CHAPTER 1 Arendt, Aristotle, and Action
… action and production are generically different.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
I. ARISTOTLE AND ARENDT ON THE SELF-CONTAINEDNESS OF ACTION
Hannah Arendt begins The Human Condition by accusing the Western philosophical tradition of effacement. She contends that “the enormous weight of contemplation” in the Western philosophical tradition served, historically, to blur the inner articulations of the vita activa, the active life.1 From Arendt’s point of view, the Socratic tradition and Christianity share an obsession with an absolute Truth far greater than man and his deeds, a Truth available to man only through the cessation of all worldly activity. Contemplative stillness made a relationship to the eternal possible. From this ascetic-theoretical perspective, the classical hierarchy of human activities was leveled: the component parts of the active life—labor, work, and action—appeared equally base, equally constrained by necessity. Only contemplation, the bios theoretikos, seemed to offer a life of freedom, while the bios politikos seemed, if anything, to be more of an entanglement than either labor or work. While Arendt believes that Marx and Nietzsche, in their rebellion against the Socratic-Christian valuation, succeeded in reversing the traditional hierarchy of the contemplative and the active life, the very success of this reversal did nothing to remedy the original blurring of the inner articulations of the vita activa. Indeed, from Arendt’s perspective, the violent anti-Platonism of Marx and Nietzsche served only to further efface these distinctions.2 By setting life and labor over against the “eternal realm” of Being, they preserved the metaphysical tradition’s conflation of labor, work, and action.
Arendt takes the failure of the Marxian/Nietzschean attempt to break out of the Western philosophical tradition’s conceptual framework as the cue for her own project. She seeks to rearticulate the component parts of the vita activa in all their specificity and irreducibility. Her hope is that distinguishing clearly between these activities will pave the way to a revaluation of politics and political action, and to a new appreciation of human plurality and the world of appearances in which it finds expression.
This is no small task in an age that, according to Arendt, scorns the political and glorifies labor and its productivity: Marx and Adam Smith are equally contemptuous of the “unproductive” political sphere.3 Nevertheless, the project must be undertaken, the revaluation attempted, for to forget the distinctiveness and value of action is tantamount, Arendt argues, to forgetting what makes us human. Political action in its genuine form is disappearing from the world, both in fact and in theory. Should this process be allowed to complete itself, human beings will no longer be able to claim that they, alone amongst all animals, are free.4
One cannot fail to be struck by the supreme confidence with which Arendt makes her distinctions. Her descriptive conceptualizations of labor, work, and action in The Human Condition leave no room for confusion or conflation: each activity emerges in sharp contrast to the other two. It is precisely the sharpness of this contrast that disturbs critics, who see what starts as an admirable and overdue attempt to separate the political from the nonpolitical congeal into a rigid and dogmatic theory of political action.5 They suggest that Arendt has indeed saved praxis from oblivion, but only at the cost of reviving quite dubious Aristotelian criteria for the articulation of a new hierarchy of human activities.
In this chapter, I want to take this charge seriously by examining the manner in which Arendt adopts Aristotle’s conceptual apparatus for her own purposes. The question is the degree to which Arendt depends upon Aristotle’s hierarchical criteria for the development of her own theory of action. I shall argue that, in this respect at least, Arendt’s “Aristotelianism” exceeds the expectations of her critics. Her appropriation of crucial Aristotelian distinctions provides the very structure of her theory of action, the frame for her articulation of the vita activa. The Aristotelian influence is thus one key to understanding the Arendtian quest for a purely political politics. Yet her appropriation of Aristotle is, in an important sense, ironic, since she uses concepts from his political philosophy to deconstruct and overcome his own theory of action. In her eyes, this negative project is a prerequisite for a genuine “renewal of praxis.” What this amounts to in a more positive sense I will discuss in later chapters.
We must begin, however, with Aristotle. In the Politics, Aristotle makes a strict distinction between the public and private realms, between the activities and relationships appropriate to each. The household realm (oikia) includes the economic or productive activities that aim at “the securing of life itself.”6 Its raison d’être is the provision of those necessities required for the preservation of individual life and the survival of the species.7 Because it is organized to meet irreducible human needs and operates under constraints imposed by the necessity of guaranteeing continued physical existence, the household presumes relations of inequality. Relations of domination—of master over slaves, husband over wife, father over children—are unavoidable in this sphere and, according to Aristotle, are natural within its boundaries.8 There must be a “head of the household” if this unit is to fulfill its basic economic functions.
The household realm, which makes material life possible, is contrasted with the political realm, the polis, which makes what Aristotle calls the “good life” possible.9 The good life is one of noble and just actions, of ethical and intellectual virtue. The political association makes it possible by endowing its members with freedom and equality. Liberated from direct concern with the problems of life maintenance, citizens (the heads of households) are free to devote themselves to the pursuit and preservation of virtue in their community. It is only as a member of such a community, Aristotle argues, that a person develops his moral and intellectual capacities, and so becomes fully human.10 An individual must have daily contact with fellow citizens concerning matters of a more than instrumental significance if he is to develop his potential for reasoned speech and his sense of justice. It is precisely in political interaction that the capacity for choice, judgment, and action is fully exercised, and that freedom is concretely realized. Without the polis, the individual cannot know human freedom: “He who by his nature and not simply ill-luck has no city, no state, is either too bad or too good, either sub-human or superhuman,” a beast or a god.11
The ends of the household and the political association are, for Aristotle, distinct but nevertheless related. Aristotle poses a specific connection between the two spheres: the household is to be regarded as a means to, or condition for, the existence of the polis. Life has its primary value as a ground for the attainment of the good life. Aristotle puts this relationship in characteristically teleological terms when he states that all prepolitical forms of association (families, tribes, villages, etc.) have their natural end in the polis: “this association is the end of those others and its nature is itself an end; for whatever is the end-product of the perfecting process of any object, that we call its nature, that which man, house, household, or anything else aims at being.”12 The polis, or political realm, may be last in “the order of becoming,” in the natural course of human development, but it is first in “the order of nature.”13 It is the end that all the other forms of association aim to attain.
The difference between the household and the political realm is, then, essentially one of rank or, as Aristotle likes to put it, relative priority: “… the city or state has priority over the household and over any individual among us. For the whole must be prior to the parts.”14 Only the “whole,” the political association, is or can be self-sufficient; only the polis can meet the full range of human needs, from species preservation to moral development. All other forms of association, the component “parts” of the polis, fall short of this self-sufficiency (autarkeia), this perfection (entelechia). They fail to fulfill all of human nature. For this reason they cannot be said to possess full independent value; they must be viewed as inferior to the political association.
The Human Condition begins with an extended consideration of the household/polis distinction, which in Arendt’s eyes is the basis for the all-important distinction between public and private.15 Following Aristotle’s discussion, she stresses the difference and hierarchy of these two spheres. The lesson to be learned from the Greeks is that the difference between public and private corresponds to the difference between freedom and necessity. Human beings are driven into the household realm by their wants and needs, by life itself. The community of the household “was therefore born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it.”16 In contrast, the polis “was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between the two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of necessities in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis.”17 Household existence—what we would call private or social existence—serves to make politics possible: “As far as the members of the polis are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the ‘good life.’”18 The Greek conception forbids us from viewing the political order as an instrumentality of the social order, as primarily concerned with the protection of life (Hobbes), the preservation of property (Locke), or the promotion of the general welfare (Bentham, Mill).
