, but, instead, the transformation of the political through an entirely new set of concerns oriented around a new understanding of power, linked to wealth, expropriation, acquisition, and accumulation that move the political space of the nation-state to the world stage. Her reading of Hobbes as the philosopher of imperialism and the emancipated bourgeoisie provides a sustained analysis of this transformation. Arendt could not be clearer: without imperialism and its economic principle of unlimited power and accumulation, of which Hobbes is the philosopher, totalitarianism would not have been possible; she does not claim the same for Rousseau and the rise of the social. While Rousseau certainly contributed to the making of docile citizens all too eager to conform and comply with totalitarian regimes, Hobbes gives the philosophical underpinnings to a concept of world politics, the condition for the totalitarianism attempt at global rule. In an all-brief discussion in a 1970 interview, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in answer to a question of whether there is an alternative to capitalism, Arendt gives a history lesson on expropriation, “the initial accumulation of capital,” before responding directly to the question of alternatives. She argues that she is not one to think there are alternatives in history as if there is some “grand development of mankind.”35 She suggests that it is neither possible nor desirable to try and sever the political from the economic. Instead, she claims, “only legal and political institutions that are independent of the economic forces and their automatism can control and check the inherently monstrous potentialities of this process.”36 Political institutions must retain an independence from economic forces, but this does not mean they can or should aspire to autonomy. Rather, in the face of unrelenting imperialism and the “inherently monstrous potentialities” of capitalist forces, the task of the political is to engage and resist these economic forces, thereby giving new shape to the economic-political.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 123.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 178.
4 Ibid., 164.
5 Ibid., 181.
6 Ibid., 137–38.
7 Ibid., 139.
8 Ibid., 140–41.
9 Ibid., 145.
10 Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972 [1969]), 211.
11 Arendt, Origins, 139.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 140.
14 Ibid., 139.
15 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 170.
16 Ibid., 171.
17 Arendt, Origins, 142.
18 Ibid., 139.
19 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 300.
20 Ibid., 299.
21 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 103.
22 Ibid., 262.
23 Hanna Arendt, Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 24.
24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 21. Cited by Arendt, Willing, 24.
25 Ibid.
26 Arendt, Origins, 170.
27 Ibid.
28 Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 78.
29 Ibid.
30 Arendt, Human Condition, 40.
31 Ibid., 44.
32 The model for the collapse of the public and the private, the political and the domestic, is found in the final book of Emile, with Rousseau’s long discussion of the duties of Sophie and Emile, husband and wife, as crucial for the preparation of citizenship.
33 Arendt, Origins, 157.
34 Ibid.
35 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 211.
36 Ibid., 212.