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Citizenship Studies
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Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social
Patricia Owens
a a

Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Version of record first published: 30 Apr 2012

To cite this article: Patricia Owens (2012): Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social, Citizenship Studies, 16:2, 297-307 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.667621

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Citizenship Studies Vol. 16, No. 2, April 2012, 297307

THINKING CITIZENSHIP SERIES Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social
Patricia Owens*
Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

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This article evaluates Hannah Arendts contribution to thinking citizenship in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of the social. It argues that Arendts writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendts story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world. Keywords: Arendt; citizenship; social

The emergence of society the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their signicance for the life of the individual and the citizen. (Arendt 1958, p. 38)

Hannah Arendt is widely celebrated as a theorist of radical democratic citizenship. Few others have better evoked the intrinsic value, dignity, and non-instrumental character of political life. Her writing on the virtues of political agonism and action-in-concert with plural others has been attractive to critical theorists, civic republicans, cosmopolitans, and post-structuralists alike. In contrast, few of even her most sympathetic readers can bring themselves to defend much about her writing on the social. Arendt famously offered an historical account of the modern rise of social realm and its basic ontology as a scaled-up form of household, a deeply problematic hybrid of public and private, polis and oikos. Capitalism and modern state administration inverted the traditional ordering of the active life; the bourgeois concern with labour, productivity and life itself necessitated a denigration of care for the public world and political action for its own sake. The protection and sustenance of life processes through social interventions became the central function of national and now increasingly global forms of governance. Like the domestic realm of the ancient Greek oikos, the modern social realm would be dominated by the rhythms of the life process, but these were no longer conned to the household; they burst out into the public realm perverting its purpose. The political was reduced to a function of the social; politics became government administration thus

*Email: p.owens@sussex.ac.uk
ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.667621 http://www.tandfonline.com

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depriving moderns of the fully human life only found in civic engagement and full membership in the public, political world. Needless to say, Arendts claims have been controversial. She was accused of creating a false distinction between the social and the political, neglecting economy and social justice, and gendering both public and private realms. The problem is not merely that Arendt defended thinking in terms of public private categories in her indictment of the modern social realm, but it would seem that their original patriarchal content could also be found in her work (Elshtain 1981, Pitkin 1998). It is not that Arendt consciously defended patriarchy, but that her symbolic gendering of labour and apparent praise of the misogynist Greeks reinforced the gender binary and relations of power. Arendts contrast between the freedom of political action and the necessities of the life process, essential to understanding what is so problematic about the social, left her open to the related charge of desiring a pure politics in which economy and life necessity are excluded. According to Benhabib (1996, pp. 142, 213), Arendt is aficted by a phenomenological essentialism that holds that every type of human activity has a proper place and can only reveal its essence properly in that place. On this account, we need to abandon Arendts emphasis on the autonomy and uniqueness of the political in favour of a more deliberative public space in which the distinction between the social and political can wither away. It has become commonplace to the point of cliche to condemn Arendts claims regarding the social before proceeding to praise some other aspect of her thought, usually those broadly related to political citizenship. While some criticisms of Arendt in this regard are more persuasive than others, especially in relation to gender, few are effectively targeted at what is essential and most important about her writing on the social. Political theorists tend not to understand Arendts argument as fundamentally historical, rather than primarily normative and analytical. While the analytical and normative loom large in Arendts work, her most signicant insights into the social concern its historical basis and the constraints this imposes on politics, properly conceived. Understood historically, the distinction between social and political does not primarily correspond to different issues and institutions as if economic justice and civil society were social, while constitutional debate and state institutions were political (Benhabib 1996, p. 139). The social already represents the merging of what the modern age (not Arendt) dened as economic (capitalist exchange) and political (state administration). Arendt did indeed contrast political freedom and life necessity, but the distinction is not grounded on a separation of economics and politics (the bourgeoisies separation, not Arendts). It is based on the difference between life as the necessary and cyclical processes associated with our mortal bodies, and world as the articial and potentially more enduring, even immortal, space for politics. The social cannot be synonymous with all labour-like, life-sustaining activities per se. If the social realm is a relatively recent and problematic modern invention, as Arendt argued, then it makes no sense to assert that all life processes should be contained therein. In other words, social and political are not equivalent concepts. The former is a historically specic formation associated with capitalist government; it is the realm where the life process has established its own public domain (Arendt 1958, p. 47). The political is a fundamental human activity not reducible to capitalism or the nation-state. What exactly was the social realm, according to Arendt, and how did its rise pervert the possibilities for meaningful citizenship? The social realm emerged in the late eighteenth-century as the domain in which the life processes of ever-larger populations were administered by the state in the interests of order and capital accumulation. The capitalist market expanded through government action and a new distinction between