Arendt makes this Greek distinction the axis of her political theory. Like Aristotle, she is convinced that politics is an end, not a means. To think otherwise not only robs politics of its dignity, but it strips human beings of their opportunity for freedom as well. For this reason, a sense of the separateness and hierarchy of the public and private realms must be preserved at all costs. Yet it is precisely this distinction that is threatened by what Arendt refers to as “the modern rise of the social,” a phenomenon whose genealogical roots are to be found in the Christian/contemplative devaluation of the vita activa. The specificity of the political having been obscured by the contemplative tradition, the modern age witnesses the expansion without limit of a realm that is neither genuinely public or private, but a bastard hybrid.19 Human community is increasingly framed in “social” terms, which is to say that the realm of the household, its “activities, problems, and organizational devices,” gradually infiltrates the public sphere, usurping its importance and effacing the conditions and modes of action that made it political.20
The result of this “rise of the social” is that we moderns are unable to distinguish accurately between public and private realms, between the political and the prepolitical or nonpolitical. We view “the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping.”21 The consequences are dire, in that our capacity for action withers as human plurality fails to find public expression.22
This is the broad phenomenological context within which Arendt provides a comprehensive theory of political action. The distinction between public and private has been hopelessly blurred, not only in the theory, but also in the experience of the modern age. Yet Arendt wishes to discover a set of criteria that will isolate genuinely political action from its various simulacra. Such criteria can be extracted from “an analysis of those general human capacities which grow out of the human condition and are permanent” (at least so long as that condition is not changed).23 Only by identifying the irreducible differences between types of activity can our sense of the political be strengthened; only then can we recover some measure of the “clarity and articulateness” of the distinction between realms that was so self-evident to the Greeks. This is the first step to restoring dignity to politics, integrity to the public realm, and value to human plurality.
The stakes for Arendt are thus extraordinarily high. Redrawing distinctions within the vita activa is no mere exercise in the history of ideas. Most of her critics have granted the importance of this project, but have questioned whether her theory of action marks the distinctions between public and private, freedom and necessity, in a convincing, nonarbitrary way. Moreover, they ask whether the attempt to revive the Greek distinction is not doomed to failure, given the overdetermined character of contemporary political experience.24 While these are important questions, I shall not pursue them here. At present I am less concerned with Arendt’s success or failure in this project than I am with what might be called (for lack of a better word) her “method.” How does she go about recovering the distinction between public and private? What set of criteria does she employ to differentiate and rank the various types of human activity? What, in short, is the standard by which she distinguishes freedom from necessity? Where does it come from, and what conception of politics does it imply?
Aristotle concludes the passage cited above on the “final” character of the political association by noting that the end of any process, its aim, “… can only be what is best, perfection; and self-sufficiency is both end and perfection.”25 The polis, in other words, is identified by its self-sufficient quality, by the fact that it alone is capable of providing the necessities of life and fulfilling the human desire for the good life. The kind of good it supplies is not partial, but final or inclusive: it encompasses the best, most complete life for man. The “self-sufficiency” of the polis, then, is not merely organizational; rather, it refers to the status of the political association as an end in itself. The polis is not a means to the good life, or one amongst several conditions necessary for its possibility, but the arena in which this life occurs. It is for this reason that Aristotle speaks of the “perfection” of the polis. As an end in itself, it is the actuality (energeia) contained only potentially in prepolitical forms of community.
We can elicit a “natural” principle of hierarchy from Aristotle’s teleology, one rooted in the idea of development, and as applicable to the realm of human affairs as it is to the cosmos. This might be called the principle of self-sufficiency or, better, self-containedness.26 It picks out those things or actions that exist or are undertaken for their own sake; that, possessing full actuality, contain their own telos and do not stand in an instrumental or developmental relation to anything else. For Aristotle, a self-contained activity is similar to a self-sufficient community or a self-sufficient life in that it is an end in itself. Such an activity is designated as higher in rank than activities that aim at some external good, just as the polis is higher in rank than forms of association whose raison d’être lies outside them.27 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states: “We call that which is pursued as an end in itself more final than an end which is pursued for the sake of something else; and what is never chosen as a means to something else we call more final than that which is chosen as an end in itself and as a means to something else.”28
To call an activity “self-sufficient” or “self-contained,” then, implies that it is undertaken for the sake of the activity itself, and not for some end beyond it. If, indeed, “it is for the sake of the end that all else is done” (NE, 1097a), then a genuinely self-sufficient activity must have its end in performance; otherwise, the activity must be viewed as incomplete and imperfect prior to its (logically and temporally distinct) end. As Aristotle says, “… in some cases the activity is the end, in others, the end is in some product beyond the activity. In cases where the end lies beyond the action the product is naturally superior to the activity.”29 Self-sufficient activities, with their connotation of full actuality or perfection, are atelic (ateleis): “we seek to derive nothing beyond the exercise of the activity” (NE, 1176b). Examples of such activities are virtuous action and contemplation.30 Aristotle employs the term energeia (actuality) in a second sense to designate activities of this kind.
This line of thought leads to the well-known distinction between poiēsis or productive activity, on the one hand, and praxis or action, on the other. If a perfect or self-contained activity is ateleis, then it is clear that any form of making fails to fit the bill, as its guiding reality or perfection lies outside the activity itself, in the product. Production realizes itself as activity only in the achievement of some result (e.g., the shoe made by the cobbler, the building constructed by the architect): its “actuality” rests in this result. Hence, “production has an end other than itself,” but action does not, for according to Aristotle, “good action (eupraxia) is itself an end.”31 The noble actions of the virtuous man are the good; they embody this perfection rather than merely indicate or reflect it.32 Since the good of praxis is manifest in performance, Aristotle dubs it “unqualified” in contrast to the “qualified” good of the activity whose end appears only with the cessation or completion of the activity.33
Viewed in terms of relative self-containedness or perfection, praxis designates a clearly distinct order of activity in comparison to poiēsis. They are, as Aristotle says, “generically different.”34 It is precisely the self-contained quality of praxis and the “incomplete” nature of poiēsis that lead Aristotle to state categorically that “action is not production nor production action.”35 It is the clear corollary of this view that the “good life,” the life toward which human beings naturally strive and which constitutes their end or “proper function” (ergon), must be a life “of action, not production.”36 The good or distinctively human life cannot be characterized by the instrumentality that is the essence of poiēsis, since this would rob it of value. Instead, it must be what Aristotle calls “an active life,” a “life composed of the performance of virtuous and noble actions.”37 The gap between the virtuous and banausic ways of life is rooted in this ontological superiority of praxis over poiēsis. The actions of the citizen participate in, and contribute to, the good itself; the work of the artisan or laborer does not.38 The life of action, available to the free citizen, manifests or is the good in the same way that flute playing is music: performance, not a product, is the end in each case. As Arendt puts it, summarizing Aristotle, good action cannot be a means in the usual sense, for in this case “the means to achieve the end would already be the end.”39 Thus, although Aristotle can say that “the actions of good and wise men have as their aim the production of a variety of excellent results” (Politics, VII.3), strictly speaking praxis lies outside the category of means and ends.
With Aristotle’s distinction between the political and the household realms in mind, we can address the question of how Arendt approaches the parallel task of distinguishing the public from the private, the political from the nonpolitical, freedom from necessity. No reader of The Human Condition can doubt that the distinction between praxis and poiēsis, acting and making, is absolutely central. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that Arendt’s theory of political action, her critique of the tradition, and her analysis of modernity would be impossible without it. Yet, precisely because of the immense importance of this distinction, we must be careful not to take her appropriation at face value.
