The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

By Anthem Press

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt offers a unique collection of essays on one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. The companion encompasses Arendt’s most salient arguments and major works – The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution and The Life of the Mind. The volume also examines Arendt’s intellectual relationships with Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and other key social scientists. Although written principally for students new to Arendt’s work, The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt also engages the most avid Arendt scholar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783086399

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The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological traditions and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner—City University of New York, USA; Australian Catholic University, Australia; and University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming titles in this series include:

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion

to Hannah Arendt

Edited by Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2017

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© 2017 Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baehr, Peter, editor. | Walsh, Philip, 1965– editor.

Title: The Anthem companion to Hannah Arendt /

edited by Peter Baehr, Philip Walsh.

Other titles: Companion to Hannah Arendt

Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2017. |

Series: Anthem companions to sociology; 1 |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016050044 | ISBN 9781783081851 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. |

Political science – History – 20th century. | Sociology – History – 20th century. |

Political sociology – History – 20th century. |

BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General.

Classification: LCC JC251.A74 A824 2017 | DDC 320.5–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050044

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-185-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-185-6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To David Kettler, friend and scholar of distinction, we affectionately dedicate this book.

CONTENTS

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a determined foe of the social sciences. She lambasted their methods and derided their objectives. Sociology was a particular target of her ire. Yet here she is: the subject of a book that appears in the Anthem Companions to Sociology series. The irony could not be plainer. What accounts for it?

Arendt’s presence in the Anthem series is neither a lofty correction of a disciplinary embarrassment – the paucity of classic female theorists – nor a cynical marketing ploy. Today, a growing number of sociologists are claiming Arendt for sociology, just as many in the past claimed Marx for it. It is not just that her investigations into the nature of science, work, agency, power, revolution and human society itself afford new perspectives from which sociologists can directly benefit. It is something more basic still. Arendt challenges us to rethink what we are doing. She nudges us to refine, revise or abandon some of our most basic intellectual reflexes.

It is startling to recall that, only 20 years ago, Arendt was still an esoteric author in most of the humanities and almost totally unread in the social sciences. Even within political theory and philosophy, disciplines to which she has an evident affiliation, Arendt was a marginal figure. Yet over the past two decades, her standing has steadily advanced from the fringe of intellectual discussion toward its centre. A host of factors explains this dynamic: the rehabilitation of totalitarianism as a vital political concept following years in the doldrums of Cold War polemics; the advent of genocidal campaigns in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East and, with them, new forms of ideology and terror; the implosion of nations and the tragic reappearance of stateless peoples; the growth of human rights discourses and human rights organizations; renewed disquiet over the reach of the state and its encroachments on privacy; the recovery of classical republicanism as a political alternative to liberalism and socialism. All these developments evoke Arendtian concerns and arguments. Furthermore, the greater porousness between and among the humanities and social sciences in recent years, as a result of the impetus towards transdisciplinary studies, has encouraged academics to move across intellectual borders. Arendt, a wide-ranging thinker with much to say about politics, society, history, aesthetics, philosophy and education, is a natural beneficiary of this process.

The Purpose and Distinctiveness of This Book

The addition, then, of a volume on Hannah Arendt to the Anthem Companion series is timely. Extant compendia on Hannah Arendt’s work divide, roughly, into three categories. Some collections place Arendt squarely in the traditions of philosophy and political theory. Others approach her from the standpoints of literary and cultural studies. Still others read Arendt through the lenses of law and history. The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt is different from previous edited volumes. Its purpose is to connect her writing to fundamental sociological problems. Composed principally with the higher-level undergraduate student and graduate student in mind, it is sufficiently demanding to engage established scholars, as well as other readers already conversant with Arendt’s work.

Part I elucidates her most important books, following chronologically their genesis of publication: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), together with the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). Part II examines themes – personhood, power, leadership and genocide – that enable sociologists to think more deeply about these topics. Naturally, the boundary separating Parts I and II is permeable. Contributors to Part I invoke a range of Arendtian texts, even as they focus on one of them, while the authors of Part II dilate on some works more than others. It is redundant in this Introduction to summarize these contributions; the authors, lucid and learned, are their own best expositors. Instead, we think it more productive to identify Arendt’s divergence from and challenges to the social sciences. This sets the scene for the chapters that follow. All of them describe in detail one or more of Arendt’s arguments. All of them assess the cogency of her analysis and its use to sociological enquiry. Before addressing Arendt’s relevance for the social sciences, however, it is worth considering her biographical background.

