Methodology, Action, and Politics
Philip Walsh
Hannah Arendt was a vehement critic of the social and psychological sciences. Schooled by two of the most prominent philosophers of her time, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, she was dismissive of scholarship she did not consider serious, or which did not match her unorthodox conception of the all-important category of politics. Her well-known diagnosis of modernity in terms of the “rise of the social” included, as a major feature, the rise of the social sciences as the dominant mode of thinking. Social science exemplified many of the crises that had presaged the degradation of modern politics and the rise of totalitarianism: the tendency toward reductionism; the conflation of the distinct activities of labor, work and action; and the trivialization of the ends of human life. She denigrated sociology, in particular, as a discipline that “did not really exist” and characterized it in a letter to Jaspers in 1949 as “a substitute for history.”1
In this, and in most of her other critiques of the social sciences, Arendt was thinking primarily of Marxism, especially the work of Karl Mannheim, who had advanced an important variant in the 1930s and was the only self-declared sociologist with whom she engaged at any length in her writings. Arendt became deeply immersed in Marx’s writings in the 1950s, an experience that culminated in the important and profound critique of his ideas that appears in Part II of The Human Condition. Indeed, although she attacked the ideas of both Marx and Mannheim, she was also deeply influenced by them both. The social sciences, and sociology in particular, were therefore formative elements in her intellectual development.
Nevertheless, both Marx and Mannheim were somewhat marginal figures within American and, to a lesser extent, German sociology in the period from 1930 to 1960. American sociology was largely dominated by the influence of Talcott Parsons, who was himself the intellectual successor to the figure who was, by common consent, the most significant of the “founders” of German sociology: the polymath Max Weber. Arendt’s mentor at Heidelberg, Karl Jaspers, was hostile to Marx and detested Mannheim, but lionized Max Weber, whom he considered to be both the greatest sociologist of his generation and a philosopher in his own right. Jaspers impressed this opinion on Arendt several times over the years, and Arendt obediently read Weber and incorporated some of his ideas into her work. Nevertheless, for all her respect for Jaspers, Arendt remained suspicious of Weber, both as a political theorist and as a social scientist. Arendt’s explicit reasons for this view are illuminating in their own right, but equally important are the subtle ways in which Arendt’s own theories were shaped by Weber’s ideas, both those that she opposed and those that permeated her own thinking. Understanding the reasons for these commonalities and differences highlights Arendt’s distinctive perspective on action, rationality, and politics.
The Intellectual Background
Arendt was first exposed to Weber’s ideas during her years in Heidelberg from 1926 to 1930, at which time she completed her doctorate under the tutelage of Jaspers. Heidelberg offered a rich intellectual atmosphere, replete with intellectual rivalries and cross-fertilizations that provided the formative education for such students as Erich Fromm and Norbert Elias, as well as Arendt herself. At the center of much of this was the circle of intellectuals that surrounded Max Weber’s widow, Marianne Weber, who provided a salon-style social hub for many politically and socially minded intellectuals in the university. Jaspers was an integral part of this group, having met the Webers in 1908 and having forged a strong intellectual friendship with Max before his death in 1919. The group also included Weber’s brother, Alfred, as well as other figures. This group was dominated by a consciousness of the centrality of Weber’s work for the human sciences, and much of the intellectual output of the leading figures was shaped by this (not least that of Marianne Weber, a prominent early feminist intellectual in her own right). Arendt therefore was exposed to Weber’s influence as a graduate student, and his groundbreaking study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is referenced in her earliest publications.
Arendt’s intellectual career was interrupted in 1933 when Hitler came to power and she fled Germany, eventually for New York. She did not resume serious intellectual study again until after the war. In 1949, in response to Jaspers’s urging, she read Weber in some detail. His theories of social action, politics, and ideal types came to play a role in her vision of how to understand human activity in The Human Condition. But his methodological writings were also crucial for her reflections on totalitarianism and on the shortcomings of many of her contemporaries’ attempts to understand and make sense of it.
