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Not li fe but the wor ld is at stake:Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age

of the socialPat r ic ia Owens

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a Depart ment of Inter nati onal Relat ions, Universit y of Sussex,Bright on, UK

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cit izenship i n t he age of t he social, Cit izenship St udies, 16:2, 297-307

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THINKING CITIZENSHIP SERIES

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship

in the age of the social

Patricia Owens*

Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

This article evaluates Hannah Arendts contribution to thinking citizenship in light ofher controversial account of the modern rise of the social. It argues that Arendts

writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as

an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration

on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendtsstory about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid ofpolis and oikos,a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.

Keywords: Arendt; citizenship; social

The emergence of society the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, andorganizational devices from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the

public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also

changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for thelife of the individual and the citizen. (Arendt 1958, p. 38)

Hannah Arendt is widely celebrated as a theorist of radical democratic citizenship. Few

others have better evoked the intrinsic value, dignity, and non-instrumental character of

political life. Her writing on the virtues of political agonism and action-in-concert with

plural others has been attractive to critical theorists, civic republicans, cosmopolitans, and

post-structuralists alike. In contrast, few of even her most sympathetic readers can bring

themselves to defend much about her writing on the social. Arendt famously offered an

historical account of the modern rise of social realm and its basic ontology as a scaled-up

form of household, a deeply problematic hybrid of public and private, polis and oikos.

Capitalism and modern state administration inverted the traditional ordering of the activelife; the bourgeois concern with labour, productivity and life itself necessitated a

denigration of care for the public world and political action for its own sake. The

protection and sustenance of life processes through social interventions became the

central function of national and now increasingly global forms of governance. Like

the domestic realm of the ancient Greek oikos, the modern social realm would be

dominated by the rhythms of the life process, but these were no longer confined to the

household; they burst out into the public realm perverting its purpose. The political was

reduced to a function of the social; politics became government administration thus

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*Email: p.owens@sussex.ac.uk

Citizenship Studies

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depriving moderns of the fully human life only found in civic engagement and full

membership in the public, political world.

Needless to say, Arendts claims have been controversial. She was accused of creating

a false distinction between the social and the political, neglecting economy and social

justice, and gendering both public and private realms. The problem is not merely thatArendt defended thinking in terms of publicprivate categories in her indictment of the

modern social realm, but it would seem that their original patriarchal content could also be

found in her work (Elshtain 1981, Pitkin 1998). It is not that Arendt consciously defended

patriarchy, but that her symbolic gendering of labour and apparent praise of the misogynist

Greeks reinforced the gender binary and relations of power. Arendts contrast between the

freedom of political action and the necessities of the life process, essential to

understanding what is so problematic about the social, left her open to the related charge of

desiring a pure politics in which economy and life necessity are excluded. According to

Benhabib (1996, pp. 142, 213), Arendt is afflicted by a phenomenological essentialism

that holds that every type of human activity has a proper place and can only reveal its

essence properly in that place. On this account, we need to abandon Arendts emphasis on

the autonomy and uniqueness of the political in favour of a more deliberative public space

in which the distinction between the social and political can wither away. It has become

commonplace to the point of cliche to condemn Arendts claims regarding the social

before proceeding to praise some other aspect of her thought, usually those broadly related

to political citizenship.

While some criticisms of Arendt in this regard are more persuasive than others,

especially in relation to gender, few are effectively targeted at what is essential and most

important about her writing on the social. Political theorists tend not to understand

Arendts argument as fundamentally historical, rather than primarily normative and

analytical. While the analytical and normative loom large in Arendts work, her mostsignificant insights into the social concern its historical basis and the constraints this

imposes on politics, properly conceived. Understood historically, the distinction between

social and political does not primarily correspond to different issues and institutions as if

economic justice and civil society were social, while constitutional debate and state

institutions were political (Benhabib 1996, p. 139). The social already represents the

merging of what the modern age (not Arendt) defined as economic (capitalist exchange)

and political (state administration). Arendt did indeed contrast political freedom and life

necessity, but the distinction is not grounded on a separation of economics and politics

(the bourgeoisies separation, not Arendts). It is based on the difference between life as

the necessary and cyclical processes associated with our mortal bodies, and world as theartificial and potentially more enduring, even immortal, space for politics. The social

cannot be synonymous with all labour-like, life-sustaining activities per se. If the social

realm is a relatively recent and problematic modern invention, as Arendt argued, then it

makes no sense to assert that all life processes should be contained therein. In other words,

social and political are not equivalent concepts. The former is a historically specific

formation associated with capitalist government; it is the realm where the life process has

established its own public domain (Arendt 1958, p. 47). The political is a fundamental

human activity not reducible to capitalism or the nation-state.