Typically, Arendt’s employment of the praxis/poiēsis distinction is seen as one way of reasserting the relative autonomy of the political order: the sphere of action is distinct from that of production. However, for Arendt far more is at stake. Pace Habermas, her appropriation attempts to do more than simply distinguish labor from interaction, or instrumental from practical reason. It seeks to illuminate a dimension of action and freedom that transcends altogether the Weberian problematic of rationalization and its discontents. Consider the following passage from her essay “The Crisis in Culture,” in which she describes a kind of epistemological horizon that encloses humanity as producer, as homo faber:
Fabrication … always involves means and ends; in fact, the category of means and ends derives its legitimacy from the sphere of making and fabricating where a clearly recognizable end, the final product, determines and organizes everything that plays a part in the process—the material, the tools, the activity itself and even the person participating in it; they all become means toward the end and are justified as such. Fabricators cannot help regarding all things as means to their end, or, as the case may be, judging all things by their specific utility.40
This passage and many others like it in her work indicate that Arendt has a profound suspicion of poiēsis as such, and not simply of its contemporary incarnation as technical rationality. Homo faber, she believes, has a natural tendency to generalize the fabrication experience. Motivated by a will to control or manipulate, he schematizes the world in terms of means and ends. The logic of production provides the ground of intelligibility: things make sense only as means or ends. With this “instrumentalization of the world,” Arendt argues, usefulness and utility are established as “the ultimate standards for life and the world of men.”41 All things are ultimately degraded into means, thus losing whatever “intrinsic and independent value” they may once have had.42 One primary result is that no activity, certainly not politics, can be comprehensibly regarded as “self-contained,” as performed for its own sake. The universalization of the producer’s “mode of comportment” toward the world creates the bizarre situation in which utility, the “in order to,” is systematically confused with meaningfulness, the “for the sake of.”43
Arendt does follow Weber insofar as she sees this paradoxical state of affairs as typical of modernity. Modern man is distinguished by his “trust in the all-comprehensive range of the means-end category.”44 According to Arendt, modernity is the age in which “the ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.”45 We can translate this back into Aristotelian terms by saying that the modern age has mistaken a qualified good for an unqualified one, and so destroyed the necessary conditions of intrinsic value: there is now “no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means.”46 Such pervasive utilitarianism creates the “dilemma of meaninglessness” that haunts modernity (as we shall see, Arendt’s description of the logic of this nihilistic dialectic owes much to Nietzsche). Arendt views homo faber’s confusion as resulting not only in the effacement of action’s distinguishing characteristics, but also in a devaluation of its primary condition, human plurality.
With this effacement, poiēsis appears as the paradigmatic free activity: action and making are utterly conflated. Homo faber’s “matter-of-course identification of fabrication with action” extends the sovereignty of the means-end category to the political realm: “… the mentality of fabrication has invaded the public realm to such an extent that we take it for granted that action, even more than fabrication, is determined by the category of means and ends.”47 The gap between the political and the prepolitical is obliterated. It is as if the epistemological ground for distinguishing between the public and the private, freedom and necessity, plurality and univocity, had been dissolved.
It is the conflation of acting and making under the means-end category that permits “the admission of the household and housekeeping activities to the public realm.”48 For when the debate and deliberation of plural individuals appears devoid of “function” and (thus) meaning, the way is cleared for “the life process itself” to be “channeled into the public realm.”49 “The social” subsumes the political. Society, then, is “the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”50 Society’s “conquest” of the public realm yields what Arendt calls “an unnatural growth of the natural,” a public domain completely determined by the dictates of the life process itself.51 Here, the realm of freedom has been completely submerged in that of necessity, all as the result of the “blurring” perpetuated by the instrumental mentality of homo faber.
Practically speaking, the “rise of the social” means that the “general interest” in economic self-reproduction is elevated to a position of unquestionable priority. This gives society its “monolithic,” antipluralistic character. Where this interest reigns supreme, Arendt argues, the “head of the household” is dispensed with and “the most social form of government,” bureaucracy, comes into being.52 This “rule by nobody” is the form appropriate to an advanced, complex “national household.” And, as Arendt is quick to add, “the rule of nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and tyrannical versions.”53 The domination exercised by the economy (and by the bureaucracy in the name of the economy) creates an unprecedented demand for rationalized, disciplined behavior. 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 achievement.”54
The obvious resonance of this observation with the work of Weber, Adorno, or Foucault should not distract us from Arendt’s main point, which is that society, “on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action.”55 It does so by absorbing the public realm and emasculating plurality. We are confronted, finally, not by a society of workers, of agents exercising a craft, but by a society of laborers, of masses who “consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families.”56 The “factual transformation of the whole society into a laboring society” permeates human existence with a naturelike necessity and sameness. The survival of the species may be guaranteed on “a world-wide scale,” yet humanity—human beings as public actors, as unique individuals—is threatened with extinction.57
Such are the vast and disturbing consequences Arendt sees flowing from homo faber’s unlimited instrumentalism. The recovery of the distinction between praxis and poiēsis is clearly essential to delimiting a public realm distinct from the state and the economy, and to preserving a space for freedom and the expression of plurality. I should add that the praxis/poiēsis distinction is important not simply because it enables us to distinguish “communicative” from “purposive-rational” action, as Habermas suggests; rather, its real significance is that it reminds us that action and plurality have intrinsic value; that freedom resides in the self-containedness of action. It is only by deploying the distinction between praxis and poiesis in its original, rigorous, and hierarchical form that action’s unique capacity to create meaning and to express plurality can be brought to light and the “gap” between public and private, the free and the unfree, can be revealed once again.
II. APPLYING THE CRITERION: ARENDT’S DESCRIPTIONS OF LABOR, WORK, AND ACTION
Arendt’s rearticulation of the component parts of the vita activa has drawn criticism from neo-Marxists, who have objected to the rigidity of her distinctions between labor, work, and action. What Arendt has missed, they say, is the dialectical relationship between these various activities, and between the realms of necessity and of freedom. The result is a political theory dedicated to the recovery of the public realm—to a “polis without slaves”—which ironically bars investigation of the ways the mode of production determines the form, content, and possibilities of political action. Arendt, it seems, is her own worst enemy: her Aristotelian hierarchy of activities effectively makes politics the province of the few, to the obvious detriment of her own democratic and participatory sympathies.
This line of criticism performs the valuable service of focusing our attention on how Arendt makes her distinctions, while highlighting the paradoxical consequences of her method. In his critique of Arendt, Bhikhu Parekh underlines the importance of “the degree of self-sufficiency of an activity” for her ranking of labor, work, and action.58 I want to examine Arendt’s distinctions in light of this criterion, in order to show just how integral it is to her theory of political action. Her application of it, however, is less myopic than her critics believe. Arendt does not attempt to escape the pradoxes of an autonomous politics; rather, she thinks them through to the end. From her perspective, the preservation of freedom and human plurality is at stake.
First, the distinctions themselves. Labor, according to Arendt, designates that part of human life devoted to subsistence and reproduction, to the fulfillment of the biological needs necessary for the preservation of the individual and the species. This dimension of existence fills the demands of the life process itself, and as such is under the sway of nature and necessity. Labor does not qualify as a specifically human activity, since our “metabolism with nature” (Marx) is something we share with all living things. Basing herself on the Greek view that “what men share with all other forms of animal life” ought not to be considered human, Arendt claims that “the use of the world ‘animal’ in the concept of animal laborans … is fully justified. The animal laborans is indeed only one, at best the highest, of the animal species that populate the earth.”59 (So much for the Marxian idea that labor is man’s essence, that humanity creates itself through labor.60 For Arendt, nothing could be further from the truth.)