A Biographical Sketch

That Hannah Arendt survived to become a notable theorist is itself a small miracle. She was born in Hannover, Germany, on October 14, 1906, the only child of secular Jewish, middle-class parents. Her father died when she was seven, leaving Martha (née Cohn) Arendt to raise her daughter in Königsberg where the family had moved in 1909. From an early age, Hannah Arendt was encouraged by her mother to avoid any sign of a victim mentality; if taunted by children’s anti-Semitic remarks (not that these were common), the young girl was supposed to stick up for herself, an expectation that seeded the moral and intellectual toughness with which she comported herself through life. Arendt’s mother was not political, and even the storms of the Great War little affected the town of Königsberg. Arendt, too, initially showed little interest in political questions. Her intellectual passion cleaved to the great literatures of Europe, to philosophy and to the classical authors of Greece and Rome whose ancient languages she learned as a student of the Gymnasium, the top academic tier of German secondary schools.

University education followed. In Marburg, she met, studied and fell in love with Martin Heidegger, the titan of Existenz philosophy. His intellectual influence on her would prove indelible but abrasive. Heidegger was, to her mind, the greatest philosopher since Kant. But his later embrace of National Socialism was for her an exemplary lesson of what goes wrong when philosophers impose their visions of Being or Truth or Rationality or Goodness onto the necessarily inconclusive and discordant nature of politics. When the love affair between professor and student disintegrated in 1926, Arendt continued her studies in Heidelberg under the very different mentorship of Karl Jaspers, who supervised her doctoral dissertation on The Concept of Love in the Work of St. Augustine.

Cumulatively, these academic experiences of the 1920s – which encompassed a term attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg – equipped Arendt with a formidable philosophical training. But harsh political realities soon overtook such transports of the mind. The Weimar period (1919–1933) was a cultural laboratory of remarkable artistic and scientific experimentation; few intervals have witnessed such creative effervescence. It was also the site of violent street combat, as communist and National Socialist paramilitaries – allies in enmity – vied to overthrow the Republic. Now living in Berlin and, since 1929, married to her first husband, fellow philosophy student Günther Stern, Arendt was confronted with a maelstrom for which philosophy had no plausible remedy. Anti-Jewish propaganda, in particular, raised pressing questions about the fate of a people to whom Arendt had, to that point, felt little visceral connection. One robust answer was the Zionist movement as enunciated by its chief German spokesman and intellectual, Kurt Blumenfeld. A Jewish homeland, Arendt reasoned, was required to protect Jews against the violent vicissitudes of anti-Semitism in Europe and, more urgently, National Socialism in Germany. Adolf Hitler’s elevation to chancellor in January 1933 only deepened this conviction. Tasked by Blumenfeld’s German Zionist Organization to collect anti-Semitic tracts in the Prussian State Library, Arendt was apprehended by the Gestapo. That might have been the last time anyone heard of her if Arendt’s interrogator had not succumbed to the young woman’s wiles and intelligence. Charming her way out of custody eight days after being arrested, she resolved to flee Germany.

So began a refugee’s odyssey, taking Arendt to Prague, Geneva, and thence to Paris, where she reunited with Stern and resumed her Zionist activities, at one point accompanying a group of young Jewish immigrants to their new homeland in Palestine. And it was in Paris that Arendt met Heinrich Blücher, whom she married soon after her relationship with Stern dissolved. On the face of it, Blücher – a burly, working-class, ex-Marxist with no formal higher education – was an unlikely match for an erudite young woman of Arendt’s background. Yet he had exactly the grit she needed and, when they first met, possessed far more political experience than she did. A philosophical autodidact, he was hard-nosed and intellectually irreverent. In later years, when Arendt was attacked for her controversial views – over the Eichmann trial in particular – Blücher offered solidarity and counsel.

