The Liberation and the Rise of the Life Society
James Barry, Jr.
In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies three fundamental forms of human activity: labor, work, and action. Each of these forms of activity is related to one or more conditions of human life. Labor is the active human capacity to respond to the demands of life and the needs of the biological frame of existence each of us has been given. Work corresponds to the fact that we are born into an artificial human world—one built by the efforts of those who came before us, but which is augmented by each generation in one way or another. Action also depends on the existence of the human world, but as a place where we can be together directly through word and deed. This being together of action depends on our ability to speak and act in relation to one another and derives from the condition of human plurality, namely, the fact that no two people are ever exactly the same. Thus, work and action are responses to the ongoing existence of a world that I share with other people. Labor, on the other hand, represents an unavoidable and all-but-automatic response to the repetitious forces bound up in the necessities of life. Where worldliness and plurality, bound up with work and action, respectively, provide for a considerable latitude or diversity of response, the demands of life give labor an almost universal face. Each of us must engage in certain fundamental and recurrent cycles of behavior if our life and the lives of our dependents are to continue. These cyclical efforts to support our biological frame represent a direct reflection of the metabolic demands of life that must be met regardless of whether they take place in a human world or not.
Arendt connects these three basic forms of human activity to the distinction between the private and public realms. She uses the ancient Greek polis or city-state as a way of exploring the connection between the traditional distinction of the public and private and the three basic human activities of labor, work, and action. Arendt argues that labor is an inherently private concern because the purpose of labor is to support the lives of oneself and one’s family alone. The private realm, or home and related areas, is the space in which one labors in the name of one’s own self and family. This realm is defined by necessity, the need to labor to meet the needs of life. The public realm, in contrast, is defined by freedom, for outside the home the citizen is able to engage in speech and action that is not bound by the necessities of biological life. Thus, the public realm is directly tied to the capacity of action, but also to the ability to work, since the space in which we meet to talk and act must be built and maintained as a lasting place for us and those who will follow us.
Arendt asserts that traditionally and up to the modern age, labor has taken place almost exclusively in the private realm. Whether in the ancient Greek city-state, Roman society, or medieval kingdom, those who labored were confined to the private life. Accordingly, those who labored were viewed, either nominally or officially, as slaves, because their activities were confined to meeting the needs of life. However, Arendt argues that the status and site of the laboring activity undergoes a fundamental shift in the modern age when “from now on labor as a human activity no longer belonged to the strictly private realm of life; it became a public political fact of the first order.”1 This claim regarding the historical migration of labor from the means by which each individual or family met the needs of life to labor as the chief public preoccupation of modern mass society appears as a red thread throughout The Human Condition. It is directly tied to many of Arendt’s most provocative claims, including her account of the rise of the social realm and the problem of world alienation because the rise of the laboring society represents for her a fundamental realignment of the conditions that had heretofore grounded human life and the world in which it dwells. This elevation of the activity of labor is necessarily accompanied by the subordination of action and work, and as a result, “we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public,” but “our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality.”2 In short, the gains we have made as a laboring society have come at the expense of our ability to act and speak politically, both individually and collectively.
The claim that the nature of labor has undergone a fundamental mutation in the modern age has much to do with Arendt’s prolonged reading of Karl Marx in the early 1950s. In fact, while her work on the question of labor in The Human Condition begins with an acknowledgment of her special debt to Marx’s approach, Arendt ultimately departs from Marx in her assessment of the consequences of the rise of the new laboring society. This divergence begins with her distinction between labor and work—a distinction she argues Marx does not embrace because he was “overwhelmed as it were by the unprecedented actual productivity of Western mankind.”3 The unparalleled productivity of the Industrial Revolution, Arendt argues, gives Marx his special understanding of labor as the “supreme world-building capacity” but also limits his ability to see the fundamental contradiction inherent in identifying labor in this fashion because “labor actually is the most natural and least worldly” of human activities.4 Thus, where Marx argues that productivity is a basic human quality that makes world building possible, Arendt worries that Marx has pursued a materialist reading of labor that overlooks the limits of labor in this regard. Arendt agrees with Marx that the industrial rise of labor represents a key moment in human history, but she does not agree with him on the meaning of this event. For Marx, industrial labor serves as a historical engine that will ultimately redefine what it means to be human by making a drastic revision of public and private life. For Arendt, the rise of the laboring society represents a fundamental perplexity, one which involves “changes of the world, and not changes in the basic conditions of human life on earth.”5 Thus, the rise of the laboring society has much to do with Arendt’s concern with what she calls “world alienation.”
To emphasize the specific and confining qualities of the human as a laboring figure, Arendt uses the term animal laborans repeatedly in the “Labor” chapter of The Human Condition. Her use of this Latin term derives from her reading of both Aristotle and Marx. For Aristotle, to be subject totally to the laws of necessity involved in labor is to be trapped in mere life and therefore not fully deserving of the term “human.” For Marx, on the other hand, to be human is to labor, both to gain the things necessary for life and to establish one’s existence as part of the human species-being.6 In Marx’s account, labor in both forms gives us our objective identity, both as individuals and as part of a larger social reality. According to Arendt, the public appearance of the figure of animal laborans in the modern age indicates a fundamental reversal in the modern understanding of what it means to be human. Now that part of us that is most animal, most bound by necessity (both inside and out), has been elevated to a position of prominence. The animal laborans is best suited to thrive in the new order of the modern world, a world that Arendt, following Marx, refers to as a society of laborers and consumers.