The “pre-human” character of labor is displayed by the rhythm and “purpose” of the labor process itself. Marx’s basic description of this process in Capital was, Arendt notes, entirely correct: labor is a ceaseless cycle of production for the sake of consumption and consumption for the sake of production, for the renewal of labor power.61 In her view, Marx’s description highlights the degree to which “labor and consumption are but two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life.”62 Precisely for this reason, Arendt claims, it is a mistake to view labor as the source of value, as Marx does. For something to possess value, she argues, it must possess durability. The labor process, however, is concerned solely with the production of consumer goods, with “commodities” that meet man’s biological need to consume, to reproduce himself. Hence, “it is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of the effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.”63
From Arendt’s perspective, then, the labor process is a ceaseless cycle of production and consumption, essentially unproductive insofar as what is produced has a most transitory existence. Consumer products appear only to be immediately resubmerged in the eternally recurring life process. As a result, there is no telos to labor. Labor assimilates human beings to nature, and nature, according to Arendt, is a realm without genuine beginnings or endings:
… all human activities which arise out of necessity to cope with [the biological process of human existence and the fact of structural growth and decay] are bound to the recurring cycles of nature and have in themselves no beginning and no end, properly speaking; unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of this organism.64
The changeless, deathless repetition of nature is mirrored in the cyclical, repetitive, and ceaseless character of labor. It “never produces anything but life.”65 It is the most animal of human activities, the least self-contained, the least free.
Arendt admits that her distinction between labor and work is “unusual.”66 It is obviously foreign to the Hegelian/Marxian tradition. She believes, however, that the phenomenal evidence for such a distinction more than compensates for the lack of theoretical attention it has received. The main difference is rooted in the virtually prehuman character of labor. Work, in contrast to labor, is a distinctively human activity (although not the distinctively human activity). The distinguishing characteristic of work is its purposiveness; all work aims at the creation of a durable and lasting product, and so possesses a directionality, a teleological quality, that is utterly absent from labor.
Work makes things, from tools and chairs to art; it is essentially instrumental in character: “the process of making is itself entirely determined by the categories of means and end.”67 Moreover, “the fabricated thing is an end product in the twofold sense that the production process comes to an end in it … and that it is only a means to produce this end.”68 The achievement of a lasting result, an end, separates work from the circularity and necessity of the labor process: “To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic also distinguishes itself from all other human activities.”69
This way of distinguishing labor from work is by no means obvious: does not labor, after all, have an end (the reproduction of the individual and the species)? May we not also regard it as purposive? Arendt’s position on this issue becomes clearer if we refer, once again, to Aristotle. “All art,” Aristotle writes, “is concerned with the realm of coming to be”; thus, production “is concerned neither with things which exist or come into being by necessity, nor with things produced by nature: those have their source of motion within themselves.”70 What distinguishes work from labor is the imposed character of the end it achieves. This end—for example, the making of a table—is not dictated by nature, but is rather imposed on it. Work or fabrication, for this reason, is inherently violent: “… violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.”71
Work, then, destroys nature through its creation of artifacts. The products of work, which Arendt calls “reifications,” do not find their way back into the cycle of natural growth and decay, but endure outside it. It is homo faber, man as craftsman, who builds the world, not man as laborer.72 In Arendt’s view, work is the only genuine embodiment of a human negativity. Homo faber acts into nature and transforms it into something stable and solid, a “man-made home.” It is on the basis of this stability that a specifically human life, a life removed from the ceaseless motion of nature, becomes possible.
Left at this, the difference between Arendt (and Aristotle), on the one hand, and Marx and Hegel, on the other, would appear largely semantic. Their descriptions of the character and significance of production seem quite similar, although they have chosen to designate this activity differently. The similarity, however, is superficial, since for Arendt the negativity of work, its violence, does not connote mediation in the Hegelian sense: work does not humanize nature. Rather, her view is that work creates a nonnatural space, the “world,” which remains juxtaposed to the unarticulated positivity of nature. The realm of objectivity that human beings create is therefore not what Hegel referred to as a “second nature.”73 In Arendt’s scheme, the world created by work does not subsume nature; it stands between nature and humanity. It provides distance from the natural, a distance that is necessary if we are to know or manipulate nature: “Only we who have created this objectivity of a world of our own from what nature gives us, who have built into the environment of nature so that we are protected from her, can look upon nature as ‘objective.’”74
Keeping labor and work distinct and judging them in terms of their relative self-sufficiency are essential, then, to the establishment of a hiatus between the realms of freedom and necessity. The latter is limited by the nexus of instrumentality created by work. But the world created by artifice is not, in itself, a space of freedom; nor is the activity that creates it self-contained. Indeed, measured against this standard, the distance between labor and work, between necessity and instrumentality, diminishes. Labor’s futility means that it is devoid of meaning, while the unquestionable hegemony of the end or product in work deprives the activity itself of any independent value: the production process “is only a means to produce this end.”75 Only action, Arendt states, following Aristotle, can lay claim to intrinsic meaningfulness, to self-containedness, and hence to freedom. But what specific activities count as action, from Arendt’s point of view? Moreover, in what sense can these activities be said to “not pursue an end and leave no work behind,” exhausting “their full meaning in the performance itself”?76
These are absolutely critical questions: they lead to the heart of Arendt’s theory of political action and her paradoxical view of politics. I begin with the obvious. For Arendt, the political action and speech of citizens are, as Aristotle claimed, paradigmatic, self-contained activities. They are distinctively or fully human, whereas labor and work fall short. As Arendt puts it in one of her most fiercely Aristotelian (and anti-Hegelian) moments, in words intended to jar:
Men can very well live without laboring. They can force others to labor for them, and they can very well decide merely to use and enjoy the world of things without adding a single useful object to it; the life of an exploiter or a slaveholder and the life of a parasite may be unjust, but they are certainly human. A life without speech and without action, on the other hand … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life.77
Only the political life, the life of action and speech, is free; only the political life is human. To be human is to be a citizen, and citizenship, as Aristotle pointed out, is consonant with the exploitation or alienation of noncitizens.78 Hegel to the contrary, where there are masters and slaves, only the master can enjoy genuinely human freedom, provided that the master is a citizen and acts with other citizens. Better that some should be free on the basis of the unfreedom of others than that all should be mired in the necessity of the household.
These judgments by Arendt seem harsh and foreign, “Greek” in the extreme. The difficulty of her position, and the discomfort it elicits, increase as she attempts to specify what exactly “self-contained” political action is. For if action is (as Aristotle says) politics, not all politics is action. The standard of self-containedness imposes severe limits on what deserves to be called political, on the kind of activity fit to appear in the light of the public realm. Distinguishing action from labor and work is only part of the job; equally important is making sure that politics lives up to the name of action. The question, then, is what conception of politics and political action results from the rigorous application of the Aristotelian standard? What does a “self-contained politics” look like?
I first want to note what is excluded by this standard. Any form of “politics” that replicates relations or functions appropriate to the household is unpolitical, since it would introduce the coercive force of necessity into the realm of freedom. The distinction between praxis and poiēsis also brackets all essentially instrumental or strategic action. Wherever action is primarily purposive, defined by its results, success, or failure, it ceases to be genuinely political. Concretely, these abstract prohibitions translate into a series of denials by Arendt that most of what we take to be political is in fact worthy of the name. Neither domination nor liberation counts as genuine political action; nor should the activities of administration or representation be viewed as properly political.