Arendt’s Paris sojourn abruptly ended with Germany’s invasion of France in the summer of 1940. She was briefly interned as an enemy alien before fleeing once more, this time immigrating to the United States with Blücher in 1941. (Her mother followed.) Life had almost to begin again. The couple knew no English when they arrived in New York, but Arendt, unlike her husband, quickly learned the language, functionally at first, more proficiently over time, always larded with the thickest German accent. During the war, Arendt combined journalism for the émigré paper Aufbau (Construction), a medium for German-speaking Jews, with research for the Commission on European Jewish Reconstruction. The early 1940s were also the time when news of the death camps first reached America; horror rapidly replaced incredulousness as the scale of the catastrophe, and the means employed to achieve it, came to be known. The impact on Arendt was enormous; henceforth, explaining Europe’s descent into industrialized extermination became the core of her life’s work. Its first offspring, consolidating a series of preparatory articles on the subject, was The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in the same year – 1951 – that she received American citizenship. This double triumph was auspicious. Origins established Arendt as the premier thinker on its topic and an iconoclastic voice in the American intellectual conversation. It was the first of a stream of books that stimulated, disturbed, shocked and sometimes offended her contemporaries.

Many readers of this Companion are career academics; Arendt was one only fitfully. As her fame grew in the 1950s, she delivered lecture courses at Princeton, Cornell, Berkeley and Chicago before becoming a recurrent visiting professor on the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago (1963–1967) and only then taking up a full-time position at the New School for Social Research in New York (1967–1975). By many accounts, she was an inspirational and demanding professor; her current literary executor, Jerome Kohn, was one of Arendt’s graduate students. Yet it bears emphasis that for much of her life Arendt avoided the university mill and, in situ, never fully adjusted to it. In that regard she resembles fellow independents like Thomas Mann, Arthur Koestler, W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy; the list is much longer and some of its number – such as James Baldwin, Rebecca West and George Orwell – were not even college educated. Rather than write for the elite journals of political science and philosophy, or position herself conspicuously among their professional associations, Arendt oriented her work to a larger audience of intelligent readers. These could best be reached in newspapers and magazines such as Commentary, Confluence, Dissent, Partisan Review, The New York Times, The Listener, and especially the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. If Arendt donned, erratically and belatedly, the role of a university teacher, she had far more in common with the pugilistic milieu of free, spirited intellectuals than with the discursively cleansed, offense-free environs of the modern academy. Nevertheless, her books – dense, scholarly monographs prodigiously laced with philosophical and literary references – are perhaps best broached in the context of a university seminar, and the current volume is designed to enable this kind of engagement.

Hannah Arendt’s Appraisal of the Social Sciences

Arendt’s attitude to the social sciences seems, at first glance, to be all of a piece: they are intellectually bankrupt, debunking exercises in reductionism, that drastically simplify and thereby dehumanize their subjects. On closer examination, however, her objections to the social sciences, her lines of attack and the virulence of her attitude show significant variation over the course of her career. Her appraisal spans five related areas and periods: 1) Arendt’s early criticism of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929) defends philosophy against the supposed encroachments of sociology. 2) Her post-war work on totalitarianism challenges the basic categories of understanding that social scientists bring to their studies. 3) The ontology of human activity provided in The Human Condition (1958) offers a critical account of the social viewpoint. 4) Her perspective on the meaning of politics, which runs through almost all of her work, leads her to sharp disagreements with how social scientists study political affairs. 5) The sociological ambition to uncover laws of human action is the subject of Arendt’s disapproval in several essays written in the mid-1960s. We here outline both the substance and the virtue of Arendt’s views on the social sciences in each of these areas.