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state public and privatised economy emerged. The social formed as an intermediary between these newly dened public and private domains. The social question, so controversially analysed by Arendt in On revolution ([1963] 1970), was an expression of the conict between claims of meaningful political citizenship and the reality of poverty in the age of accumulation. Kirstie McClure (2007, p. 101) has rightly argued that
the question of the social question arises not as an analytical/conceptual problem, but as a practical issue within the broader historical phenomenon of the rise of the social and, more particularly, in contingent relation to the diverse administrative apparatuses adopted by modern states to manage, address, or otherwise cope with the vicissitudes of the process of accumulation.

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What are these administrative apparatuses and how best to account for the ontology of the social realm? As noted above, Arendt understood the social as a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of public housekeeping. Although it is implied by some of her critics, Arendt never presented the household, in whatever form, as somehow divorced of relations of power and beyond normative judgement. In other words, critics have focused on what Arendt had to say about citizenship in the Greek polis at the expense of her account of the oikos and its oppressions. Rather than celebrating the Greeks and Athenian citizenship, Arendt was illuminating forms of domination in modern mass society through the horrors of subordination in the classical household. So problematic about the modern rise of the social, among other things, was that the model of the patriarchal family was transgured onto collective life as a whole, except that the despotism of the father was replaced by the anonymous rulership of the bureaucrat. This short contribution to the Thinking Citizenship series addresses this important element of Arendts story, the rise of the social as a form of large-scale public housekeeping and why it was so devastating for meaningful citizenship. Arendt celebrated the spontaneous, initiatory ability of a plurality of actors of citizens to bring into being something new. It was this revolutionary capacity to create new beginnings that was most endangered by the relentless administration of the social as a substitute for political action. Transformations of the household A basic feature of human existence, households are organisations in which the life processes of members are reproduced and, crucially, in which membership is not conned to houses or kinship relations (Peterson 2010). Life processes are closely related to the biological and labouring activities of the human body, humans as animal laborans. They are necessary, repetitive, and cyclical and tend to involve violent subordination (Arendt 1958, Terada 2011). Under modern capitalism, Arendt argued, the organisation and management of life processes underwent a major transformation: they were emancipated from their containment within the classical or medieval household. The modern social realm emerged when the life processes of populations acquired their own public domain, that is, when activities and relations of dependency once rooted in ancient and feudal households became a matter of state public regulation and administration. The expansion of capitalist markets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a new set of distinctions between state-administrative (public) power and (privatised) economy. This hybrid emerged because although public administration was not directly concerned with the productive economy, the new private sphere of economic reproduction was of enormous public (state) relevance (also see Habermas [1962] 1991). As distinct from polis and oikos, politics and economy, society became conceptualised and acted on as the mass or multitude of households (Myrdal 1953, Arendt 1958). This section briey