Although Arendt asserts that politics may be based on limited domination, she explicitly and vehemently denies the Weberian proposition that all politics is, finally, domination.79 Domination is not political, because it imposes a monopoly on speech and action, a monopoly that destroys plurality. Where the prerogative of action is reserved by a ruler or a ruling clique, there are in effect no citizens, only subjects and their masters. The preservation of the lives and power of the rulers is the only real goal of such an association; the activity of subjects has value only as a means to this end. Politics as domination universalizes the master/slave relation, permeating all action with the necessity, inequality, and univocity characteristic of the household realm.80
One might be tempted to conclude that if domination is a specifically unpolitical form of activity, then action that overcomes it—liberating action—captures the essence of the political. Yet from Arendt’s perspective, this assumption is flawed.81 In her view, revolutionary action can be expressly political; indeed, in certain instances it has provided the modern age with a taste of the political life at its fullest and most intense. The American Revolution, the Paris Commune, the original soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Räte (workers’ councils) of the German Revolution of 1918, the Hungarian revolt: all are cases in which the overthrow of tyranny led to the founding of a space for freedom and the (tragically brief) flowering of action and speech.82 Yet, modern revolutionary action has also had an antipolitical impact, unleashing the tremendous “natural” forces bred by poverty, hunger, and exploitation. With the arrival of the poor on the political scene, Arendt asserts, the public realm and the freedom specific to it are overwhelmed by the torrent of unmet human needs released from their place of darkness. Social revolution, which elevates poverty to the rank of a “political force of the first order,” creates a situation in which freedom has to be “surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself.”83 The paradigm example that Arendt cites in this connection is the French Revolution, a revolution that justified itself not in terms of political freedom, but rather in terms of the needs of the people, their “rights” to “dress, food and the reproduction of their species.”84 Such needs are urgent, undeniable, necessary: the attempt to meet them through political means inevitably produces terror; because while politics can “transcend” nature, it cannot overcome it. As Arendt notes, “It was necessity … that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom.”
Arendt’s judgments on this issue seem exceptionally severe, bordering on the reactionary. Does she not realize that political freedom is meaningless where humanity remains enslaved to nature? The answer is, of course she does: a certain freedom from the burdens of life, from subsistence and reproduction, is a prerequisite for any real politics.85 Her point is that so long as biological necessity forms an irreducible dimension of the human condition, freedom is possible only through the strict separation of activities relating to the life process and those relating to politics. The attempt to redress what she refers to as “the Social Question” through political means succeeds only in placing all of human existence under the aspect of necessity. Marxist revolutionairies, following the model of the French Revolution, had thought it possible to overcome necessity once and for all, to liberate humanity from biological necessity tout court.86 But this goal makes natural need the sole content of revolutionary politics, and it leads not from necessity to freedom, but from necessity to violence. In Arendt’s view, the attempt to liberate humanity from biological need and/or social inequality is responsible for returning men to the “state of nature.”87
The standard of self-containedness also excludes what is, from our perspective, the stuff of everyday contemporary politics. Administration does not qualify as political action because its work, as Weber noted, is framed entirely in terms of means and ends.88 The bureaucrat or manager is concerned solely with finding the most efficient means to achieve a pregiven end. Typically, these ends are derived in accordance with the imperatives of social reproduction. Conceived of as administration or management, then, government is concerned primarily with the life process of society, with its material conditions of existence and continued smooth functioning. Since their business is “dictated by the necessities which underlie all economic process,” administration and management are, according to Arendt, “essentially non-political.”89 There can be no free or plural action where politics is reduced to the management of the “national household.” As Arendt reminds us, “where life is at stake all action is by definition under the sway of necessity.”90
The praxis/poiēsis distinction also leads Arendt to classify representation as unpolitical. Her polemical remarks about representative government are such that some have mistaken her for an elitist critic of democracy. This is not the place to deal with the details of her critique (elaborated in On Revolution) or the controversy it has stirred: we must limit ourselves to Arendt’s main point.91 In theory, she observes, the relation between those represented (the people) and their representative is entirely instrumental. The use of the representative is, in essence, a labor-saving device: to be a representative is to discharge the will of his constituents or to represent their interests in the public arena. His presence in government enables the electorate to get on with their “more urgent and more important” private business; he lifts from them the “burden” of attending to public business.92 The representative system thus has its raison d’être in facilitating the pursuit of private economic interest. Indeed, genuine representation—representation that does not transcend its purpose as “glorified messenger boy or hired expert”—is possible only on the basis of a clear-cut, concrete interest such as the material welfare and prosperity of the represented group. (Where there is a wide range of individual opinion, as in more expressly political matters, the mechanism either breaks down or winds up usurping the power of the people.93) Where the representative system functions well, then, the public is once again an instrumentality of the private, and politics becomes a means to life or, more exactly, “commodious living.” The end result, according to Arendt, is that “government has degenerated into mere administration” and “the public realm has vanished.”94 There is no space for freedom, for the articulation of plural popular opinion, or for the performance of “noble actions.” Where the representative system does not function well, it devolves into oligarchy: “what we today call democracy is a form of government where the few rule, at least supposedly, in the interest of the many.”95
Domination, liberation, administration, representation—determined by the force of necessity and destructive of plurality they are all prepolitical in character. Mistaken for the stuff of politics, they become antipolitical, denaturing the public realm by subjecting it to the life process. For Arendt, genuine political action is never a means to (mere) life, but the embodiment or expression of a meaningful life.96 However, given the exclusions outlined above, what form can such action take? In what sense can political action be said to transcend necessity and instrumentality? Arendt has an answer to this seemingly unanswerable question, one that is, to all appearances, markedly Aristotelian.
The general mode of human activity that (potentially) breaks free of the life process is speech, speech with others. Genuine political action is nothing other than a certain kind of talk, a variety of conversation or argument about public matters. Aristotle had claimed that it is the capacity for reasoned speech (logos) that distinguishes men from such other “social” creatures as bees. Speech makes man a political animal in that it enables him to ascend from mere expression of appetite or aversion, or the perception of pleasure or pain, to the expression of judgment: only human beings can articulate and share a perception of what is good and what is bad, what is honorable and what is blameworthy, and this they do through speech.97 It is this capacity of speech to raise human beings, so to speak, above life and its needs to the level of judgment that prompts Arendt to observe that “wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political animal.”98 The importance of this kind of talk, its fundamental significance for a human life, is underlined in her essay on Lessing: “… the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become human just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it becomes the object of discourse. … We humanize what is going on in the world only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking we learn to be human.”99 Although Arendt officially draws a distinction between action (deeds) and speech, it is clear that action without speech would not be action, since it fails to adequately express this capacity for judgment.
Speech is essentially political for the additional reason that it provides the basis for a noncoercive, nonviolent form of being and acting together. One point that Arendt consistently emphasizes about the polis is that, if it was ruled by anything, it was ruled by speech. Glossing Aristotle’s differentiation between political and nonpolitical types of authority, Arendt notes that “to be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion, and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis.”100 The political way of life, when contrasted to that lived in the household or the “barbaric” life outside a state, was characterized by the fact that here “speech and only speech made sense,” for “the central concern of all citizens was to talk to each other.”101
We can grant Arendt the point that speech serves to lift human beings above the level of mere need, and that it can create relations between individuals based on a kind of sharing—the “sharing of words and deeds”—rather than obedience, but in what way is political speech “self-contained”? What in the nature of such talk makes it one of those activities where “the means to achieve the end would already be the end,” where performance is the goal?102
The answer to this question is that only a specific kind of speech is in fact political, deserving the title of action. Throughout her work, Arendt focuses on deliberative speech. Political speech has its end, typically, in the making of a decision, in the choice of a course of action. Political speech, then, is nothing other than the process of debate and deliberation, the “talk and argument,” the “persuasion, negotiation and compromise” that precedes the deed.103 It is “the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading” that counts as political speech, and (thus) as politics.104 Deliberative speech, political debate, when engaged in by public-spirited citizens, is “an end in itself,” because here the quarrel over “means,” about the appropriate action to take, is always already a quarrel about ends. Deliberative speech in the political arena is never merely technical (as it is in the administrative sphere), since the “good” to be attained is articulated concretely only in the medium of debate about possible courses of action. Where all are agreed on the end, debate can take place, but it ceases to be political.105 Political debate is end-constitutive: its goal does not stand apart from the process, dominating it at every point, but is rather formed in the course of the “performance” itself. Through such deliberation, individuals rise above merely strategic considerations and engage questions that have a direct bearing on the kind of political community they see themselves as part of. Genuine political deliberation does not move at the level of “in order to,” but rather at the level of “for the sake of”: it ultimately is concerned with the meaning of our life in common.