What exactly was the social realm, according to Arendt, and how did its rise pervert

the possibilities for meaningful citizenship? The social realm emerged in the late

eighteenth-century as the domain in which the life processes of ever-larger populations

were administered by the state in the interests of order and capital accumulation. The

capitalist market expanded through government action and a new distinction between

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statepublic and privatised economy emerged. The social formed as an intermediary

between these newly defined public and private domains. The social question, so

controversially analysed by Arendt in On revolution ([1963] 1970), was an expression of

the conflict between claims of meaningful political citizenship and the reality of poverty

in the age of accumulation. Kirstie McClure (2007, p. 101) has rightly argued thatthe question of the social question arises not as an analytical/conceptual problem, but as apractical issue within the broader historical phenomenon of the rise of the social and, moreparticularly, in contingent relation to the diverse administrative apparatuses adopted bymodern states to manage, address, or otherwise cope with the vicissitudes of the process ofaccumulation.

What are these administrative apparatuses and how best to account for the ontology of the

social realm? As noted above, Arendt understood the social as a peculiar hybrid of polis

and oikos, a scaled-up form of public housekeeping. Although it is implied by some of her

critics, Arendt never presented the household, in whatever form, as somehow divorced of

relations of power and beyond normative judgement. In other words, critics have focused

on what Arendt had to say about citizenship in the Greek polis at the expense of her

account of the oikos and its oppressions. Rather than celebrating the Greeks and Athenian

citizenship, Arendt was illuminating forms of domination in modern mass society through

the horrors of subordination in the classical household. So problematic about the modern

rise of the social, among other things, was that the model of the patriarchal family was

transfigured onto collective life as a whole, except that the despotism of the father was

replaced by the anonymous rulership of the bureaucrat. This short contribution to the

Thinking Citizenship series addresses this important element of Arendts story, the rise of

the social as a form of large-scale public housekeeping and why it was so devastating for

meaningful citizenship. Arendt celebrated the spontaneous, initiatory ability of a plurality

of actors of citizens to bring into being something new. It was this revolutionarycapacity to create new beginnings that was most endangered by the relentless

administration of the social as a substitute for political action.

Transformations of the household

A basic feature of human existence, households are organisations in which the life

processes of members are reproduced and, crucially, in which membership is not confined

to houses or kinship relations (Peterson 2010). Life processes are closely related to the

biological and labouring activities of the human body, humans as animal laborans. They

are necessary, repetitive, and cyclical and tend to involve violent subordination (Arendt1958, Terada 2011). Under modern capitalism, Arendt argued, the organisation and

management of life processes underwent a major transformation: they were emancipated

from their containment within the classical or medieval household. The modern social

realm emerged when the life processes of populations acquired their own public domain,

that is, when activities and relations of dependency once rooted in ancient and feudal

households became a matter of statepublic regulation and administration. The expansion

of capitalist markets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a new set of

distinctions between state-administrative (public) power and (privatised) economy. This

hybrid emerged because although public administration was not directly concerned with

the productive economy, the new private sphere of economic reproduction was of

enormous public (state) relevance (also see Habermas [1962] 1991). As distinct from

polis and oikos, politics and economy, society became conceptualised and acted on as the

mass or multitude of households (Myrdal 1953, Arendt 1958). This section briefly

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analyses the concept and changing structure of households through transformations of the

publicprivate distinction so central to Arendts conception of citizenship.

Where the modern, bourgeois household emerged primarily as a reproductive and

consumer unit, the ancient oikos was the fundamental building block of the classical polis.