Weber’s Methodological Writings
Weber advocated the use of ideal-type concepts in the social sciences. By this, he meant not the simplification of phenomena to make them fit some preexisting schema (although Arendt in several places suggests that this is in fact what sociologists had done with his methodological principles) but, rather, “an analytical accentuation [Steigerung] of certain elements of reality.”2 The preeminent example of the use of ideal types was in Weber’s own historical work, especially in the study of the “Protestant ethic” and its decay into the “spirit of capitalism.” The phenomena to which these concepts refer are not, as Weber was at pains to point out, freestanding historical facts immediately available to the historian’s gaze. They were acquired inductively from careful study of the belief structure and rationales for action on the part of the actors involved, though an act of imagination is required to transform them into useful historical generalizations that possess explanatory power. This insight did not mean merely that all phenomena, as philosophers express it, “appear under some description,” nor that all explanation depends on an act of “social const ruction.” On the contrary, Weber insisted that not all descriptions are equal: ideal types must have an empirical anchor, but the ideal type depends on a nonreducible conceptual contribution from the historian.
Arendt was largely at one with this “strong conception” of ideal typical theorizing and, indeed, practised it herself. But she criticized social scientists for routinely ignoring the caveats with which Weber surrounded his methodological recommendations. By imposing their own ideas on history willy-nilly, social scientists often produced ahistorical typologies in which differences were ignored, crucial nuances lost, and historical reality reduced to flat, nondescript generalities. Indeed, the most important political phenomenon of the twentieth century, the emergence of totalitarian states, had been subjected to typologies that obscured more than they illuminated by their insistence on seeing totalitarianism as continuous with other earlier autocratic and despotic regimes. Totalitarianism, Arendt argued, was fundamentally different from any previous political type. Totalitarian regimes were not—like the absolutist regimes to which social scientists routinely compared them—to be understood simply in terms of the drive for conquest, power, or booty, at least insofar as these objectives were pursued as genuine ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argued, totalitarian regimes do not clearly pursue ends at all, and this is reflected in their “supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; ‘idealism,’ i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power.”3
This insistence on the unprecedentedness of totalitarianism was a central feature of her analysis, and it was worked up in conscious opposition to the typologies of such sociologists as Raymond Aron and Talcott Parsons, who, she thought, were misled by the logic of ideal types into emphasizing the continuity of human affairs and therefore missed the terrifying novelty of totalitarianism. On the other hand, Arendt made use of various powerful images in her depiction of totalitarianism. There is, on the one hand, the conception of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism as a raging torrent sweeping away all things in its path and driven by an insane logic of uprooting. She also suggests that the totalitarian regime resembles an onion, or an inverted pyramid. Such images were not exactly what Weber had in mind in his characterization of ideal types, but they are not dissimilar. To see totalitarianism in its true light requires an act of imagination that escapes the boundaries of the merely empirical. Accurate description does not necessarily depend on accurate reflection. Indeed, the careful and precise assembly of “pure facts,” Arendt suggested—such as Martin Gilbert had attempted in his 1961 Destruction of the European Jews—in a certain sense led to an obscuring of the nightmare quality of the phenomena it wished to explain.
Arendt also accused sociologists of ignoring Weber’s emphasis on Verstehen, that is, the interpretive understanding of action, which requires the empathic identification with the actor’s motive in order to understand his or her actions. This is in contrast to what Arendt characterized as the “functionalizing” tendencies of positivistic social scientists who, she thought, were intent on ignoring people’s own conceptions of their own actions. She upbraided functionalism in both its Marxist and non-Marxist forms in terms that were strikingly similar to Weber’s own impatience with those of his own time who saw the destiny of the social sciences written in the natural sciences of the day. In this sense, both Weber and Arendt were good hermeneuticists, insisting that reduction and generalization from without were the deadly enemies of historical and social understanding. Weber explicitly contrasted the natural with the social sciences in this way. Arendt had the same sharp contrast in mind when she insisted that the study of human affairs revealed stories in the same way as the study of nature revealed laws.
Weber and Arendt on Action and Technology
Weber’s most influential doctrine and the nub of Arendt’s main objections to his approach is his account of social action. In the well-known introductory chapter of Economy and Society, Weber defines the field of sociology as concerned with social action, which is delineated via a fourfold distinction:
1. Instrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings. These expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends.
2. Value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other forms of behavior, independently of its prospects for success.
3. Affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states.
4. Traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation.4
According to Weber, all individual and collective action, insofar as it is meaningful, may be captured analytically in terms of particular combinations of these elements. The task of the social scientist is to interpret social action accordingly. While Weber never explained the bases on which these four types could be identified, Jürgen Habermas has proposed that a single principle can be distilled from it by noting how each type can be related to the others with respect to the extent to which it takes account of four action variables: means, ends, values, and consequences. Type 1 takes account of all four, while Type 2 ignores consequences. Type 3 ignores both values and consequences, and Type 4 only acknowledges means. The principles are summarized in The Theory of Communicative Action as follows:5
The theory of human activity that Arendt presents in The Human Condition can be understood as a direct challenge to this typology of social action. While Arendt rejects the specific form of Weber’s theory, there is a shared ambition in terms of what their respective theories are intended to explain. In The Human Condition, Arendt reserves the term “action” for the specific kinds of interaction that occur within the “in-between” space of human plurality that she designates “the web of human relationships.”6 This is distinct from the kind of purposive interactions with objects through which human beings accomplish their foreseen goals, which Arendt classifies as “work” or “fabrication.” Work in turn is contrasted with labor, which comprises activities that are oriented toward the reproduction of life. The following schema summarizes many of the features that Arendt takes to be essential to the “triad of activities” as presented in The Human Condition.
True to her historicist orientation, Arendt does not suggest that the triad of activities is an anthropological constant; there is no essentialism here. However, the distinction between the three activities is both historically persistent and grounded in the fundamental world-orientation of each. Moreover, the meaning of each of the activities is dependent on the others. In other words, Arendt’s theory of activity, like Weber’s, is partly intended to explain how the different meanings of individual actions come to produce an institutionally differentiated society.
However, there are marked divergences between the two on how to actually theorize action. For Weber, all conscious, intended activity falls within the category of “rational action,” that is, it is relative to some consideration of the relationship between means and ends. For Arendt, in contrast, means-ends thinking is typified by the activity of “work.” But the category of action cannot be understood in this way. This is so partly because of the intangibility of action, given that it consists primarily in speech, but even more so because communicative (as opposed to exploitative) relationships among human beings are not susceptible to the orientation to mastery, control, and “success” that is obtained within the sphere of work. The realm of action is the sphere in which human beings reveal themselves, in which they seek recognition from and contend with others, and struggle to shape the res publica in accordance with their visions of the good. All this is to say that, for Arendt, action and speech are where politics plays out, and freedom is to be measured by the extent to which spaces exist in which people can engage in political action. Similarly, power consists in the collective capacity for political action and thereby affirms human spontaneity and the capacity to begin, that is, to bring something new into the world. This also contrasts sharply with Weber’s perspective, which confines politics within the institutional canopy of the state and conceives of power instrumentally as the “probability that an actor within a social relationship will be able to carry out his will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.”7 For Arendt, such visions reduced action to fabrication and tempted actors to substitute violence for politics.
Arendt’s insistence on the distinction between action and work is therefore seminal to her conception of politics. Nevertheless, there are similarities between Arendt and Weber in another area, namely, their respective understandings of the challenges posed by modern technology. Weber captured this in his well-known distinction between value-rational and instrumentally rational action. His insight that the modern emphasis on the technological enhancement of means threatens to eclipse the capacity to act in accordance with substantive rationality—a process that he thought was accompanied by “the disenchantment of the world”—has been enormously influential within the social sciences. In The Human Condition, Arendt also took aim at the valuations that accompanied the modern orientation toward technological rationality. But her fears were less about the ascendancy of homo faber (the orientation to tool-making) than the orientation to a cycle of labor and consumption that technological enhancement could bring about. The last section of the book, “The Victory of the Animal Laborans,” warns against the modern division and simplification, not only of labor but also of all human activity, that industrial technology presages. A possible future “society of jobholding” that would result would reduce all human activity to a common understanding as “labor,” impoverish the capacity for action, and limit fabrication to the realm of the artist. Both Weber’s and Arendt’s fears on this score remain unrealized, but they continue to loom as disturbing future possibilities.
Conclusion
Arendt was affected by Weber’s perspective, but she sought to combat its influence in the form in which it was most obviously present, that of the contemporary social sciences. She thought the methodology of ideal types was vulnerable to abuse by its unreflective adherents. Moreover, Weber’s application of this methodology to the field of human activity could be dangerously reductive. She also opposed his conceptions of politics and power in the name of a subtler and philosophically informed understanding of the political. Arendt and Weber continue to be two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and their differences reflect many ongoing debates within philosophy, politics, and social science.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), 114.
2 Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), 417–18.
4 Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. E. Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 248.
5 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (New York: Beacon Press, 1984), 282.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 182–83.
7 Weber, Economy, 53.