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analyses the concept and changing structure of households through transformations of the public private distinction so central to Arendts conception of citizenship. Where the modern, bourgeois household emerged primarily as a reproductive and consumer unit, the ancient oikos was the fundamental building block of the classical polis. The private space of the oikos and the public political realm were recognised as culturally distinct but clearly integrated in important and complimentary ways. Household activities were arranged in accordance with the personal ranking of members master, wife, child, servant, slave each understood to have specic tasks and responsibilities (Booth 1993). The gendered, parental and master slave relations between household members appeared natural and inevitable. The basic activities related to maintaining life the endlessness and repetitiveness of the labouring process were not considered distinctively human, but limitations imposed by nature on all animal life and which stood in stark contrast to what was conceived as the unpredictability and extraordinariness of political action (Arendt 1958, pp. 28 37). Women and slaves as not fully capable of expressing their humanity by participating in polis life were forced through violence to provide life-reproducing functions for the benet of free (and thus considered fully human) male citizens. They attended to the repetitive and cyclical needs of life. It was of enormous signicance to Arendt that the basic management of life processes, the primary activity of the oikos, was a realm of violence, necessity, hierarchy and privation. The household was the building block of the polis not only in terms of reproducing the life of citizens but also in the moral formation of citizens able to participate in military and political affairs. The political freedom of the citizens, Arendt argued, required the institution of slavery and the practice of war. Slavery was not simply a part of Greek political life; it was a necessary condition. Power was organised to facilitate the organised solidarity of the masters over the slaves (Arendt 1972, p. 149, 2002, p. 285). From the perspective of the all-male citizenry, the chief merit of their political organisation was that it enabled citizens to act as bodyguards to one another against slaves and criminals so that none of the citizens may die a violent death (Xenophon in Arendt 1972, p. 149f). This solidarity was an integrative, constitutive struggle. Citizens banded together to protect themselves against those whom they oppressed. Limiting access to the public realm restricted the nature and content of matters discussed, which in turn reinforced existing gendered and other hierarchies. In other words, the polis was functionally dependent on the oikos, but the experience of the oikos was also required to give meaning to polis life and its distinctive political and military activities. They were distinct but inseparable. This interpretation was new with Aristotle. In The Statesman, Plato made no distinction between the constitution of the polis and of a large household. The best model for political rulership was the hierarchal, patriarchal oikos; the same body of knowledge covered both domains (Arendt 1958, p. 223n). Aristotle distinguished more sharply between polis and oikos, conceiving household management as a form of expertise for the acquisition of life necessities as distinct from political action, more accurately reecting polis conditions: oikonomikos was a means to higher ethical and political ends determined by the free citizenry. The polis was not an expanded oikos. Where the former required a multiplicity of equal actors and opinions to thrive, the later was hierarchical in which one opinion was enforced and one interest prevailed. The satisfaction of basic material needs and, by extension, all economic activities, were not ends in themselves. The household economy was subordinated to the wider (though also restricted) political community and the demands of civic virtue. For example, rather than the basis of the accumulation of ever-greater wealth, property was understood as a secure private enclosure from which men were able to enter into the common public world. This vision of a largely use-value, needs-oriented economy

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was attractive to Karl Marx, who, like Arendt, commented favourably on the democratic possibilities of the Greek model if shorn of its many hierarchies. Conict and competition between Greek city-states contributed to the decline of the ancient polis and associated household model. With the collapse of the late Roman Empire after the Germanic invasions, the slave mode of production was replaced by feudalism; slaves became dependent tenants. The basis of feudal authority in medieval Europe was the ability of lords to appropriate feudal rents from peasants. Production was organised around subsistence agriculture and associated relations of dependency in a self-contained household economy (Habermas 1991, p. 15). The village community, in the words of Ferdinand Tonnies (1955, p. 68), even where it encompasses also the feudal lord, is in its necessary relation to the land like one individual household. The common land was the object of household activity and care and is intended partly for the collective purposes of the unit itself, partly for the identical and related purposes of its members. The organisation of the feudal household was not simply the underlying foundation of the wider political community; private and public were fused into one. Production, reproduction, and politics (as domination) were combined. Monarchs were not in a position to directly govern within strictly dened territories; control over violence was diffuse. In Arendts (1958, p. 29, fn14) words,
Within the feudal framework, families and households were mutually almost independent, so that the royal household, representing a given territorial region and ruling the feudal lords as primus inter pares, did not pretend, like an absolute ruler, to be the head of one family. The medieval nation was a conglomeration of families; its members did not think of themselves as members of one family comprehending the whole nation.

Jurisdiction was dispersed among a number of overlapping actors in a system of shifting relations of hierarchy and subordination. Feudal arrangements were transformed when their underlying economic and military underpinnings evolved. Small peasant property ownership and serfdom were destroyed with the forcible expropriation of the peasant classes (Arendt 1958, p. 66). Proudhons dictum that property is theft, Arendt (1958, p. 67) wrote, has a solid basis of truth in the origins of modern capitalism. The revolutions in the management of life processes fed into changes in the systems of public authority. While property was privatised and commercial relations were understood as occurring in civil society among private individuals, signicant elements of private exchange became the concern of the increasingly powerful state public realm. Commodity exchange burst out of the connes of the household (Habermas 1991, p. 28), but accumulation itself would adopt many of the characteristics of the life process that had previously been contained in the ancient oikos: it would constantly expand its reach in a potentially never-ending process; an unnatural growth of the natural (Arendt 1958, p. 47). The reproduction of life was no longer a matter primarily left to the household, as in the classical oikos or medieval manor. It required public regulation and protection in the interests of what would be conceived of as society as a whole. With capitalism, Arendt (1958, p. 47) argued, the labour process was liberated . . . from its circular monotonous recurrence [in ancient and medieval households] and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world. Out of the Oikos Why did capitalism require the emergence of a separate social realm? What does this distinctive form of space and mode of governance mean for citizenship? As outlined in