The private space of the oikos and the public political realm were recognised asculturally distinct but clearly integrated in important and complimentary ways. Household

activities were arranged in accordance with the personal ranking of members master,

wife, child, servant, slave each understood to have specific tasks and responsibilities

(Booth 1993). The gendered, parental and master slave relations between household

members appeared natural and inevitable. The basic activities related to maintaining life

the endlessness and repetitiveness of the labouring process were not considered

distinctively human, but limitations imposed by nature on all animal life and which stood

in stark contrast to what was conceived as the unpredictability and extraordinariness

of political action (Arendt 1958, pp. 2837). Women and slaves as not fully capable of

expressing their humanity by participating in polis life were forced through violence to

provide life-reproducing functions for the benefit of free (and thus considered fully

human) male citizens. They attended to the repetitive and cyclical needs of life. It was of

enormous significance to Arendt that the basic management of life processes, the primary

activity of the oikos, was a realm of violence, necessity, hierarchy and privation.

The household was the building block of the polis not only in terms of reproducing the

life of citizens but also in the moral formation of citizens able to participate in military and

political affairs. The political freedom of the citizens, Arendt argued, required the

institution of slavery and the practice of war. Slavery was not simply a part of Greek

political life; it was a necessary condition. Power was organised to facilitate the organised

solidarity of the masters over the slaves (Arendt 1972, p. 149, 2002, p. 285). From the

perspective of the all-male citizenry, the chief merit of their political organisation was thatit enabled citizens to act as bodyguards to one another against slaves and criminals so that

none of the citizens may die a violent death (Xenophon in Arendt 1972, p. 149f). This

solidarity was an integrative, constitutive struggle. Citizens banded together to protect

themselves against those whom they oppressed. Limiting access to the public realm

restricted the nature and content of matters discussed, which in turn reinforced existing

gendered and other hierarchies. In other words, the polis was functionally dependent on

the oikos, but the experience of the oikos was also required to give meaning to polis life

and its distinctive political and military activities. They were distinct but inseparable.

This interpretation was new with Aristotle. In The Statesman, Plato made no distinction

between the constitution of the polis and of a large household. The best model for politicalrulership was the hierarchal, patriarchal oikos; the same body of knowledge covered both

domains (Arendt 1958, p. 223n). Aristotle distinguished more sharply between polis and

oikos, conceiving household management as a form of expertise for the acquisition of life

necessities as distinct from political action, more accurately reflecting polis conditions:

oikonomikos was a means to higher ethical and political ends determined by the free

citizenry. Thepolis was not an expanded oikos. Where the former required a multiplicity of

equal actors and opinions to thrive, the later was hierarchical in which one opinion was

enforced and one interest prevailed. The satisfaction of basic material needs and, by

extension, all economic activities, were not ends in themselves. The household economy

was subordinated to the wider (though also restricted) political community and the demands

of civic virtue. For example, rather than the basis of the accumulation of ever-greater wealth,

property was understood as a secure private enclosure from which men were able to enter

into the common public world. This vision of a largely use-value, needs-oriented economy

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was attractive to Karl Marx, who, like Arendt, commented favourably on the democratic

possibilities of the Greek model if shorn of its many hierarchies.

Conflict and competition between Greek city-states contributed to the decline of the

ancient polis and associated household model. With the collapse of the late Roman Empire

after the Germanic invasions, the slave mode of production was replaced by feudalism;slaves became dependent tenants. The basis of feudal authority in medieval Europe was

the ability of lords to appropriate feudal rents from peasants. Production was organised

around subsistence agriculture and associated relations of dependency in a self-contained

household economy (Habermas 1991, p. 15). The village community, in the words of

Ferdinand Tonnies (1955, p. 68), even where it encompasses also the feudal lord, is in its

necessary relation to the land like one individual household. The common land was the

object of household activity and care and is intended partly for the collective purposes of

the unit itself, partly for the identical and related purposes of its members. The

organisation of the feudal household was not simply the underlying foundation of the wider

political community; private and public were fused into one. Production,

reproduction, and politics (as domination) were combined. Monarchs were not in a

position to directly govern within strictly defined territories; control over violence was

diffuse. In Arendts (1958, p. 29, fn14) words,

Within the feudal framework, families and households were mutually almost independent, sothat the royal household, representing a given territorial region and ruling the feudal lords as

primus inter pares, did not pretend, like an absolute ruler, to be the head of one family. Themedieval nation was a conglomeration of families; its members did not think of themselvesas members of one family comprehending the whole nation.

