On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A NoteAuthor(s): Martin LevinSource: Political Theory, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 521-531Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191165 .Accessed: 04/04/2011 01:11

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ON ANIMAL LABORANS AND

HOMO POLITICUS

IN HANNAH ARENDT A Note

MARTIN LEVIN University of Victoria

VERY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER is subject to misunderstanding, but perhaps none more so than those who insist on distinctions to which their age is not accustomed or which it is determined to ignore. Thus it is not surprising to discover that Hannah Arendt, whose philosophy is based on just such distinctions which we find either alien or meaningless, should be particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

Two recent issues of Political Theory have included articles which have contained critical but thoughtful appreciations of Arendt's celebration of the political.' However, the authors of these articles, George Kateb and Margaret Canovan, have found quite troubling the counterpart of Arendt's glorification of the political: her denigration of all nonpolitical activities, and in particular laborng as personified in Arendt's animal laborans.2 Indeed, Kateb finds Arendt's indictment of labor so relentless and so complete that he feels compelled to defend her against the possible charge of austocratic "fastidiousness."3 Canovan believes no defense is possible and finds Arendt guilty of "demonstrating a haughty and distant contempt for the vulgarity of the modern world."4

I believe both Kateb and Canovan are wrong m discernig elitist tendencies m Arendt, at least to the extent they base their conviction on Arendt's alleged harsh strctures against the laboring class. They make that mistake because both of them too easily assume that Arendt's devaluation of labor and her idictment of animal laborans refer to a social category of humanity that was formerly described as the lower orders and today is

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 7 No. 4, November 1979 521-531 0 1979 Sage Publications, Inc.

521

522 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

called the worlkng class. What I will argue is that first, Kateb and Canovan fail to pay sufficiently close attention to how Arendt actually defines animal laborans. It has little to do with traditional sociological categories and everything to do with Arendt's original and subtle philosophical distinctions. Second, Canovan particularly fails to explore the fundamental ground of Arendt's indictment of animal laborans. Third, with the first two points clarified, Arendt's choice of homo politicus as the alternative to animal laborans takes on special meaning and becomes more under- standable, if no less shocking.

I. WHO IS ANIMAL LABORANS9

Both Kateb and Canovan believe that Arendt's harsh strictures against animal laborans are not simply the expression of the low valuation she places on a particular activity or relationship to the world, but constitute the castigation of a whole social class, namely the labouring or working class.5 In other words, not only labouring but the social class made up of those who labour stands condemned. For instance, Kateb writes m passing that "when Arendt speaks of what should be hidden, she characteristically has the labouring mass in mind, the animal laborans in enormous number."6 Animal laborans is seen to be synonymous with the labouring class.

The same assumption is made by Canovan who places Arendt's denigra- tion of animal laborans at the centre of her analysis. Canovan claims to have uncovered "a deep and serious inconsistency,"7 a "contradiction"8 in Arendt, a contradiction between democratic and elitist tendencies. On the one hand, Arendt argues that each idividual has the potential of beginning something new in the world and praises the ordinary working people who invented the system of peoples' councils which have been spontaneously formed m almost all modern revolutions.9 On the other hand, Canovan suggests that Arendt's work also contains a harsh indict- ment of the working class m the form of animal laborans, whose activities are described as fundamentally private and profoundly antipolitical.10 How then Canovan asks, can Arendt condemn the working class for being "world-less"l and "herdlike"12 and at the same time praise it as leading the way in inventing new forms of political action and discovering the joys of public freedom?

