On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note Author(s): Martin Levin Source: Political Theory, Vol.

7, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 521-531 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191165 . Accessed: 04/04/2011 01:11
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

ON ANIMAL LABORANS AND HOMO POLITICUS IN HANNAH ARENDT A Note

MARTIN LEVIN University of Victoria

to is VERYPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHERsubject misunderstanding,

but perhapsnone more so than those who insist on distinctions to which their age is not accustomed or which it is determinedto ignore. Thus it is not surprisingto discover that HannahArendt, whose philosophy is based on just such distinctions which we find either alien or meaningless,should and be particularly vulnerableto misunderstanding misinterpretation. Two recent issues of Political Theoryhave includedarticleswhich have contained critical but thoughtful appreciationsof Arendt's celebration of the political.' However, the authors of these articles, George Kateb and MargaretCanovan,have found quite troublingthe counterpartof Arendt's glorification of the political: her denigrationof 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 againstthe possible charge of austocratic "fastidiousness."3Canovan believes no defense is possible and finds Arendtguilty of "demonstrating haughty and distant contempt a for the vulgarityof 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 againstthe laboringclass. They make that mistake because both of them too easily assumethat Arendt'sdevaluation of labor and her idictment of animal laboransrefer to a social category of humanity that was formerly described as the lower orders and today is
POLITICAL THEORY,Vol. 7 No. 4, November1979521-531 Inc. 0 1979Sage Publications, 521

522 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1979

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

I. WHO IS ANIMAL LABORANS9 Both Kateb and Canovanbelieve that Arendt'sharsh strictures against animal laborans are not simply the expression of the low valuation she places on a particularactivity or relationshipto the world, but constitute the castigation of a whole social class, namely the labouringor working class.5 In other words, not only labouringbut 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."6Animal laborans is seen to be synonymous with the labouring class. The same assumption is made by Canovanwho places Arendt's denigration of animal laborans at the centre of her analysis. Canovanclaims to have uncovered "a deep and serious inconsistency,"7 a "contradiction"8 in Arendt, a contradiction between democraticand elitist tendencies. On the one hand, Arendt argues that each idividual has the potential of beginning something new in the world and praisesthe ordinary working people who invented the system of peoples' councils which have been spontaneously formed m almost all modern revolutions.9On the other hand, Canovan suggests that Arendt's work also contains a harsh indictment of the working class m the form of animallaborans,whose activities How are describedas fundamentallyprivateand profoundlyantipolitical.10 then Canovan asks, can Arendt condemn the working class for being "world-less"l and "herdlike"12and at the same time praise it as leading the way in inventingnew forms of political action and discoveringthe joys of public freedom?

Levin / HANNAH ARENDT. A NOTE / 523

Of course, Arendt is not guilty of such a contradiction.Herindictment of animal laboransis the indictment of an activity, a way of life, even of a relationship to the world, but not of a social class. Contraryto Canovan's argument, Arendt is generally quite careful throughout her work to distinguish animal laboransfrom 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 realmbut because we have all become animallaboransm our attitude to our work and in our relationship to the public world. A careful consideration of Arendt's special usage of animallaboransis in order. she In Arendt's first edition of The Originsof Totalitarianism, 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 totalitarianism 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'sassertions. 4 Canovanclaims 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 automaticallybe a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian."'6However, the fact that Arendt places m "labourers" quotation marksshould suggestto Canovanas it is meant to to the readerthat Arendt is employig the term m a specialway. suggest For Arendt is not refernng to a sociological class here but, as she writes to only a few lines previously m the very same paragraph, a "worldwhose chlef values are dictated by labour, that is where all human activitieshave been transformedito labouring."17 It is this last statement whlch Canovan ignores that requiresexplication and whlch constitutes the groundof her idictment of the modem age. What can Arendt mean when she describesa "world whose chief values are dictated by labour"9 To understand Arendt, it is necessary to grasp that her thought revolvesaroundtwo fundamentalpolanties: 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 describedby 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 providingthe necessities of life. All such activities Arendt calls labouring.Whatis unique about the modern age, according to Arendt, is that mere life has itself been elevated to the highest good and consequently, labouringwhich sustains that life has become the dominant activity All "the ancient distinctions and articulationswithin the vita active,"19the distinctionsbetween labour, work, and action has been levelled out or obliterated.20They have disappeared because only those activities which contribute to the biologicallife process are seen as havingvalue. This means that labouring,which sustains that process,has been "elevatedto the highest rankof man'scapacities,"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 durablelastingworld which is durable precisely because it transcends life, what we are left with is actually not a true public realm, "but only privateactivities 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 remainsto be explained:how the victory of animal laborans (the chapter with which Arendt concludes The Human Condition) is not the victory of a particularclass but is the consequence of a world "whereall human activitieshave been transformed into labounng." Arendt is quite explicit on this point. Animal laboransdoes 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 labourmgactivity itself, which precededby centuries 3 the political emancipationof labourers."2 Canovan misunderstandsArendt when she accuses Arendt of Again, lapsing into a materialistdeterminism.24WhenArendt refersto labourers, she does not mean the Marxian proletanans who are defined by their relationship to the means of production. Arendt explicitly disclaimsthat every member of the labourers'society must actually be a labourerm the sociological sense, "but only that all members consider whateverthey do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families,"2 When Arendt inveighs against the labourers'or consumers'society,2 6 she is not pointing her philosophical finger at the labouringmasses