Jurisdiction was dispersed among a number of overlapping actors in a system of shifting

relations of hierarchy and subordination.

Feudal arrangements were transformed when their underlying economic and militaryunderpinnings evolved. Small peasant property ownership and serfdom were destroyed

with the forcible expropriation of the peasant classes (Arendt 1958, p. 66). Proudhons

dictum that property is theft, Arendt (1958, p. 67) wrote, has a solid basis of truth in the

origins of modern capitalism. The revolutions in the management of life processes fed

into changes in the systems of public authority. While property was privatised and

commercial relations were understood as occurring in civil society among private

individuals, significant elements of private exchange became the concern of the

increasingly powerful statepublic realm. Commodity exchange burst out of the confines

of the household (Habermas 1991, p. 28), but accumulation itself would adopt many of

the characteristics of the life process that had previously been contained in the ancientoikos: it would constantly expand its reach in a potentially never-ending process; an

unnatural growth of the natural (Arendt 1958, p. 47). The reproduction of life was no

longer a matter primarily left to the household, as in the classical oikos or medieval manor.

It required public regulation and protection in the interests of what would be conceived of

as society as a whole. With capitalism, Arendt (1958, p. 47) argued, the labour process

was liberated . . . from its circular monotonous recurrence [in ancient and medieval

households] and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have

in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world.

Out of the Oikos

Why did capitalism require the emergence of a separate social realm? What does this

distinctive form of space and mode of governance mean for citizenship? As outlined in

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The human condition, the rise of the social was closely associated with the historical

transformation of private wealth into capital and the commoditisation of productive

processes, especially human labour. The new private realm of economic exchange

assumed public significance. The exchange of labour for a wage would now occur in a

newly conceived private realm, yet the circumstances of capitalist exchange theworking of the market and the conditions of labour were a matter of state concern and

intervention. What we called earlier the rise of the social, wrote Arendt (1958, p. 68),

coincided historically with the transformation of the private care for property into a public

concern. The new system of accumulation again transformed the meanings of public and

private. In particular, the functions of both the political realm and the domestic

household dramatically narrowed. Civil society, distinguished from the state, would be

comprised of two different forms of privacy: capitalist exchange and the intimate sphere of

the family. Political citizenship was redefined, narrowed, and subordinated to capitalist

economy.

The new public realm was conceived as a separate and distinct sphere of government

action; administrative structures associated with the state became the new narrow

conception of politics. Political action was not conceived as an end in itself; government

was established as the means to the end of protecting liberty, national defense and private

property. In Arendts (1961, p. 150) words, government, which since the beginning of the

modern age had been identified with the total domain of the political, was considered to be

the appointed protector not so much of freedom as of the life process, the interests of

society and its individuals. Rather than directly participate in all public affairs, bourgeois

subjects participated primarily to protect private interests. Rather than achieving ones full

and equal humanity through speaking and acting with ones peers, the private person in the

bourgeois household was the definition of the human with moral rights. The capacity for

speech and action was not what defined humans as distinct from other animals. The idealindividual was the property-owning businessman and head of household, an image taken

to define the human being as such. The intimate household became the sphere of privacy

and personal freedom. The management of life processes was no longer rooted in the

classical oikos or medieval household economy. However, there are several ways in which

the public organisation of the new system could be understood in terms of an expanded

oikos; social regulation would extend the activities, problems and organizational devices

of the patriarchal household (Arendt 1958, p. 38).

Formally private activities, mentalities and forms of oppression associated with the

oikos did not disappear with modern capitalism and the nation-state; they were

transformed. Labour had been redefined as the source of wealth; it needed to be properlyand rationally organised for the benefit of a new unified object: the national society as a

whole (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). How best to think of this (fictitious) subject? Political

economy emerged as the new scholarly and practical field examining the scientific laws

regulating economy in the interests of society. Its terminology relied on the analogy

between the individual running of a household for the benefit of its members and social