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 523

Of course, Arendt is not guilty of such a contradiction. Her indictment of animal laborans is the indictment of an activity, a way of life, even of a

relationship to the world, but not of a social class. Contrary to Canovan's argument, Arendt is generally quite careful throughout her work to dis-

tinguish animal laborans from the labouring or working class as such. The whole ground of Arendt's objection to the modern age is that animal laborans has become the dominant model of human life. However, this is not because the working class has taken over the public realm but because we have all become animal laborans m our attitude to our work and in our

relationship to the public world. A careful consideration of Arendt's

special usage of animal laborans is in order. In Arendt's first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she presents

us with an early formulation of animal laborans m her theory of mass society and more specifically in her discussion of the "masses." In that work, she explicitly emphasizes that the "masses" who made totalitari- anism possible were recruited from all classes and not simply from the lower orders or the working class.13 Nor does she modify that position m later editions, contrary to Canovan's assertions. 4 Canovan claims to find m Arendt's new chapter "Ideology and Terror," m her second edition of Origins, an explicit identification of "the masses with the activity of labounng,"15 i.e., with a specific social class and the linking of that class to totalitananism. As evidence she cites Arendt that "a tyranny over 'labourers . . would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian."'6 However, the fact that Arendt places "labourers" m quotation marks should suggest to Canovan as it is meant to suggest to the reader that Arendt is employig the term m a special way. For Arendt is not refernng to a sociological class here but, as she writes only a few lines previously m the very same paragraph, to a "world whose chlef values are dictated by labour, that is where all human activities have been transformed ito labouring."17 It is this last statement whlch Cano- van ignores that requires explication and whlch constitutes the ground of her idictment of the modem age.

What can Arendt mean when she describes a "world whose chief values are dictated by labour"9 To understand Arendt, it is necessary to grasp that her thought revolves around two fundamental polanties: the. polarities of necessity and freedom. The characteristic activity carried on in the realm of necessity is labour, that m the realm of freedom is political action. The tension between these two realms is described by Arendt as the opposition between private and public, shame and honour-and most significant of all-futility and permanence.18

524 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

What Arendt is identifying here is all activities done m bondage to necessity, i.e., performed under the compulsion of providing the necessi- ties of life. All such activities Arendt calls labouring. What is unique about the modern age, according to Arendt, is that mere life has itself been elevated to the highest good and consequently, labouring which sustains that life has become the dominant activity All "the ancient distinctions and articulations within the vita active,"19 the distinctions between labour, work, and action has been levelled out or obliterated.20 They have disap- peared because only those activities which contribute to the biological life process are seen as having value. This means that labouring, which sustains that process, has been "elevated to the highest rank of man's capacities,"21 an elevation that has had fateful consequences for the modern age. What are essentially household or private activities (labouring), m Arendt's termiology, have taken over the public realm. But since animal laborans has no notion of how to create and care for a durable lasting world which is durable precisely because it transcends life, what we are left with is actually not a true public realm, "but only private activities displayed m the open."22 That is why Arendt could write in the statement cited previously that we live in a "world whose chief values are dictated by labour."

However, the latter part of that sentence remains to be explained: how the victory of animal laborans (the chapter with which Arendt concludes The Human Condition) is not the victory of a particular class but is the consequence of a world "where all human activities have been transformed into labounng."

Arendt is quite explicit on this point. Animal laborans does not refer to a sociologically defined class. Our society of labourers "did not come about through the emancipation of the labounng classes but by the emancipation of the labourmg activity itself, which preceded by centuries the political emancipation of labourers."2 3

Again, Canovan misunderstands Arendt when she accuses Arendt of

lapsing into a materialist determinism.24 When Arendt refers to labourers, she does not mean the Marxian proletanans who are defined by their relationship to the means of production. Arendt explicitly disclaims that every member of the labourers' society must actually be a labourer m the sociological sense, "but only that all members consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their fam- ilies,"2 When Arendt inveighs against the labourers' or consumers' soci- ety,2 6 she is not pointing her philosophical finger at the labouring masses

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 525

but at all classes in society. For the modern age's preoccupation with the life process itself and the consequent theoretical glorification of labour has transformed the whole of society into a society of labourers.

The problem is that all human activities have been reduced to the common denomiator of labouring, i.e., of procuring the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. With the possible exception of artists, all of us-labourers, bourgeoisie, professionals, academics, politicians-have become labourers.27 Our relationship to life and the world is that of animal laborans. That is, everything we do is considered to be done for the sake of "making a living."