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The human condition, the rise of the social was closely associated with the historical transformation of private wealth into capital and the commoditisation of productive processes, especially human labour. The new private realm of economic exchange assumed public signicance. The exchange of labour for a wage would now occur in a newly conceived private realm, yet the circumstances of capitalist exchange the working of the market and the conditions of labour were a matter of state concern and intervention. What we called earlier the rise of the social, wrote Arendt (1958, p. 68), coincided historically with the transformation of the private care for property into a public concern. The new system of accumulation again transformed the meanings of public and private. In particular, the functions of both the political realm and the domestic household dramatically narrowed. Civil society, distinguished from the state, would be comprised of two different forms of privacy: capitalist exchange and the intimate sphere of the family. Political citizenship was redened, narrowed, and subordinated to capitalist economy. The new public realm was conceived as a separate and distinct sphere of government action; administrative structures associated with the state became the new narrow conception of politics. Political action was not conceived as an end in itself; government was established as the means to the end of protecting liberty, national defense and private property. In Arendts (1961, p. 150) words, government, which since the beginning of the modern age had been identied with the total domain of the political, was considered to be the appointed protector not so much of freedom as of the life process, the interests of society and its individuals. Rather than directly participate in all public affairs, bourgeois subjects participated primarily to protect private interests. Rather than achieving ones full and equal humanity through speaking and acting with ones peers, the private person in the bourgeois household was the denition of the human with moral rights. The capacity for speech and action was not what dened humans as distinct from other animals. The ideal individual was the property-owning businessman and head of household, an image taken to dene the human being as such. The intimate household became the sphere of privacy and personal freedom. The management of life processes was no longer rooted in the classical oikos or medieval household economy. However, there are several ways in which the public organisation of the new system could be understood in terms of an expanded oikos; social regulation would extend the activities, problems and organizational devices of the patriarchal household (Arendt 1958, p. 38). Formally private activities, mentalities and forms of oppression associated with the oikos did not disappear with modern capitalism and the nation-state; they were transformed. Labour had been redened as the source of wealth; it needed to be properly and rationally organised for the benet of a new unied object: the national society as a whole (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). How best to think of this (ctitious) subject? Political economy emerged as the new scholarly and practical eld examining the scientic laws regulating economy in the interests of society. Its terminology relied on the analogy between the individual running of a household for the benet of its members and social (or national) housekeeping. There was a need to assume a willing subject who coordinates economic activities on behalf of society that, in Arendts (1958, p. 47-8fn) words, was conceived as one single subject, the fulllment of whose needs [were] then subdivided by an invisible hand among its members. As Gunnar Myrdal (1953, p. 141) put it, The very attempt to study society from the economic point of view makes it necessary to assume such a unied subject and to determine it scientically in order to derive the general interest or the general welfare. Rather than in the interests of the despotic patriarch, government planning, administration and economic decision-making