The critique of Karl Mannheim

In 1930, Arendt published a critical review of Mannheim’s ([1929] 1936) Ideology and Utopia, a work that in its time attracted intense scrutiny in Germany and – when it was translated in 1936 – the United States as well. In the review, titled Philosophy and Sociology, Arendt defends the Existenz philosophy of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and attacks Mannheim’s sociology on the grounds of its failure to grasp the kinds of fundamental human experiences in which existentialist thinking is rooted. This line of attack to some extent anticipates her later criticisms of sociology, which all draw attention to sociology’s failure to take account of the complexity of human phenomena. Ideology and Utopia is primarily concerned to establish a new foundation for the sociology of knowledge by extending and reconfiguring Marx’s account of ideology. But Mannheim also travels much further afield, addressing such issues as the possibility of a rationalized (or scientific) politics, the functions of utopian and ideological thought in the historical process and the role of philosophy in understanding human affairs. For Mannheim, the standard under-laboring¹ model of philosophy – which aspires to furnish a rational justification for the other sciences – is complacent; it fails to glean its own existential determination ([1929] 1993, 404). Philosophy, in other words, does not and cannot stand outside struggles over the truth and value of its own claims; further, Mannheim continues, these claims are implicated in contests for power between and among differentially placed social groups. Philosophies are always – consciously or not – engaged in a competition to make their public interpretation of reality (ibid.) the accepted one, and in this respect they are, like any other discourse, correlatives of distinct social situations ([1929] 1936, 81). Most brazenly, Mannheim singles out Existenz philosophy as a salient culprit of this intellectual naivety.

For Arendt, equipped with a newly minted doctorate in philosophy and a strong attachment to the thought of both her primary mentors, Mannheim’s book presented a powerful challenge. Her review takes him to task on several issues, including what has often been considered the Achilles heel of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge: sociological relativism (he preferred the term relationism), and the presumptive standpoint it adopts of a free-floating intellectual stratum tasked with the responsibility of mediating antagonistic political perspectives. But Arendt’s primary concern is with Mannheim’s depiction of philosophy as subject to the same social forces, prejudices and ideological distortions that affect everyday experience and the other human sciences. This reductive and deflationary position, she argues, fails to distinguish between the two levels of analysis Heidegger is at pains to distinguish in Being and Time (1927): the ontic and the ontological. This difference, she argues, is not an arbitrary one that the philosopher imposes from on high, but one congruent with the structure of human experience. In the everyday mode of human communal life – expressed in the experiences of idle talk, the being-with-others and the They – the world has a flat, continuous, intrinsically ontic character. But, as both Heidegger and Jaspers insist, this does not exhaust the range of human experience. On the contrary, it is in the moments in which the mundane is interrupted, when human beings are thrown back upon their own selves and recognize the uncertainty of the human situation as such (Arendt 1994, 31), that knowledge of their own authentic being-in-the-world becomes possible. This experience is precipitated, for Jaspers, by what he calls border situations, those few moments during which alone we experience our authentic selves (ibid.) – moments of discernment that are potentially available to all human beings, and therefore rooted in the world, not in the philosopher’s reflected perspective. But Mannheim’s sociology – and the perspective of sociology more generally – is drably uniform and homogenous; it is incapable of noticing the distinctive and diverse modes of human experience, and therefore the possibility of undertaking confrontations with oneself, let alone with the ontological structure of existence. For Mannheim, there exists only the ontic, or what he calls the concretely operating order of life ([1929] 1936, 193). All experiences – including those that involve fundamental truths or core values – are to be explained in terms of societal pressures and social positioning. This means, as Arendt points out – and generalizing the point to include the discipline as a whole – that sociology is in search of a reality that is more original than the mind itself, and all the intellectual products are to be interpreted or destructured in that light. Destructuring does not mean destruction, but, rather, a tracing back of any claim to validity to the specific situation from which it arises (1994, 33).

While references to the ontological difference vanish from Arendt’s later writings (as they do from Heidegger’s), the objections to Mannheim’s sociological perspective that derive from the commitment to such a difference persist, and indeed pervade her other criticisms of the social sciences discussed later. Mannheim’s refusal to grant the basic datum of phenomenology – that experience consists of a complex, differentiated structure that must be construed in its own terms – is emblematic of sociology’s monochrome vision: namely, a perspective that refers all significant things to an extraneous social origin and consistently favours subsuming judgments. These are judgments that are indifferent to the specific, particular and sometimes unique character of human phenomena.