As a result, all serious activities, irrespective of their fruits, are called labour, and every activity which is not necessary either for the life of the idividual or for the life process of society is subsumed under playfulness.28

The particular derangement of the modern age is not then the result of the emancipation of the worlkng class but the emancipation of a sigle activity-labour-and its "almost undisputed predominance"29 over all other activities of the vita active, i.e., over work and especially over

politics. The result is a society "in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance."30 It is the ideal of animal laborans, the ideal of effortless consumption and abundance that has become the ideal of the whole society. Of course, the

completely realized dream of animal laborans would transform our eco- nomy into a total waste economy in which things would be "almost as quickly devoured and discarded"31 as they appeared m the world. There are obviously some natural limits to such a process. But what interests Arendt much more are the existential implications. For the real danger, according to Arendt, is that such a labourers' or consumer society, "dazzled by the abundance of its growing futility and caught m the smooth functioning of a never-ending process, would no longer be able to recognize its own futility."32

II. ARENDT'S INDICTMENT OF ANIMAL LABORANS

Here we arrive at the chief ground of Arendt's indictment of animal laborans and discover the real significance of the polarity m Arendt's

526 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

thinking between necessity and freedom, labour and action, futility and permanence. In his article on Arendt, Kateb writes that Arendt's vindica- tion of the political life is "shocking and foreign."33 Indeed it is. But equally shocking is what Kateb describes as Arendt's "elaborate and

complex re-evaluation of non-political things."34 For Arendt's "re-evalua- tion" is, of course, a radical devaluation of nonpolitical thigs. What Kateb partly misses and where I believe Canovan to be quite mistaken is in the identification of that devaluation with a social class rather than with a set of activities or way of life.

However the question still to be answered is how to account for Arendt's radical devaluation of nonpolitical things, particularly of labouring. The answer is to be found at the most profound level of Arendt's reflections, in her acute awareness of the evanescence and precar- iousness of human accomplishment.35 It is to be found i Arendt's conviction that much of life's activities are done m unredeemable futility, a futility bound up in the transiency and ephemerality inherent in the very biological processes of life itself. Labour, in particular, is singled out by Arendt because labour is the activity

which corresponds to the blological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed ito the life process by labour.36

By its very nature then labour is condemned to never leave anything lasting behind.

Yet what justifies life for Arendt and makes "life's burden"3 7 bearable is precisely that which defies and transcends the mortality of idividual life and the natural cyclical processes which surround it. Arendt's denigra- tion of labouring (or animal laborans) can now be seen for what it is. It is rooted m her profound "repugnance to futility,"38 a futility to which labour, by its very nature, is consigned. Hence Arendt's opposition is not even to labouring or animal laborans as such (as it certainly is not to the labouring or working class) but to the futility to which the labouring activity is condemned. The point can perhaps be emphasized by observng that while labouring is an example of futility for Arendt, all of life's

futility is not encompassed by labouring. In an intriguig passage m her essay on "What Is Freedom?" Arendt

writes that even the words and deeds of men of action m the political

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 527

realm are subject to man-made historical processes which acqure a life and automatism of their own and which "are no less ruinous than the natural life process that drives our organism."39 "The truth is," according to Arendt, "that automatism is inherent in all processes, no matter what their

origin may be,"40 whether they be in the natural processes of biological life or the hlstorical processes initiated by man. Hence even m the public realm-that realm of possible immortality-"no single act and no sigle event, can ever, once and for all, deliver and save a man, or a nation, or mankind."4

Labour, the endless repetitive cycle of man's metabolism with nature, and the deadening sterility of the autonomy of automatic processes-both constitute "the essential worldly futility of the life process."42 Moreover they are not eradicable. They cannot be vanquished: "they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt."43 As Arendt remids us:

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won m his never wholly successful attempt to liberate himself from necessity 44

What Arendt has presented us with is the challenge of the human condition: where "nature forever invades the human artifice, threatening the durability of the world and its fitness for human use,"45 while man forever struggles to demonstrate his capacity for life m the world by transcending nature in asserting the purely worldly stability of the human artifice against the deadly erosion of automatic processes. However, the game is worth the candle: the stakes are freedom in a public world and even the possibility of living m everlastingness.