Arendt’s attribution of inherent value to deliberative speech can be traced directly to Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle depicts practical/political deliberation as an activity valuable for its own sake. Practical wisdom (phronxsis), the primary intellectual virtue of deliberation concerned with action, is not merely concerned with the selection of means, as is technx or art. Rather, in deliberating, the man of practical wisdom, the phronimos, is more concerned with finding what is good for himself and his fellow citizens. This sets his deliberation off from the more limited, instrumental sort that is concerned with particular questions of policy. The latter type of deliberation, Aristotle calls “qualified”: when done well it brings “success in the attainment of some particular end.”106 The former sort is “good deliberation in the unqualified sense”: it does not concern itself with “what is good and advantageous in a partial sense, for example, what contributes to health or strength”; rather, it seeks “what sort of thing contributes to the good life in general.”107 The “correctness” of unqualified deliberation is measured not so much in terms of its success as in its ability to attain “what is good.”108 It does not have an end “other than itself,” as does poiēsis, for “good action is itself an end.”109 To deliberate well, as the man of practical wisdom does, is to do well.
The distinction between praxis and poiēsis thus yields a focus on deliberative speech in the work of both Arendt and Aristotle. It is the unique character of deliberative speech that serves as the basis of Arendt’s broad conception of politics. Debate “constitutes the very essence of political life,”110 because it is only through the exchange, modification, and criticism of opinion that political deliberation proceeds. The public realm, the space of freedom and action, is then primarily an arena in which this unconstrained exchange of opinion can take place. It is “the common meeting ground of all,” the place where everyone can “be seen and heard”;111 its paradigm is the assembly or agora of antiquity.112
But in order for such deliberation to occur and for such “sharing” to take place, certain preconditions are essential. First and foremost, politics as deliberative speech and common action presupposes a genuine plurality. Without plurality, without the diversity of perspectives implicit in “the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world,”113 no action in Arendt’s sense would be possible. Where this plurality has been neutered, as in the household, through force of common interest, or where it has been negated, as it has been under conditions of totalitarian domination, there political action is impossible. Under such circumstances, where a single perspective has been “prolonged” or “multiplied” to encompass all,114 there can be no end-constitutive deliberation. This is because the ends are pregiven or imposed, and the space between individuals necessary for a variety of standpoints and the formation of opinion has been compressed or eliminated altogether. This is why Arendt calls plurality, with its connotation of spatial distribution and perceptual diversity, “specifically the condition—not only the condition sine qua non, but the condition per quam—of all political life.”115
Secondly, deliberative or political speech presupposes equality. Deliberation can be unconstrained only when it takes place amongst peers; inequality introduces coercion and makes the exchange or sharing of speech false. However, in citing equality as an essential precondition of political action, Arendt is not subscribing to a doctrine of natural equality, such as that articulated by the Declaration of the Rights of Man or the Declaration of Independence. Equality is not a natural phenomenon. The Greeks knew this, and therefore created an artificial realm, the polis, in which individuals qua citizens could recognize one another on an equal footing. “The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.”116 As citizens, each had equal opportunity to be seen and heard, and to participate in deciding public affairs. Political equality is therefore inseparable from political freedom, since the latter “means the right to be a participator in government; or it means nothing.”117
A further precondition of political action understood as deliberative speech is commonality. Deliberative speech must be anchored in a shared world, since debate or disagreement concerning the direction of collective action presumes a certain minimum agreement in background judgments and practices. Where such agreement dissolves or is shattered, it is no longer possible to view the same thing from a variety of perspectives. The mediation necessary to the formation of opinions breaks down, with the result that politics (at least in the Arendtian sense) comes to a halt. Arendt attempts to convey the necessity of having such a “background consensus” by insisting upon the “worldly” character of political action. It is the world, that “relatively permanent home for man” created by homo faber, which makes politics possible by serving as “the common meeting ground of all.”
Although she believes that “sharing a world” is a precondition of politics, we should not read Arendt as promoting an “organic” form of community. For her, the essential point about the public world is, as noted above, its objectivity, its “reified” quality. This objectivity “relates and separates men at the same time.”118 The world and the things in it bring individuals together by opening a (shared) space between them. It is the presence of such a palpable “in-between” that makes plurality—a genuine diversity of perspectives on the same phenomenon—possible. Where this shared sense of the world has become attenuated—whether as a result of the anomie and loneliness of mass society, or as the result of intensely intimate forms of community (for example, early Christianity) that collapse the “in-between,” binding their members through force of love or shared belief—there politics is threatened in its very being.119
That politics is threatened by both too much and too little community leads Arendt to describe the appropriate relation between citizens as one of “friendship.” Following Aristotle, she defines civic friendship in opposition to relations of intimacy or privacy. The substance of friendship is public talk: “… for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse. They held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis. In discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it, were made manifest.”120 Friendship in the political sense is a form of partnership, in argument and in conversation. It is based on mutual respect and mutual “commitment to a shared enterprise.”121
A final precondition of properly political speech is ability. Arendt’s espousal of citizenly equality as a condition of action does not make her an egalitarian. Far from it. Just as she believes that certain activities (labor and work) and subjects (administration and economics) are not fit to appear in the public realm, she feels that not all opinions are worth sharing and not all speakers are fit to be heard. Political speech/action requires judgment (Aristotle’s “excellence in deliberation”), integrity, impartiality, and a fierce commitment to the “public thing.” As a result, the activity of politics has an irreducibly “elitist” dimension: only those of “authentically political talents” and public passion should be allowed to take up residence, so to speak, in the public realm. To demand that all participate, regardless of ability or degree of public-spiritedness, is to ensure the denaturing of political action and its corruption by extrapolitical concerns. Indeed, Arendt insists that we not delude ourselves about “the obvious inability and conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in political matters as such”; the political way of life “has never been and will never be the way of life of the many.”122
Arendt’s insistence upon a public realm that is at once both open and exclusive, in which “those who belong are self-chosen, [and] those who do not belong are self-excluded,”123 challenges “the democratic mentality of an egalitarian society.” Yet she is unapologetic. Like Aristotle, she believes that the “good life” can be pursued only by “good” or the best individuals. Entry to the political realm should not be determined according to extrapolitical criteria, such as birth or wealth, but residence there should not be indiscriminately available to all. Arendt argues for a principle of distributive justice much like Aristotle’s when it comes to the privilege of being seen and heard by one’s peers. This opportunity is properly accorded to those with the abilities or virtues specific to politics, including trustworthiness, integrity, judgment, and courage.124 Such individuals are deserving of public recognition and honor because they possess qualities that contribute directly to the vitality and freedom of the political community.125
Extracted from the vita activa by the criterion of self-containedness, political action emerges in Arendt’s work as a certain kind of talk: the end-constitutive debate and deliberation of diverse equals on matters of common concern.126 This talk occurs in the public realm, a sphere distinct from both the state and the economy, one structured by plurality, equality, commonality, and ability. The continuities with Aristotle on these aspects has already been noted; here, I simply want to underline how they contribute to what appears to be a broadly Aristotelian conception of the political.