Levin / HANNAHARENDT. A NOTE / 525

but at all classes in society. For the modern age's preoccupationwith the life processitself and the consequent theoreticalglorificationof labourhas transformedthe 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 procuringthe necessities of life and providingfor 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, everythingwe do is consideredto be done for the sake of "makinga living."
As a result, all seriousactivities, irrespectiveof their fruits, are called labour, and every activity which is not necessaryeither for the life of the idividual or for the life processof society is subsumedunderplayfulness.28

The particularderangementof 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"29over 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."30It 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 transformour economy into a total waste economy in which things would be "almost as quickly devoured and discarded"31as they appearedm 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-endingprocess, would no longer be able to recognizeits 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 vindication 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-evaluationof non-political things."34 For Arendt's"re-evaluation" is, of course, a radicaldevaluationof nonpolitical thigs. WhatKateb partly misses and where I believe Canovanto be quite mistaken is in the identification of that devaluationwith a social class ratherthan 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 awarenessof the evanescenceand precariousness of human accomplishment.35 It is to be found i Arendt's conviction that much of life's activities are done m unredeemablefutility, a futility bound up in the transiencyand ephemeralityinherentin the very biological processes of life itself. Labour, in particular,is singled out by Arendt because labouris the activity
which corresponds to the blological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism,and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessitiesproducedand fed ito the life processby labour.36

By its very nature then labour is condemned to never leave anything lasting behind. 7 Yet what justifies life for Arendt and makes "life's burden"3 bearable is precisely that which defies and transcends the mortality of idividual life and the natural cyclical processeswhich surroundit. Arendt'sdenigration of labouring (or animal laborans) can now be seen for what it is. It is rooted m her profound "repugnanceto futility,"38 a futility to which labour, by its very nature, is consigned. Hence Arendt's opposition is not even to labouringor animal laboransas 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 perhapsbe emphasizedby observng that while labouring is an example of futility for Arendt, all of life's futility is not encompassedby labouring. In an intriguig passage m her essay on "WhatIs 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-madehistoricalprocesseswhich 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 automatismis inherentin all processes,no matterwhat 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."42Moreover they are not eradicable.They cannot be vanquished: "they are ratherthe modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt."43 As Arendt remids us:
Mancannot be free if he does not know that he is subjectto necessity,because his freedom is always won m his never wholly successfulattempt 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 transcendingnature in assertingthe 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'sanswerto her searchfor 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 darknessof every day life."46 We are also now in a position to reflect on how misleading is Canovan'sidentification of Arendt'sanimal 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 classicalGreece and the reason that Arendt finds her mtellectual home in the polis derives from her belief that the polls providedthe space where men could not only appearand revealthemselves in their heroic individuality but could strve for nothing less than an earthly immortality Accordingto Arendt, the polls was for the Greeks
first of all their guarantee against the futility of mdividuallife, the space if protected againstthls futility and reservedfor the relativepermanence, not immortality,of mortals.4

Harlkngback to the Greeks and forwardin time to the creation of "new revolutionary organs of self government"49Arendt's overwhelmingsense of the futility of most of life's activities now finds its counterpartin her exalted conviction m the redeemig possibility of the political. The political realm is the one realm where the ephemeralnature 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 throughthe ages. Indeed, they become "imperishable."51 It is important to be clear what Arendt is assertinghere. 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 greatnessof mortals lies m their ability to produce which would deserveto be and, at least to a degree,are at home m thmgs so everlastingness, that through them mortals could find their place m the cosmos where everythng is unmortalexcept themselves.By their capacityfor the unmortaldeed, by their ability to leavenon-pershabletracesbehmd,men,