III. ARENDT'S ALTERNATIVE TO ANIMAL LABORANS. HOMO POLITICUS

We are now m a position to consider Arendt's answer to her search for what could challenge life's futility, for what could justify and redeem "life's burden," for what could rescue us from what Arendt significantly

528 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

calls "the darkness of every day life."46 We are also now in a position to reflect on how misleading is Canovan's identification of Arendt's animal laborans with the sociologist's working class. The Human Condition, far from demonstrating Arendt's "haughty and distant contempt for the vulgarity of the modern world,"47 as Canovan would have us believe, contains her fullest theoretical vidication of a life that offers not only permanence but the promise of immortality, namely the life of homo politicus, the free life of political action.

The attraction of classical Greece and the reason that Arendt finds her mtellectual home in the polis derives from her belief that the polls provided the space where men could not only appear and reveal themselves in their heroic individuality but could strve for nothing less than an earthly immortality According to Arendt, the polls was for the Greeks

first of all their guarantee against the futility of mdividual life, the space protected against thls futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals.4

Harlkng back to the Greeks and forward in time to the creation of "new revolutionary organs of self government"49 Arendt's overwhelming sense of the futility of most of life's activities now finds its counterpart in her exalted conviction m the redeemig possibility of the political. The politi- cal realm is the one realm where the ephemeral nature of most man-made "products" can be overcome. For the "free deeds and living words"50 that are the outcome of a life lived in the political realm echo and resonate through the ages. Indeed, they become "imperishable."51

It is important to be clear what Arendt is asserting here. For she is not simply calling to us to recover that "shining brghtness we once called glory and which is possible only m the public realm."52 It is more than a

question of glory or honour or even freedom.53 It is the possibility of achieving a kind of immortality. Arendt's claim is so startling that she should be allowed to state it in her own words:

The task and potential greatness of mortals lies m their ability to produce thmgs which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home m everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place m the cosmos where everythng is unmortal except themselves. By their capacity for the unmortal deed, by their ability to leave non-pershable traces behmd, men,

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 529

their idividual mortality notwithstanding, attai an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a "divine" nature.54

To appreciate the uniqueness of Arendt's claim, it might be recalled that Aristotle, who defined man as a political being, considered man to partake of the divine only to the extent he left the polls behmd and contemplated the eternal order. But such is Arendt's esteem for and celebration of the political that it is political actors, those who act in the political realm, who "will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages"55 and who will thereby "prove themselves to be of a 'divine' nature."56

The modern age stands condemned by Arendt not for its "vulgarity" (Canovan's term) but because the public realm has withered away Or what amounts to the same thing, it has been taken over for alien purposes. In modern democracies, all we are left with are "private activities displayed in the open."57 The private has superseded the public, politics yielded to economics and freedom has been submerged by necessity This is the real meaning for Arendt of the ascendancy of animal laborans. Moreover, in an age which believes that our freedom and individuality begin where politics ends, i.e., in our private life, Arendt has left us a startling legacy' the assertion of the redeemig and even immortal possibilities of political action.

NOTES

1. George Kateb, "Freedom and Worldliness m the Thought of Hannah Arendt," Political Theory 5, 2 (May 1977) and Margaret Canovan, "The Contradic- tions of Hannah Arendt's Political Thought," Political Theory 6, 1 (February 1978). Hereafter cited as "Contradictions."

2. Actually Arendt sigles out two kinds of activites for criticism and devalua- tion, both of which are characteristic of the modem age: labourmg and its counter- part, consumption, and the cultivation of consciousness and an inner life. As Kateb succinctly sums up Arendt's position: "In the Modem age, the many consume or aspire to consumption, and the few withdraw into themselves. Both are prisoners." "Freedom and Worldliness m the Thought of Hannah Arendt," p. 146.