First, Arendt and Aristotle are one in their emphasis on the primacy of participation. Politics is action for Arendt: her debt to Aristotle’s conception of citizenship, which makes participation in “judgment and authority” the criterion that “effectively distinguishes citizens from all others,” is manifest. Second, Arendt and Aristotle seem to focus on community as the foundation of action. For Aristotle, the political association is bound not simply by interests, but by shared norms, purposes, and a harmony in basic judgments. Arendt’s definition of action as “acting together” seems to imply a similar conception. Finally, both theorists have an essentially deliberative conception of politics, in which the debate and deliberation of diverse equals is granted an intrinsic value.
If the question about the form of genuine political action is answered by the appeal to such “unqualified” deliberation and debate, we are still left with the question of what such speech is actually about. The self-contained character of deliberative speech tells us nothing about the matters argued, debated, and decided upon in the public realm, as Arendt conceives it. “Household” or socioeconomic concerns are excluded; so what can the content of such talk be? This question takes us to the center of debates concerning Arendt’s highly restrictive conception of politics and political action.
III. THE IDEA OF A “SELF-CONTAINED” POLITICS
There is much in Arendt’s appropriation of Aristotle that her critics applaud. Richard Bernstein, for instance, has drawn attention to the way in which deliberation, practical wisdom, and the nature of judgment stand at the center of the Arendtian view of political action.127 This side of her thought provides a powerful weapon in the fight against the modern tendency to reduce political/practical questions to technical ones, and to grant experts an unquestioned hegemony over the collective judgment exercised by citizens. Ronald Biener and Hanna Pitkin have also highlighted this dimension of Arendt’s work from slightly different perspectives.128 But while the critics praise her conception of political action as coercion-free debate amongst equals, they balk at the transition from form to content. It is one thing to employ the criterion of self-containedness in order to isolate distinctively political modes of action; it is quite another to use this criterion to limit, and limit narrowly, what political speech can properly be about.
It is when one addresses the question of the content of political action that the “clamps” of Arendt’s Aristotelian theory of action make themselves most sharply felt. The insistence upon self-containedness results in an apparently untenable and misguided attempt to sever the public from the private, the political from the social.129 Even if one could separate these complexly intertwined strands, what would be left for citizens to talk about once such “extrapolitical” topics as wage justice, racial and gender inequality, social welfare issues, and the environment have been excluded? Hanna Pitkin expresses the frustration of many readers when she asks, “What keeps these citizens together as a body? … What is it that they talk about in the endless palaver of the agora?”130
The answer to this question is by no means obvious. How is it possible for the content of politics to be “self-contained”? How can political talk take place at a level abstracted from the “real interests” (Pitkin) of various social groups? What does political action deal with if not social problems and the demand for justice? Beyond the question of “What else is there”? one wonders whether the political and social can be distinguished at other than a merely conceptual level. One not need be a neo-Marxist in order to feel the force of Albrecht Wellmer’s observation that virtually all our social problems are, at some level, also political problems.131 Pitkin seems justified in decrying the “curious emptiness of content” that characterizes Arendt’s image of politics and the public realm.
I shall return to these objections. For the moment, I want to concentrate on the paradoxical quality of Arendt’s notion of a political action that, apparently, has no extrapolitical referent. Here it is crucial to see (1) that Arendt does want to limit the content of political talk to specifically political matters; and (2) that she does in fact have an answer to the charge of “emptiness of content.” The answer, perhaps, is not totally satisfactory, and Arendt tends to obscure things by providing different versions. Nevertheless, she believes that it is both possible and necessary to limit the scope of properly political speech. The value of action, plurality, and the public sphere itself is at stake. For this reason Arendt, if anything, is even more rigorous than Aristotle in drawing out the implications of a “self-contained” praxis.132
If political action is to be valued for its own sake, then the content of political action must be politics “in the sense that political action is talk about politics.”133 The circularity of this formulation, given by George Kateb, is unavoidable. It helps if we make use of an analogy that Kateb proposes, the analogy between such a purely political politics and a game. “A game,” writes Kateb, “is not ‘about’ anything outside itself, it is its own sufficient world … the content of any game is itself.”134 What matters in a game is the play itself, and the quality of this play is utterly dependent upon the willingness and ability of the players to enter the “world” of the game. The Arendtian conception of politics is one in which the spirit animating the “play” (the sharing of words and deeds) comes before all else—before personal concerns, group interests, and even moral claims. If allowed to dominate the “game,” these elements detract from the play and from the performance of action. A good game happens only when the players submit themselves to its spirit and do not allow subjective or external motives to dictate the play. A good game, like genuine politics, is played for its own sake.
Illuminating as this analogy might be, it obviously fails to do justice to the stakes of politics, and to the seriousness that attends the “play” in this realm.135 Political action entails great “responsibilities, sacrifices and dangers”; it is, in addition, far more of a response to events than any game.136 Most important, the analogy is inadequate because it begs the question of what political action and speech is actually about. While it may give us a sense of the spirit appropriate to political action, we are still at a loss to describe how politics is or can be about itself.
The paradox is resolved, at least partially, if we look to the examples Arendt gives of exemplary political speech. These examples—the speeches of Athenian democracy, the debates attending the founding of the American republic, the deliberations of revolutionary councils, certain acts of civil disobedience—all revolve around the creation and preservation of the public sphere. Genuinely political speech concerns itself with “the creation of the conditions that make [politics] possible or with the preservation of those conditions.”137 This is the sense in which politics is or can be the content of politics. For the Greeks, such speech typically concerned the defense of the polis and its distinctive way of life against its neighbors, as in Pericles’ Funeral Oration. For moderns, political speech has centered on the creation and maintenance of an institutional arrangement or framework of laws that serves to articulate and protect the public realm. It has centered, in other words, on the creation of a constitution, which Arendt understands to be less an instrument of limitation than a positive “system of power.”138
According to Arendt, a constitution is an agreement by means of which a group of individuals constructs a space for action and for “tangible” freedom. Thus, the “foundation of a body politic,” its constitution, is what “guarantees the space where freedom can appear.”139 The essential function of a constitution is not simply the safeguarding of rights and liberties, important as these are, but the creation and preservation of such a space. Understood as the creed of limited government and nothing more, “constitutionalism” ceases to be political in Arendt’s sense. The act of founding a body politic and the debates and deliberations that precede the founding are evidences of exemplary political speech precisely because they concern the “creation of conditions”—for example, the guarantee of rights, the distinction between public and private, the institutionalization of popular participation—that transform political action into a relatively permanent way of being together. A space for action may “come into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predate and precede all formal constitution of the public realm,”140 but it fails to become “a house where freedom can dwell” until this constitution takes place.141 The speech of the revolutionary councils—of the French sociétés populaires, the soviets, the German workers’ and soldiers’ councils of 1918—is exemplary because this kind of speech enacted a new constitution of power, a people’s constitution, so to speak. In the council system, the system of power not only created a space for action, but it was that space for action.142 It becomes clear that for Arendt, as for the Greeks, “constitution” denotes less an institutional structure than a peculiarly political way of life.143
It would, of course, be self-defeating to hypostatize the moment of founding as the manifestation of genuinely political speech. The understanding outlined above demands that action be a continuing possibility. Thus, Arendt’s understanding of what counts as political action expands to include all speech that serves to preserve a constitution from internal or external erosion.144 In the case of the council system (where the system of power and the space for freedom coincide) or the agora, there is maximum opportunity for such speech. In representative democracy, on the other hand, the opportunity for deliberation and action tends to be limited. Civil disobedience, however, provides ordinary citizens with an additional outlet, a point Arendt makes forcefully in her essay on the subject. Unlike Thoreau, Arendt does not view civil disobedience as an expression of individual conscience. Its recent American manifestations (the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement) are viewed, instead, as exemplary forms of acting together—of political action.145
Genuinely political talk is concerned, then, with “preserving and promoting a way of acting and the values embodied in it.”146 This is the gist of its self-referential character. One must be careful, however, not to reify the constitution into an ideal entity separate from the system of power it creates and the modes of action it makes possible. It would be wrong, for example, to see the constitution as laying down a set of transcendent moral principles to guide the life of the political association. This way of construing the “foundational” character of the constitution merely succeeds in reducing all action to repetition; it separates the content of politics from the actual performance of political action. The implied or explicit constitutional concern of genuine political action hardly means that deliberation or debate is subject to a static, given set of intentions or ends that it must seek to uphold. The immanent ends of a political association, Arendt wants to argue, are not of this nature; their presence is rather a function of a continuing process of appropriation and transformation.