The originality of totalitarianism

When Arendt wrote her review of Ideology and Utopia, the Weimar Republic was still intact. She was still a citizen of Germany. The Nazis had not yet seized the state and launched what would become a global war. In contrast, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was composed in the utterly different circumstances of the post-war world. Her criticisms of sociology witness a corresponding shift in emphasis. Whereas, earlier, she was on the defensive, speaking up for philosophy against a parvenu social science, now she was attacking sociology and other social sciences for misunderstanding the most important episode of modern times.

The main charge Arendt levels at the social sciences in The Origins of Totalitarianism and, even more, in related writings, is that they fail utterly to grasp that totalitarianism is an unprecedented social and political order ([1950] 1994, 233; [1951] 1973, 461). A regime type common to National Socialism and Bolshevism, especially in its Stalinist phase, totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression. It generates entirely new political institutions ([1951] 1973, 460) and these operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral or common sense utilitarian categories [can] any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge or predict their course of action (ibid.).

On one level, Arendt’s claims about the novelty of totalitarianism are clearly overstated. Totalitarian regimes contain many features shared with dictatorships, notably a monopolistic party system. The assault on the rule of law, the demand for ideological conformity and even concentration camps are not totalitarian innovations. But this misses Arendt’s point. Totalitarianism is novel not only because of its peculiar configuration of terror and ideology, or because it is a kind of government that incubates a movement rather than taming it, but because its existence gives rise to actions that defy the repertoire of concepts typically used to compare and classify human behaviour. Death camps have no utility and cannot be explained by comparing them, for instance, to slavery. The purge cycle subjects the regime to deliberate chaos. The confession of impossible crimes by totally innocent people is bizarre; so, too, is the identification and liquidation of so-called objective enemies – people whose only crime is that they exist. And although sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Raymond Aron advance important analytical arguments about totalitarianism, their intellectual reflex, Arendt claims, is largely conventional: they depict National Socialism and Bolshevism as more extreme versions of previous regimes, their radical nature refracted through the prism of well-worn concepts such as autocracy or anomie. Arendt took this reflex to indicate more fundamental weaknesses of the social sciences: a reliance on functionalist explanation, an insensitivity to key historical differences and a tendency to substitute and shuffle ideas, destroying the boundaries between them and their objects. She also developed these criticisms in other work, as we detail later. So while Arendt’s claims about the unprecedentedness of totalitarian regimes are problematic in some ways, the originality of her approach and her defiant refusal to regard totalitarianism as a permutation of something already mapped is a stimulating challenge to think anew.

Even if we accept that Arendt identified fundamental weaknesses of the social sciences in the 1950s, we would still expect these to have long since been addressed, and the social sciences to be less prone to such problems today. It is therefore worth exploring the applicability of Arendt’s objections in Origins to more recent sociological frameworks for understanding political phenomena. For totalitarianism, and the powerful picture of it Arendt offered, still poses challenges to conventional social scientific understanding. Take, for example, the approach of contemporary neo-Weberian sociologist W. G. Runciman (2000, 64–93), whose model of the organization of power in human societies relies on inductive generalization and trans-historical comparison. Runciman argues that although the ancient Greek polis of the third century BC and the absolutist English monarchy of the sixteenth century AD are clearly different in many respects, both can be classified as state societies because they were both sustained by a particular configuration of power. This configuration is composed of the following ingredients: 1) a division between the ruling elite and the ruled; 2) ruling ideologies that secure legitimacy and stability; and 3) unequal balances of the means of production, coercion and/or persuasion between rulers and ruled (2010: 10–11). The power structure of every society, for Runciman, can be understood relative to the degrees of control ruling elites can exercise over the means of coercion, production or persuasion. Once we define the bases on which power and its legitimation rest, we can extrapolate them to any state-based formation. This complements Runciman’s more general approach, in which comparison and classification are the staples of naming and understanding social phenomena across long tracts of historical time.