(or national) housekeeping. There was a need to assume a willing subject who

coordinates economic activities on behalf of society that, in Arendts (1958, p. 47-8fn)

words, was conceived as one single subject, the fulfillment of whose needs [were] then

subdivided by an invisible hand among its members. As Gunnar Myrdal (1953, p. 141)

put it, The very attempt to study society from the economic point of view makes it

necessary to assume such a unified subject and to determine it scientifically in order to

derive the general interest or the general welfare. Rather than in the interests of the

despotic patriarch, government planning, administration and economic decision-making

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were legitimated in terms of social and nationalist discourses. In an adaptation of the

long-standing tradition of accounting for government structure in terms of the family, the

nation-state would be conceived as one family with a unity of interests; society itself

would be the primary protector of the needs of the individual. Even with less organic, more

civic, forms of nationalism the state could appear as a neutral arbiter between kinsmen, abenign body that could administer the rule of law; the collective of families economically

organised into the facsimile of one superhuman family is what we call society, and its

political form of organization is called nation (Arendt 1958, p. 29).

The classical bourgeois public sphere of civil society would eventually be subsumed

into an expanded and deepened social realm in a context of class conflict and imperial

crises. Liberal constitutional states were forced to respond to the demands of labour; more

concerted and organised forms of state-led socialisation would be required as well as

new academic and sociological discourses about citizenship.1 Under the traditional

social-welfare model, the social represented a territorial unity, a space through which

government coordinated policy in the name of national solidarity (Donzelot 1984,

Durkheim 1997 [1893]). Concepts of social citizenship would underpin mass social

programmes related to housing, education, and health (Marshall 1950). In mass society, a

variety of socially defined groups would seek equal recognition from the state.

The equality of the members of these groups, far from being an equality among peers,

Arendt (1958, p. 40) maintained, resembles nothing so much as the equality of household

members before the despotic power of the household head, except that in society, where

the natural strength of one common interest and one unanimous opinion is tremendously

enforced by sheer number, actual rule by one man, representing the common interest and

the right opinion, could eventually be dispensed with. This form of rulership was not

despotically patriarchal as such, although systems of patriarchy would persist. It was

rulership through permanent bureaucracy, which, according to Arendt, was the mostsocial form of government. Not one-man rule as in the ancient oikos, but a kind of no-

man rule (Arendt 1958, p. 40). Increasingly anonymous administration substituted for the

dictates of the pater familas. But the task of the bureaucratic administrator of social

assistance, Arendt (1958, p. 93) argued, was less to keep the life process intact and

provide for its regeneration than to care for the upkeep of the various gigantic bureaucratic

machines whose processes consume their services and devour their products as quickly

and mercilessly as the biological life process itself.

To be sure, Arendt did not offer a conventional history of the rise of the social realm,

nor were her writings on this area entirely consistent (see Pitkin 1998). We see this in

Reflections on little rock (Arendt 2003 [1959]), an essay on the clash of states rights,federal law, and the rights of free association she believed were highlighted by the US

Supreme Courts decision to legally enforce school desegregation in the American South.

Arendt appeared to conflate the more general term society, formed through human

association as such, with the language of the social sphere, concepts that she elsewhere

tries to separate given the more specific and historical rise of the social realm. Moreover,

as with her account of totalitarianism, she deliberately resisted the temptation to offer a

linear path of causality that might be understood as culminating in the creation of the

modern social (McClure 2007). In Origins of totalitarianism, the elements that

crystallised into the social (as well as the totalitarian) are the political emancipation of

the bourgeoisie; imperial accumulation of capital in which Expansion again appeared as a

lifesaver, if and insofar as it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole

(Arendt 1966, p. 152); and the rise (and decline) of the nation-state. On revolution (Arendt

[1963] 1970) was less a history of the social than a study of how the social question

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overwhelmed the French revolutionaries just as they were trying to find public freedom.

The most sustained discussion of societys victory in the modern age (Arendt 1958, p. 45)

is in The human condition and, again, focuses on capitalism and the bureaucratic state in

addition to three earlier events imperial, religious, and scientific at the threshold of

the modern age.