The structure of political action is one in which debate and disagreement reflect an overarching commitment to a particular public world and the mode of being together that it makes possible. It is therefore less a question of what is being debated, or how conservative or radical the outcome, so long as the participatory spirit remains and citizens “share a commitment to a mode of being together that recognizes and realizes the capacity for freedom in all individuals.”147 Genuine political talk must always, somehow, be concerned with the creation or preservation of this framework. But beyond this, the content of political action is neither given nor fixed, but generated in the course of performance. A constitution exists, as Kateb suggests, less for the realization of certain ends than for “indefinite future possibilities of political action … the frame is changed by what it contains—by the experience it shapes and accommodates.”148
This rendering of the content of political action returns us to the charge of vacuity leveled by Arendt’s critics. In his largely sympathetic reading of her work, Habermas praises Arendt for distinguishing between a genuinely political conception of power—power as the result of agreement and acting together—and the strategic model so often promoted by the tradition.149 Yet Arendt’s admirable attempt to separate communicative from instrumental or strategic relationships generates an unacceptably narrow view of politics, one “that is not applicable to modern relationships.”150 If her conception of politics is to be critically useful, it must be expanded to take into account socioeconomic relationships, an irreducible dimension of politics in the modern world.151
If Habermas’s characterization of Arendt’s “narrowing of the political” is correct, her political theory has a fatal weakness. Indeed, Richard Bernstein charges that the distinction between the social and the political engenders self-contradiction at the heart of her theory. For how are we to take seriously a political theorist who insists that “each person must be given the opportunity” to participate, but who turns a blind eye to the problem of how to create, through political means, the conditions that would help guarantee this opportunity?152 Is not the narrowness of her conceptual structure the primary obstacle separating her view of political action from the realities of contemporary politics?
Arendt’s conception of the content of politics is, as I have argued, deliberately exclusive. In fact, the desire to procure the “utmost possible autonomy” for politics is the driving force behind her thought on action.153 Yet this need not render her conception irrelevant, or bar the possibility of revision. However, one must avoid exaggerating the degree to which Arendtian action is or can be “about” socioeconomic matters.154
Several issues need to be addressed in this regard. First, there is the obvious point against Habermas that Arendt’s concept of action does not aim at descriptive generality: its critical power derives precisely from its foreignness and its oppositional quality. True, her notion of action and the distinction between action and violence are not much help in isolating the more sophisticated forms of coercion (for example, ideological distortion, manipulation by media) that often dominate our public realm. But insofar as the Habermasian project centers on identifying the criteria necessary for distinguishing genuine from de facto consensus, its aim is much different from Arendt’s.155 The “adequacy” of Arendt’s concept of action ought to be judged according to its ability to distinguish the public realm from other spheres, and its capacity to preserve the fundamental phenomenon of plurality.
Second, the charge of self-contradiction that Bernstein levels against Arendt fails to hold water. Yes, to claim that “every person must be given the opportunity to participate in politics transforms the question of society,” in that “it means we must honestly face the issue of how we can achieve or strive to realize a society where everybody has the opportunity to engage in politics.”156 But, strictly speaking, the issues raised by the goal of greater social justice are prepolitical. One needs to distinguish between the minimum conditions necessary for action and the achievement of genuinely equal access to the public realm (something no society has yet realized). Arendt sides with liberals against social democrats in viewing constitutionally guaranteed political rights as more fundamental than the abstract goal of social justice. Equality of citizenship, rather than greater equality of condition, is her primary concern. The relationship between the two, in her view, is a good deal looser than Bernstein suggests.
Third, Arendt’s conception of praxis, while restrictive, is somewhat more flexible than Habermas, Bernstein, or Pitkin believe. When pressed by critics on the issue of her excessively narrow definition of “the political,” Arendt indicated that (formal restrictions aside) her conception was “open” in two ways. First, she admitted that the content of political action—what citizens talk about—varies historically and culturally. Political talk is about the world. However, Arendt uses “world” in a very particular sense: the world is that “in-between” that “relates and separates men at the same time.”157 It is coextensive with “the public” in the broad sense of this term: “that which is common to us all of us.”158 The content of this world or this “in-between” necessarily “varies with each group of people.”159 As Arendt put it in response to a mystified query from Mary McCarthy:
Life changes constantly, and things are constantly there to be talked about. At all times people living together will have affairs that belong in the realm of the public—“are worthy to be talked about in public.” What these matters are at any historical moment is probably utterly different. For instance, the great cathedrals were the public space of the Middle Ages. The town halls came later. And there perhaps they had to talk about a matter which is not without interest either: the question of God. So what becomes public at every given period seems to be utterly different.160
This response relativizes the “proper content” of the public realm and political action without abdicating the various qualifications outlined above. Arendt’s response may seem evasive, but it is in fact quite consistent with her “official” position. It is clear that any frame for action must possess certain formal qualities: it must create a space of artificial equality from which violence and coercion have been largely excluded, and in which citizens have the opportunity to make their voices heard. It is also clear that politics must be about itself, in the sense that its primary concern must always be the health of this public sphere and the particular way of being together it makes possible. The self-contained quality of politics finds its chief expression in these dimensions of form and content. However, the objects of political speech—the worldly things that fill this public space—will vary and be subject to contestation. This is not to say that because our public space is filled by socioeconomic issues, these are or should be its proper content. Rather, it is to say that the question of content (understood now in the sense of the worldly referent of action) is secondary to the spirit and formal structure of political action. Certain kinds of concerns undermine the “care for the world,” which, according to Arendt, animates all genuinely political life.
The “revisions” Arendt proposes thus do not seriously challenge her original notion of the properly political content of action. Arendt continues to apply the distinction between praxis and poiēsis, a distinction that bars coercive or essentially instrumental modes of action from the public sphere, as well as “household” or administrative matters. Her exclusionary strategy appears less strange if we recall the motive behind her theory of action. Arendt wanted, above all, to distinguish the life of action from the other activities that constitute the vita activa; moreover, she wanted to affirm the endless debate, deliberation, and plurality that characterize the bios politikos. By using Aristotle’s distinction to focus on the atelic character of political action, she was able to free action from domination by the socioeconomic realm and thus restore, at least in principle, the inherent value of the plural realm of opinion.