In major respects, Runciman’s model is inapplicable to totalitarian regimes. Nazism and Stalinism (and Maoism) succeeded in integrating large segments of the population, together with their secondary institutions, into the political apparatus. The ruling elite was periodically subject – in the Soviet Union, at least – to liquidation. The ideologies of history and nature Bolshevism and Nazism articulated were not stabilizing factors but rather their opposite (Arendt [1951] 1973, 463). Totalitarian ideologies transform Nature and History from the firm soil supporting human life and action into supra-gigantic forces whose movements race through humanity, dragging every individual willy-nilly with them – either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels (1994, 341). Moreover, the Nazi assumption of power was marked not by attempts to shore up its legal status; on the contrary, the Nazis did not even bother to replace the Weimar constitution. They showed no concern whatsoever about their own legislation. Rather, there was ‘only the constant going ahead on the road toward ever new fields’ ([1951] 1973, 394). It is true that totalitarian regimes monopolize control of the means of coercion, and the exercise of terror is a principal component of their rule. But the notion of means of persuasion, canvassed by Runciman, seems a misnomer when applied to totalitarian propaganda. Arendt devotes one of the most powerful sections of the third part of Origins (341–364) to its analysis, not only revealing the specific techniques the Nazis and Bolsheviks employed – including a pseudo-scientific language, self-fulfilling prophecies, conspiracy theories and other elements – but also emphasizing the dissimilarity between totalitarian propaganda and any means of persuasion that appeals to self-interest or utilitarian considerations. Similarly, while the economy of Nazi Germany was recognizably capitalist in the organization of its means of production, it was in other respects heteroclite and anomalous – notably in its mixture of wage labor and slavery and in its deliberate destruction of large portions of the labor force; in these and other respects neither Nazism nor Bolshevism conformed to the class-interest presuppositions on which the idea of control over the means of production rests.

Runciman’s model may still be useful in explaining features of totalitarian rule that Arendt missed, and in establishing links and similarities between phenomena that she claimed defied comparison (1994, 339). Equally Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust identifies hitherto underappreciated features of totalitarian rule from a distinctly sociological perspective (for example, the production of social distance in the erosion of ethical concern), while also problematizing the sharp distinction between regarding the Holocaust as either normal or extraordinary. In so doing, he goes some way toward questioning both the argument that totalitarianism constitutes a variant of autocracy and the claim that it is unprecedented. Still, as Margaret Canovan (2000, 33) points out, what remains striking about totalitarianism is "its strangeness: the phenomenon [Arendt] pictures is not only terrifying but weird and senseless, much less comprehensible." Arendt confronted the strangeness of totalitarianism with extraordinary clarity, and this remains, perhaps, the principal virtue of her account.

The social viewpoint and the triad of activities

Arendt challenged the social sciences on a still more fundamental level in The Human Condition ([1958] 1998). This is not immediately obvious. The book is heavily philosophical and, some argue, deeply Heideggerian (Villa 1999, 62). But it is also the place where she engages with problems the social sciences routinely address, such as the human meaning of work, the character of the public sphere, interaction, individualism and the origins of modern natural science, among a range of other issues. Though the book has a curious organization and looks superficially like a series of self-standing essays, its unifying core lies in three sections titled Labor, Work and Action.

Philosophical interpreters of The Human Condition tend to see it as a phenomenological work, a mapping of the human world from the standpoint of individual experience. Yet the book is also intended to account for the objective and intersubjective structures within which individual experience occurs. Accordingly, Arendt locates individual activity in a previously established human environment, or web, that limits, allows and induces human conduct. The conversation between her and Karl Mannheim appears to have resumed, except now it is only Mannheim’s ghost that can reply. When Mannheim writes, in Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon, that we step at birth into a ready-interpreted world, a world which has already been made understandable, every part of which has been given meaning (1930, 198), he has the individualistic assumptions of Existenz philosophy in his sights. Arendt’s analysis in The Human Condition proceeds from a comparable starting point: human activity unfolds in a shared, interdependent world that preexists the individual. Yet her project also recalls the ontological difference, invoked in her review of Ideology and Utopia, for she provides a fundamental ontology (not an ontic account) of the shared human world of interaction and institutions. The Human Condition, indeed, provides an account of society that competes directly with sociological theories.