2

At the end of this book, Arendts historical argument is condensed intoa sequence of three successive stages of what she would call world alienation. The first

stage was the cruelty of the primitive accumulation that produced the laboring poor,

whom expropriation deprived of the twofold protection of family and property, that is, of afamily-owned private share in the world, which until the modern age had housed theindividual life process and the labouring activity subject to its necessities. The second stagewas reached when society became the subject of the new life process, as the family had beenits subject before. Membership in a social class replaced the protection previously offered bymembership in a family, and social solidarity became a very efficient substitute for the earlier,natural solidarity ruling the family unit. (Arendt 1958, p. 256)

The beginnings of the last phase of this historical development were clear to Arendt

writing in the middle of the 1950s and should be familiar to any undergraduate student ofinternational relations today (see Owens 2011a, 2011b). The decline of the European

nation-state system; the economic and geographic shrinkage of the earth, so that prosperity

and depression tend to become worldwide phenomena; the transformation of mankind,

which until our own time was an abstract notion or a guiding principle for humanists only,

into a really existing entity whose members at the most distant points of the globe need less

time to meet than the members of a nation needed a generation ago (Arendt 1958, p. 257).

Each successive stage of the process, from the original expropriation of peasants and the

creation of wage labourers to the rise of social welfare-ism to the now transnational

administration of the social underpins the condition of world alienation so devastating to

political citizenship.Arendt did not offer a theory of citizenship as such, although her theory of politics

had clear implications for how citizenship should be understood in relation to the rise of

the social, but also more generally. In The origins of totalitarianism, she argued that

human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political

principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of

humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly

defined territorial entities (Arendt 1966, p. ix). In later work she began to articulate a form

of post-national politics and political founding that were potentially worldwide in scope;

namely a democratic-republican model of interlinked polities. Crucially, however, there is

an important element of territorial bounded-ness to political space and thus limitations on

any idea of global citizenship or we might add to the transnational administration of

the social. The rights and duties of citizenship, she wrote, must be defined and limited,

not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory

(Arendt 1968, p. 81). In addition to the stabilising capacity of law, territorial boundaries

provide the main limitation to the inherently boundlessness and unpredictability of

political action, but also some limitation on the dangers of imperial expansion and the

tyranny of world government. World citizenship should not be imagined, to borrow her

words from a different context, as an achievable, producible end within the world

(Arendt 2005, p. 3). And as she put it in her Kant lectures, one is supposed to take ones

bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen (Arendt 1982, p. 76).

This is suggested in Arendts much-cited phrase the right to have rights. The first

right implies a claim to membership of a political world and associated right to speak and

act with plural equals in that political space. It means to live in a framework where one is

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judged by ones actions and opinions and a right to belong to some kind of organized

community (Arendt 1966, pp. 296297). This first right is universal but is also politically

and historically grounded. The political is always limited by a concrete political space and

yet, inspired by Karl Jaspers philosophy of mankind, it forever remains in reference to

the world and the people in it, not because it is bound to any existing space. In fact, theopposite is the case, because [Jaspers] deepest aim is to create a space in which the

humanitas of man can appear (Arendt 1968, p. 79). Each of us has a right to be treated as a

member of humanity and, as discussed below, our humanity is most fully realised through

caring for the public, political world. The second reference to rights in Arendts phrase is

to those rights already possessed by citizens in a distinct political community. These are

the non-universal rights necessary for democratic self-determination and, again, reflect the

incontrovertible fact that the organisation of politics, the artificial human-made laws, and

conventions, are historically contingent, just as the subversion of the political by the social

was an historical rather than a conceptual or primarily normative problem.

Conclusion: not life but the world is at stake

In writing on the rise of the social in this way, Hannah Arendt was asking whether it was

possible to preserve the distinctiveness of the political in a society made in the image of

the household. The social, recall, arose when life processes acquired their own public

domain through a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping (Arendt 1958,

p. 28). Though fundamentally shaped by economy and politics, the social is neither strictly

the sphere of economic interaction or political conflict. It is the historically specific

domain between state-politics and capitalist-economy, polis and oikos, or the merging of

these realms. Arendt concluded that humans did retain the capacity to begin and create

new worlds with plural others and thereby interrupt and disrupt the endless processesassociated with labour, that is, to act outside and even against social administration. But

the creation of such genuine new beginnings would be episodic and rare in the modern age.