The “Labor” chapter ends with an account of consumer society, the necessary corollary to the laboring society that Marx announced and embraced a century before. Arendt describes what it would mean to live in a purely consumer society in very dire terms, for “we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear . . . never to last long enough to surround the life process in their midst.”7 These are the same “ever-recurrent cycles” that define the necessity of labor because consumption is the other side of labor. More than this, consumer society is the other side of the society of labor: both spring from the metabolic cycles that define biological life. The irony is that although this society built exclusively on the cycles of labor and consumption would seem a perfect habitat for the human as animal laborans, Arendt argues that this expansion of natural forces into the human world is a futile project. The very worldliness that the rise of animal laborans seems to shun is essential to human life and without it even the human as animal laborans could not survive. As Arendt states on the last page of the “Labor” chapter, “without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human.”8 In short, left to its own metabolic processes, animal laborans would lose itself as well as the human world that made its laboring and consuming activities meaningful.
The final two sections of The Human Condition offer a short but dense account of the rise of the society that holds life as the highest good. Defined by an unparalleled expansion of labor, this society threatens to engulf and pervert virtually every traditional virtue and activity. These last two sections of the book are in some ways a concluding elaboration of what Arendt had already discussed much earlier, in what may be the most famous (or infamous) section of the book, “The Rise of the Social.” The social realm is defined in terms of a nation run as a single household that seeks to level and equalize all members by way of economic and behavioral norms. Even more essentially, “the social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose the unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural.”9 This famous phrase, “the unnatural growth of the natural” refers directly to the rise of labor as the highest public activity. Labor, once bound up in the private realm, that is, in the realm in which life’s necessities were traditionally met, has become the first principle of the life society. The natural and private needs of the individual and her family have now become the blueprint for the chief activities of society: labor is the new public norm and the realm of necessity has expanded into what had traditionally been the space of freedom, the public world.
Indeed, freedom is the chief virtue threatened by the rise of the new society of life and labor. The life society involves an embrace of necessity, in both its biological and its social forms, and as such sees liberation rather than active freedom as its goal. For Arendt, the tension between the activities dedicated to necessity and those carved out by a free life never ends. As she puts it, “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”10 Arendt’s concern with the question of the relationship between political freedom and the unavoidable role that necessity plays in human life is not confined to The Human Condition, but continues to serve as a basic concern in her work for the rest of her life. In On Revolution, written a few years later, she reflects on the ambiguous emancipation of the industrial working class, who had been liberated from “their masters only to put them under a stronger taskmaster, their daily needs and wants, the force, in other words with which necessity drives compels men and which is more compelling than violence.”11 Ironically, the rise of the society of free labor does not mean that we are more free, but less so, for not only are we still obliged to meet the needs of ourselves and our kin but we also now conduct ourselves as if we do so as a free choice, a choice we make collectively with all the other members of the society of labors and consumers.
This misunderstanding of freedom, namely, that the freedom to consume is the same as the freedom to act politically, is made possible by the urgency with which life is felt. However, the rise of labor as the chief activity of politics in the modern age still depends on a freedom that is not felt but shared with others. Or as Arendt puts it, we are granted a sort of second life, one not bound by necessity as much as by the shared aspirations of a community. In the society dedicated to labor, the goals of the second life have become united with the goals of our biological existence. In short, we have freed ourselves to labor, but in such a way, we are also freed from labor insofar as we are offered the chance to embrace a “sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the overall life process of the species.”12 Thus, in a world where labor has become the main activity we pursue in public, the once-insoluble problem of labor as the necessary activity derived from our individual biological lives seems finally resolved in a curious new freedom. A community dedicated entirely to the processes of labor and consumption has finally emerged to liberate its members from the basic struggles required by being alive, though only by concealing the needs of individual life behind the pleasant but futile processes driven by a second realm of necessity, the needs of society itself.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 284. This long text is a fragment of a much larger body of research that Arendt pursued under the working title of “The Totalitarian Elements of Marxism.”
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1998), 49.
3 Ibid., 87. In the pages just before this quotation Arendt argues that despite the fact that labor is viewed more and more as encompassing all forms of productive activity, one nonetheless finds different words for labor and work in various European languages. The increasing erosion of the distinction between labor and work in the languages and practices of the modern age is for her a clue that can help us to see the dramatic changes at play in the shape of world in the last 200 years.
4 Ibid., 101. In her 1954 “Understanding and Politics,” Arendt describes the Industrial Revolution as the “radical change in the world . . . certainly the greatest revolution in the shortest span of time mankind has ever witnessed; in a few de cades it changed our whole globe more radically than all the three thousand years of recorded history before it.” Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1994), 315–16.
5 Arendt, The Human Condition, 121.
6 Marx’s most direct comparison of human and animal life is found in the early text “Estranged Labor.” See 72–76 of The Marx-Engels Reader ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978). Arendt seems to be directly responding to Marx’s account in this passage of “Estranged Labor” when she writes that “animal laborans is indeed only one, at best the highest, of the animal species which populate the earth” (The Human Condition, 84). In fact, one can read any number of Arendt’s claims about labor as a response, sometimes affirmatively and sometimes critically, to Marx’s writings. This includes his writings on freedom. See, for example, Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 48, where Marx writes, “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.” Arendt’s views on the perplexities of freedom and necessity are clearly indebted to her careful reading of Marx.
7 Arendt, The Human Condition, 134.
8 Ibid., 135.
9 Ibid., 47.
10 Ibid., 121.
11 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 53.
12 Ibid., 322.