To understand what she is doing, we must first explore the meaning of one of Arendt’s most infamous theses, the rise of the social. She uses this phrase in distinct, if often related senses to refer to: a) the culture of conformism pervading mass society; b) the invasion of civil society and private life by state-organized agencies at the expense of traditional sources of solidarity; c) the unnatural growth of the natural, namely, the transvaluation of activities and experiences that have hitherto been considered part of the realm of labor and therefore trivial or unimportant in the larger scheme of human existence; d) the colonization of political institutions by mass media and mass marketing. Now, one could restate each of the statements sociologically. There is considerable overlap, for example, between the second of these theses and Robert Putnam’s (2000) enquiries into the decline of social capital since the 1960s; he attributes this decay partly to the displacement of local and traditional identities – based on ethnic and religious organizations – by the state’s appropriation of welfare and other responsibilities.

There is another meaning of the rise of the social, however, that is directly linked to Arendt’s critique of the social sciences. This is the idea that the rise of the social includes the rise of the social viewpoint. She puts it this way:

The social viewpoint is identical … with an interpretation that takes nothing into account but the life process of mankind, and within its frame of reference all things become objects of consumption. Within a completely socialized mankind, whose sole purpose would be the entertaining of the life process – and this is the unfortunately quite unutopian ideal that guides Marx’s theories – the distinction between labour and work would have completely disappeared; all work would have become labour because all things would be understood, not in their worldly, objective quality, but as results of living labour power and functions of the life process. ([1958] 1998, 88)

The propensity to understand all work simply as labor is therefore at the root of the social viewpoint, and this viewpoint is not independent of the social processes that promote it. An important part of what Arendt means by the rise of the social is the idea, widely shared within the social sciences, that all work can be understood as labor and all action understood as work. The significance Arendt attributes to this and other developments, in which Marxism is most obviously complicit, is clarified through her triadic understanding of the nature of human activities.

Arendt argues that the categories of labor, work and action denote distinctive human forms that exhibit trans-historical, essential or at least definitive qualities. But these forms are also interdependent, insofar as their meanings depend on their contrasts with each other, and together they comprise a vita activa, a mode of life that is within the range of every human being ([1958] 1998, 3). (The Human Condition was actually titled Vita Activa in its European editions; see Young-Bruehl 1982, 324.) The category of labor includes those activities that are undertaken by the body, and whose function is oriented to biological needs ([1958] 1998, 80–81). Labor is not a project; it has no end beyond the maintenance and reproduction of life itself. It involves production for the purpose of consumption, and is contrasted with the planned, controlled and organized activities that characterize the capacity to work (or to fabricate, as she renders it consistently in her later writings), that is, to transform objects in the world into things that fulfil human purposes. Fabrication is associated with utilitarian, means-ends thinking, in which goals are foreseen and pathways chosen to achieving them. The third category of activity is action, which is closely related to speech and to communication more generally. Action and speech are to be distinguished from fabrication insofar as they are pursued primarily for their own sake, and not for some further end. And while the meaning of work is inherently tied to its outcome, and while labor is bound to the biological conditions of human life, action occurs between human beings, in the in-between space of human plurality. Action takes place, in other words, in contexts and spaces in which human beings encounter each other as fellow actors (not things), endowed with freedom and the ability to think, will, speak with and recognize each other. Arendt identifies it strongly with the political realm, but Seyla Benhabib (2000, 125) points out that this is an unduly restrictive conception. We engage in action whenever the meaning of the activity plays out in the web of relationships and enacted stories that constitutes human plurality. Action can take place in classrooms, salons and living rooms as well as in parliaments, trade union halls and television studios.²

The triad of activities just described should not be understood to map straightforwardly onto the actual activities humans carry out. Childrearing, for example, is an activity that combines elements of labor, work and action. In addition, many practices, such as thinking or playing, do not fit the model at all. Nevertheless, the triad captures important differences between and among types of human activity that have, to some extent, trans-historical institutional correlates. For example, slavery, indenturing, caste and wage labor are institutional arrangements intended to reserve the activity of labor for a particular group of people. Similarly, guilds grew up around the prerogatives of artisans engaged in fabrication, and a public sphere, where