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were legitimated in terms of social and nationalist discourses. In an adaptation of the long-standing tradition of accounting for government structure in terms of the family, the nation-state would be conceived as one family with a unity of interests; society itself would be the primary protector of the needs of the individual. Even with less organic, more civic, forms of nationalism the state could appear as a neutral arbiter between kinsmen, a benign body that could administer the rule of law; the collective of families economically organised into the facsimile of one superhuman family is what we call society, and its political form of organization is called nation (Arendt 1958, p. 29). The classical bourgeois public sphere of civil society would eventually be subsumed into an expanded and deepened social realm in a context of class conict and imperial crises. Liberal constitutional states were forced to respond to the demands of labour; more concerted and organised forms of state-led socialisation would be required as well as new academic and sociological discourses about citizenship.1 Under the traditional social-welfare model, the social represented a territorial unity, a space through which government coordinated policy in the name of national solidarity (Donzelot 1984, Durkheim 1997 [1893]). Concepts of social citizenship would underpin mass social programmes related to housing, education, and health (Marshall 1950). In mass society, a variety of socially dened groups would seek equal recognition from the state. The equality of the members of these groups, far from being an equality among peers, Arendt (1958, p. 40) maintained, resembles nothing so much as the equality of household members before the despotic power of the household head, except that in society, where the natural strength of one common interest and one unanimous opinion is tremendously enforced by sheer number, actual rule by one man, representing the common interest and the right opinion, could eventually be dispensed with. This form of rulership was not despotically patriarchal as such, although systems of patriarchy would persist. It was rulership through permanent bureaucracy, which, according to Arendt, was the most social form of government. Not one-man rule as in the ancient oikos, but a kind of noman rule (Arendt 1958, p. 40). Increasingly anonymous administration substituted for the dictates of the pater familas. But the task of the bureaucratic administrator of social assistance, Arendt (1958, p. 93) argued, was less to keep the life process intact and provide for its regeneration than to care for the upkeep of the various gigantic bureaucratic machines whose processes consume their services and devour their products as quickly and mercilessly as the biological life process itself. To be sure, Arendt did not offer a conventional history of the rise of the social realm, nor were her writings on this area entirely consistent (see Pitkin 1998). We see this in Reections on little rock (Arendt 2003 [1959]), an essay on the clash of states rights, federal law, and the rights of free association she believed were highlighted by the US Supreme Courts decision to legally enforce school desegregation in the American South. Arendt appeared to conate the more general term society, formed through human association as such, with the language of the social sphere, concepts that she elsewhere tries to separate given the more specic and historical rise of the social realm. Moreover, as with her account of totalitarianism, she deliberately resisted the temptation to offer a linear path of causality that might be understood as culminating in the creation of the modern social (McClure 2007). In Origins of totalitarianism, the elements that crystallised into the social (as well as the totalitarian) are the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie; imperial accumulation of capital in which Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver, if and insofar as it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole (Arendt 1966, p. 152); and the rise (and decline) of the nation-state. On revolution (Arendt [1963] 1970) was less a history of the social than a study of how the social question

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overwhelmed the French revolutionaries just as they were trying to nd public freedom. The most sustained discussion of societys victory in the modern age (Arendt 1958, p. 45) is in The human condition and, again, focuses on capitalism and the bureaucratic state in addition to three earlier events imperial, religious, and scientic at the threshold of the modern age.2 At the end of this book, Arendts historical argument is condensed into a sequence of three successive stages of what she would call world alienation. The rst stage was the cruelty of the primitive accumulation that produced the laboring poor,
whom expropriation deprived of the twofold protection of family and property, that is, of a family-owned private share in the world, which until the modern age had housed the individual life process and the labouring activity subject to its necessities. The second stage was reached when society became the subject of the new life process, as the family had been its subject before. Membership in a social class replaced the protection previously offered by membership in a family, and social solidarity became a very efcient substitute for the earlier, natural solidarity ruling the family unit. (Arendt 1958, p. 256)

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The beginnings of the last phase of this historical development were clear to Arendt writing in the middle of the 1950s and should be familiar to any undergraduate student of international relations today (see Owens 2011a, 2011b). The decline of the European nation-state system; the economic and geographic shrinkage of the earth, so that prosperity and depression tend to become worldwide phenomena; the transformation of mankind, which until our own time was an abstract notion or a guiding principle for humanists only, into a really existing entity whose members at the most distant points of the globe need less time to meet than the members of a nation needed a generation ago (Arendt 1958, p. 257). Each successive stage of the process, from the original expropriation of peasants and the creation of wage labourers to the rise of social welfare-ism to the now transnational administration of the social underpins the condition of world alienation so devastating to political citizenship. Arendt did not offer a theory of citizenship as such, although her theory of politics had clear implications for how citizenship should be understood in relation to the rise of the social, but also more generally. In The origins of totalitarianism, she argued that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly dened territorial entities (Arendt 1966, p. ix). In later work she began to articulate a form of post-national politics and political founding that were potentially worldwide in scope; namely a democratic-republican model of interlinked polities. Crucially, however, there is an important element of territorial bounded-ness to political space and thus limitations on any idea of global citizenship or we might add to the transnational administration of the social. The rights and duties of citizenship, she wrote, must be dened and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory (Arendt 1968, p. 81). In addition to the stabilising capacity of law, territorial boundaries provide the main limitation to the inherently boundlessness and unpredictability of political action, but also some limitation on the dangers of imperial expansion and the tyranny of world government. World citizenship should not be imagined, to borrow her words from a different context, as an achievable, producible end within the world (Arendt 2005, p. 3). And as she put it in her Kant lectures, one is supposed to take ones bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen (Arendt 1982, p. 76). This is suggested in Arendts much-cited phrase the right to have rights. The rst right implies a claim to membership of a political world and associated right to speak and act with plural equals in that political space. It means to live in a framework where one is

