The World Turned Upside Down
Arendt on Marx
In the Acknowledgments at the end of The Human Condition (p. 327), Hannah Arendt explains a bit of the backstory of the book, published in 1958. In 1953, she had given a lecture series at Princeton on “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought.” In 1956, at the University of Chicago, she had given another series of lectures, “Vita Activa.” It helps to keep these origins in mind when trying to make sense of the main objectives book, especially the first three chapters.
Here are three foundations:
Arendt is writing a critique of Karl Marx (see p. 79, the opening line of ch. 3). Specifically, she’s writing about Marx on labor.
She’s thinking from the standpoint of the tradition of political thought. This tradition includes a) at least two phases of Greek thought, that coming before and that coming after the rise of political philosophy in Plato and Aristotle; b) the Roman inheritance from the Greeks; c) the impact of Christianity in the medieval era; and then d) much happening in modernity. The tradition culminates in Marx and what he wrought. He brought the philosophical tradition to an end, having turned everything upside down and inside out — yet in continuity with the tradition. We’re now in new territory.
Arendt adopts the medieval Latin vita activa as the central rubric for three kinds of human activity, which make up the human condition: labor, work, and (political) action.
The top level taxonomic divide distinguishes the vita activa from its counterpart, the equally Latin and medieval vita contemplativa — that latter having successfully pushed political action to the “lower” side of this divide. For the Greeks, who came before in the tradition, the top divide was not between these two even though Aristotle’s bios politikos and bios theoretikos are what the Latin translates directly into the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. For the Greeks, these are on the same side as the two high forms of human life, the free forms, standing opposed to the non-free lives of slaves, craftsmen, and merchants (see my earlier post). For Aristotle, the political life retains its status on the side of the free and fully human. Following him, Arendt’s goal is to re-elevate the vita activa back into prominence, which she does by working to clarify the three types of human activity in her own way: labor in ch. 3, work in ch. 4, action in ch. 5. All is in conversation with Marx and with the long tradition of political thought going before, that he culminated and reversed.
That’s pretty complicated in its own right.
But another mystery begins immediately in chapter 2 on “The Public and the Private Realm.” Arendt seemingly goes far afield at the very beginning, to address a completely different tripartite division: the private, the public, and the social. Do these correspond to labor, work, and action? Sort of.
Labor definitely corresponds to the private. It’s what humans do hidden in the household to produce the consumable goods necessary to sustain life, both life as such and the life of the species through fertility and reproduction. Private labor is related to slavery and violence, because necessity is a compulsive and coercive force of nature.
Action definitely corresponds to the public. The paterfamilias, who is absolute tyrant ruling over an ordered household, finds freedom by leaving the household and rising from the private realm to the public realm, where he engages in politics amongst his peers.
In contrast to those pairings (labor in private, political action in public), the “rise of the social,” which happens especially in modernity, with some vague hints in medieval times, is bad according to Arendt (section 6 in ch. 2). The world, on the other hand, related to work, is a really good thing. (The definitive biography of Arendt, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, is subtitled: “For Love of the World.”) The world — a technical term — is made up of the durable, non-consumable things that outlast human life spans, things that are fabricated through productive human work, not labor. (Labor makes non-durable consumables.) The world, for Arendt, is comprised of everything that is held in common, not privately, and it provides the public place where political action happens. Arendt’s favorite metaphor is the table around which political actors sit to converse and debate.
The social thus does not correspond to work or world-making in any clear way, unlike the private and labor or the public and action. It’s decidedly not the public. It’s not the world. It’s something else, a mass phenomenon and a reduction of humans to statistically measurable crowds(?) of quasi-ordered but otherwise homogenous beings agglomerated into an “economy” or marketplace.
Reading The Human Condition can thus be pretty confusing from the outset, because the taxonomy gets messy.
The clue, I think, to making sense of the “rise of the social” for Arendt is the unprecedented expansion of the (dubious) qualities of private households into a wider and ultimately all-inclusive sphere — again, not the (good) public realm, but what comes to take its place. The public as the traditional place of the political, the realm of free human action, is displaced by the ballooning social, and this is what makes the social bad.
Note that an “economy” by definition is the place where the law of the household — the nomos of the oikos — reigns supreme.
Marx was the philosopher of political economy. Politics becomes economics. It is displaced by economics. It is reduced to economics. Free humans engaging in political action, the capstone activity of the vita activa, is lost.
For Arendt, this means that the entire tradition has been turned on its head.
It seems to me, Arendt's concepts of labour, work, and action function in the context of the polis and become disfunctional in the context of modernity where the patriarchal family has disintegrated together with the city state, mass culture is dominant, and economies at scale, rather than ethical actions carried out by free citizens, guide politics.
Marx's analysis, on the other hand, seems to be understood by the author himself as a scientific enterprise aiming at uncovering the mechanisms underlying the working of modern capitalism and how capitalism is likely or even bound to unfold in the future given those mechanisms.
While the two projects focus on different realms of reality, they might complement each other in the sense that Marx picks up from where Arendt's more existential ontological examination leaves off (theoretically, not temporally, of course) and zooms into the ballooning dimension of work as it engulfs everything else, not least human creativity and uniqueness, which can hardly emerge without the boundaries of a world where free citizens mutually recognise each other through what they say and do.
As to the issue of how Arendt's model can be used to inform what we could do in the present or how we could rethink a different future, I'm not sure, not least because the city-state of ancient Greece where the 3 dimensions worked in sync is no more and can hardly be restored.
However, Arendt makes us acutely aware of the loss of the realm of freedom and action we're undergoing, that which makes us authentically human, and consequently of the existential risk involved, ie, that of losing our humanity.
She's not telling what we can do, but she's certainly alerting us to the horrors of doing nothing.
I'm having some difficulty absorbing the ideas you're describing here, Tracy. I think a big part of it is, although I've often told myself that I should dig into Arendt's writing, I'm not sure I'm that motivated to understand the distinctions she's making here between labor, work, and political action. I'm confused how these relate, not to Marx (whose ideas I'm also a bit skeptical about digging deeply into) but to some type of working model of how to deal with the present?