530 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

3. Ibid., p. 144. 4. "Contradictions," p. 11. 5. Arendt actually makes a novel distinction between labour and work. While

the distinction is important m a discussion of the three activities of the vita activa, it is not relevant to the present essay

6. "Freedom and Worldliness m the Thought of Hannah Arendt," p. 144. 7 "Contradictions," p. 5. 8. Ibid., p. 7. Canovan had "by-passed" these contradictions m her earlier

excellent study, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

9. For Arendt's account of these people's councils, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Vikng, 1963), pp. 265-285. Hereafter cited as OR. On Arendt's linking of birth and new begimngs and its significance, see Hans Jonas who asserts that with "'natality', Arendt not only comed a new word but itroduced a new category into the philosophical doctrme of man." "Acting, Knowing, Thiking: Gleanigs from Hannah Arendt's Philosophical Work," Social Research 44, 1 (Spring 1977), p. 30.

10. E.g., The Human Condition (Garden City, NY Doubleday-Anchor, 1959), pp. 42, 74, 111-113, 140-141, 191. Hereafter cited asHC.

11. Ibid., p. 102. 12. Ibid., pp. 190-199. 13. The Burden of Our Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951), pp. 308, 310. 14. "Contradictions," pp. 10-12. 15. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 16. The Origms of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), p. 475.

Cited m "Contradictions," p. 12. 17 Ibid. In a later essay on mass culture and mass society, it is agai clear that

Arendt, m discussmg "the masses" is not referrig to a specific class but a relation- ship with the world. See Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture," m Between Past and Future (New York: Vikig, 1968), pp. 199, 210-211.

18. HC, p. 65. 19. Ibid., p. 289. See all of pp. 286-292. 20. The reasons for this are related by Arendt, m a subtle and complex argument,

to the rise of Christianity, the impact of modern science and the loss of faith arlsmg from Cartesian doubt. See the whole of Section VI, "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age," m HC, pp. 225-297

21. Ibid., p. 286. 22. Ibid., p. 115. On the icapacity of animal laborans to sustai a true public

world, see HC, pp. 44, 102, 111-113 and "The Crsis m Culture," pp. 210-211. 23. HC, p. 110. Arendt repeats this argument several times. See, for example

ibid., p. 43. The "emancipation of labour was not a consequence of the emancipation of the working class, but preceded it."

24. "Contradictions," pp. 11-12. 25. HC, p. 43. 26. "Labour and consumption are but two stages of the same process," HC, p.

110. 27. HC, pp. 5, 110-111. 28. Ibid., p. 111. 29. Ibid.

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 531

30. Ibid., p. 43. 31. Ibid., p. 116. 32. Ibid., pp. 116-117 33. "Freedom and Worldliness m the Thought of Hannah Arendt," p. 141. 34. Ibid., p. 143. 35. Arendt's concluding paragraph m On Revolution contans the lines from

Sophocles: "Not to be born prevails over all meanmg uttered m words; by far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came." OR, p. 285. Also see her comments on good fortune "which is rare and never lasts and cannot be pursued," HC, p. 93 and on the "good things m history" which "are usually of short duration," m "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution," i Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 204.

36. HC, p. 9. 37. OR, p. 285. 38. A phrase from Veblen which Arendt cites over and over again. 39. In Between Past and Future, p. 168. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. Also see HC, pp. 93-94. 42. HC, p. 113. 43. Ibid., pp. 103-104. 44. Ibid., p. 105. 45. Ibid., p. 87. 46. Ibid., p. 32. 47. "Contradictions," p. 11. 48. HC, p. 51. 49. OR, pp. 250, 259-285 and "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution," pp.

231-233. 50. OR, p. 285. 51. HC, p. 176. 52. Ibid., p. 160. 53. It is also more than a question of dramaturgy. For the view that politics for

Arendt is "essentially dramaturglc," see Sheldon S. Wolin, "Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time," Social Research 44, 1 (Sprig 1977), p. 96.

54. HC, p. 19. 55. Ibid., p. 176. 56. Ibid., p. 19. 57. Ibid., p. 115.

Martin Levin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbra, Canada. He is the author of an article on "The Challenge to Economic Man" that will shortly appear in Journal of Social and Political Studies and is currently engaged in work on Hannah Arendt's thought.