Levin/ HANNAHARENDT. A NOTE / 529 their idividual mortality notwithstanding,attai an immortalityof theirown and provethemselvesto 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 remembranceof their good and bad deeds, to inspire admirationin the present and in future ages"55 and who will thereby "provethemselvesto 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 "privateactivities displayedin the open."57 The private has superseded the public, politics yielded to economics and freedom has been submergedby necessity This is the real meaning for Arendt of the ascendancyof animallaborans.Moreover,in an age which believes that our freedom and individualitybegin 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 Contradictions of HannahArendt'sPoliticalThought,"Political Theory6, 1 (February1978). Hereaftercited as "Contradictions." 2. Actually Arendt sigles out two kinds of activitesfor criticismand devaluaof tion, both of which are characteristic the modem age: labourmgand its counterpart, consumption,and the cultivation of consciousnessand 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 withdrawinto themselves.Both are prisoners." "Freedomand Worldliness the Thoughtof HannahArendt,"p. 146. m

530 / POLITICAL THEORY/ NOVEMBER1979 3. Ibid., p. 144. 4. "Contradictions," 11. p. 5. Arendt actually makes a novel distinctionbetween labourand work. While the distinction is importantm a discussionof the threeactivitiesof the vitaactiva, it is not relevantto the presentessay m 6. "Freedomand Worldliness the Thoughtof HannahArendt,"p. 144. 7 "Contradictions," 5. p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. Canovanhad "by-passed"these contradictionsm her earlier excellent study, ThePolitical Thoughtof HannahArendt (New York: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich,1974). 9. For Arendt's account of these people's councils, see HannahArendt, On Revolution (New York: Vikng, 1963), pp. 265-285. Hereafter cited as OR. On see Arendt'slinkingof birth and new begimngs and its significance, HansJonaswho asserts that with "'natality', Arendt not only comed a new word but itroduced a new category into the philosophicaldoctrme of man.""Acting,Knowing,Thiking: SocialResearch44, 1 (Spring Gleanigs from HannahArendt'sPhilosophicalWork," 1977), p. 30. 10. E.g., The Human Condition (GardenCity, NY Doubleday-Anchor, 1959), pp. 42, 74, 111-113, 140-141, 191. Hereaftercited asHC. 11. Ibid., p. 102. 12. Ibid., pp. 190-199. 13. The Burdenof Our Time (London: Secker& Warburg, 1951), pp. 308, 310. 14. "Contradictions," 10-12. pp. 15. Ibid.,pp. 11-12. 16. The Origmsof Totalitarianism Books, 1958), p. 475. (New York: Meridian Citedm "Contradictions," 12. p. 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 relationship with the world. See HannahArendt, "The Crisisin 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 reasonsfor this arerelatedby Arendt,m a subtle and complex argument, to the rise of Christianity,the impact of modern scienceand the loss of faith arlsmg doubt. See the whole of Section VI, "The VitaActiva and the Modern from Cartesian Age," m HC, pp. 225-297 21. Ibid., p. 286. 22. Ibid., p. 115. On the icapacity of animallaboransto 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 argumentseveraltimes. See, for example of ibid., p. 43. The "emancipation labourwas not a consequenceof the emancipation of the workingclass,but precededit." 24. "Contradictions," 11-12. pp. 25. HC, p. 43. 26. "Labourand consumption are but two stagesof the same process,"HC, p. 110. 27. HC, pp. 5, 110-111. 28. Ibid., p. 111. 29. Ibid.

Levin / HANNAHARENDT. A NOTE / 531 30. Ibid., p. 43. 31. Ibid., p. 116. 32. Ibid., pp. 116-117 m 33. "Freedomand Worldliness the Thoughtof HannahArendt,"p. 141. 34. Ibid., p. 143. 35. Arendt's concluding paragraphm On Revolution contans the lines from Sophocles: "Not to be born prevailsover all meanmguttered 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 commentson good fortune"whichis rareand never lasts and cannot be pursued,"HC, p. 93 and on the "good things m history"which "are usually of short duration,"m "Thoughtson Politics and Revolution,"i Crises of the Republic (New York: HarcourtBraceJovanovich,1972), p. 204. 36. HC, p. 9. 37. OR, p. 285. 38. A phrasefrom Veblenwhich Arendtcites over and overagain. 39. In BetweenPastand 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," 11. p. 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. the view that politics for For Arendt is "essentiallydramaturglc," Sheldon S. Wolin,"HannahArendt and the see Ordinance Time,"Social Research44, 1 (Sprig 1977), p. 96. of 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 Universityof He Canada. is the authorof an articleon "TheChallenge Victoria,British Columbra, to Economic Man" that will shortly appearin Journalof Socialand PoliticalStudies and is currentlyengagedin work on HannahArendt'sthought.