Several years after Arendt was writing about the life process of society, Michel

Foucault (2003) presented an almost equally vivid picture of how biological life itself

had become the subject of interventions aimed at improving, but also controlling and

normalising groups along lines of nationality, race, gender, illness, and age. This

biopolitics is said to operate across all spheres, eliminating the distinctiveness of any

legal and political subjectivity (also see Agamben 1995). This system of differentiating

and then intervening into socially defined groups, Arendt (1968, p. 155) argued, is a

constituent element of the social realm. The problem, she wrote, is that in societyeverybody must answer the question of what he is as distinct from . . . who he is

(Arendt 1968, p. 155). Arendt theorised whatness as an attribute of physical fact and

identity that may connect a person to and define them against others. Once such a construct

is adopted, this whatness becomes the quality that describes a certain type; it identifies

different specimens of the animal species mankind (Arendt 1958, p. 46). Social

administration works on whatness and its sociability rests not on equality but on

sameness (Arendt 1958, p. 213). Someones who-ness, in contrast, is their specific,

unique, and distinguishing identity that is constantly recreated and revealed in action and

speech among individuals who are not the same but equal citizens.

On what grounds, then, can we argue that humans do not exist only as members of a

species to be governed based on whatness (Arendt 1958, p. 18, emphasis added)?

Should we embrace an image of the world as one large zone of indistinction between

biological and political life (Agamben 1995, p. 187, cf. Owens 2009)? Arendts argument

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concerning the weight of the social on the political is no less radical than theorists of

biopolitics. The victory of the social was a victory of life over world, of the necessities of

animal laborans over the appearance of free humanity, of subjects over citizens. Yet she

offered a new conceptualisation of politics based precisely on the distinction between life

itself and the possibility of constituting an artificially constructed, worldly space forpolitics. Through speech and action men and women could form a space in-between

them, the public realm or world that varies with each group of people (Arendt 1958,

p. 182). Action is worldly and world making. The term public, Arendt (1958, p. 52)

wrote,

literally signifies the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and distinguished fromour privately owned place in it. This world . . . is not identical to the earth or with nature. . . Itis related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairsthat go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together . . . the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. . . What makes mass society so difficultto bear is not the number of people involved . . . but the fact that the world between them has

lost its power to gather them together, to relate and separate.Only in such an artificially constructed realm of political equality, she argued, could

human freedom, and thus the achievement of our fullest humanity, become possible;

human beings in the true sense of the term can exist only where there is a world, and there

can be a world in the true sense of the term only where the plurality of the human race is

more than a simple multiplication of a single species (Arendt 2005, p. 176).

On numerous occasions, Arendt described certain activities as non-political or pre-

political. Her critics often claimed that this political always seemed to be somewhere else

and its content was never very clear (Shklar 1998). But it is not the issues or contents of

debate that defined Arendts politics. It is a distinctive mode of being with others manifest

in action and speech. At its best, political action is marked by a concern for the public,political world itself, care that may even take the form of activities associated with the

oikos. Consider the attention paid to the integrity of the public space, the world created

through political action, by the men and women revolutionaries in Egypts Tahrir Square.

As well as calling for the overthrow of Mubarak, these actors self-organised during the

many weeks of the occupation, cleaning the square, organising food, and recycling. Later,

volunteers would clear rubble, mend pathways, and remove paint. The square had literally

become the space for freedom and the concern for and care for the public space itself

shown by the revolutionaries was paradigmatic of what they were doing: attempting to

found freedom. Arendts point is that the worldliness of political action is irreducible. She

suggests that the political realm itself is more than the sum of the individuals or citizens

who constitute it; political space has interests and needs of its own. Strictly speaking, she

wrote, politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into

being between them and endured beyond them (Arendt 2005, p. 175). To engage in

political action is to participate with plural others in founding and sustaining a common,

public political world that can last longer than a natural human life.

Notes

1. Arendt despised social science. The confusion over these matters among intellectuals inimmense. The blame lies with the sociologists and psychologists in whose conceptual swampseverything founders and sinks. They, too, of course, are only a symptom of the mass society, but

they play an independent role as well (Arendt in Arendt and Jaspers 1992, p. 236).2. These events were the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the

Reformation, which by expropriating ecclesiastical and monastic possessions started the two-fold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth; the invention of

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the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth fromthe viewpoint of the universe (Arendt 1958, p. 248).

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