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judged by ones actions and opinions and a right to belong to some kind of organized community (Arendt 1966, pp. 296 297). This rst right is universal but is also politically and historically grounded. The political is always limited by a concrete political space and yet, inspired by Karl Jaspers philosophy of mankind, it forever remains in reference to the world and the people in it, not because it is bound to any existing space. In fact, the opposite is the case, because [Jaspers] deepest aim is to create a space in which the humanitas of man can appear (Arendt 1968, p. 79). Each of us has a right to be treated as a member of humanity and, as discussed below, our humanity is most fully realised through caring for the public, political world. The second reference to rights in Arendts phrase is to those rights already possessed by citizens in a distinct political community. These are the non-universal rights necessary for democratic self-determination and, again, reect the incontrovertible fact that the organisation of politics, the articial human-made laws, and conventions, are historically contingent, just as the subversion of the political by the social was an historical rather than a conceptual or primarily normative problem. Conclusion: not life but the world is at stake In writing on the rise of the social in this way, Hannah Arendt was asking whether it was possible to preserve the distinctiveness of the political in a society made in the image of the household. The social, recall, arose when life processes acquired their own public domain through a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping (Arendt 1958, p. 28). Though fundamentally shaped by economy and politics, the social is neither strictly the sphere of economic interaction or political conict. It is the historically specic domain between state-politics and capitalist-economy, polis and oikos, or the merging of these realms. Arendt concluded that humans did retain the capacity to begin and create new worlds with plural others and thereby interrupt and disrupt the endless processes associated with labour, that is, to act outside and even against social administration. But the creation of such genuine new beginnings would be episodic and rare in the modern age. Several years after Arendt was writing about the life process of society, Michel Foucault (2003) presented an almost equally vivid picture of how biological life itself had become the subject of interventions aimed at improving, but also controlling and normalising groups along lines of nationality, race, gender, illness, and age. This biopolitics is said to operate across all spheres, eliminating the distinctiveness of any legal and political subjectivity (also see Agamben 1995). This system of differentiating and then intervening into socially dened groups, Arendt (1968, p. 155) argued, is a constituent element of the social realm. The problem, she wrote, is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is as distinct from . . . who he is (Arendt 1968, p. 155). Arendt theorised whatness as an attribute of physical fact and identity that may connect a person to and dene them against others. Once such a construct is adopted, this whatness becomes the quality that describes a certain type; it identies different specimens of the animal species mankind (Arendt 1958, p. 46). Social administration works on whatness and its sociability rests not on equality but on sameness (Arendt 1958, p. 213). Someones who-ness, in contrast, is their specic, unique, and distinguishing identity that is constantly recreated and revealed in action and speech among individuals who are not the same but equal citizens. On what grounds, then, can we argue that humans do not exist only as members of a species to be governed based on whatness (Arendt 1958, p. 18, emphasis added)? Should we embrace an image of the world as one large zone of indistinction between biological and political life (Agamben 1995, p. 187, cf. Owens 2009)? Arendts argument

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concerning the weight of the social on the political is no less radical than theorists of biopolitics. The victory of the social was a victory of life over world, of the necessities of animal laborans over the appearance of free humanity, of subjects over citizens. Yet she offered a new conceptualisation of politics based precisely on the distinction between life itself and the possibility of constituting an articially constructed, worldly space for politics. Through speech and action men and women could form a space in-between them, the public realm or world that varies with each group of people (Arendt 1958, p. 182). Action is worldly and world making. The term public, Arendt (1958, p. 52) wrote,
literally signies the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it. This world . . . is not identical to the earth or with nature . . . It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs that go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together . . . the world, like every inbetween, relates and separates men at the same time . . . What makes mass society so difcult to bear is not the number of people involved . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and separate.

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Only in such an articially constructed realm of political equality, she argued, could human freedom, and thus the achievement of our fullest humanity, become possible; human beings in the true sense of the term can exist only where there is a world, and there can be a world in the true sense of the term only where the plurality of the human race is more than a simple multiplication of a single species (Arendt 2005, p. 176). On numerous occasions, Arendt described certain activities as non-political or prepolitical. Her critics often claimed that this political always seemed to be somewhere else and its content was never very clear (Shklar 1998). But it is not the issues or contents of debate that dened Arendts politics. It is a distinctive mode of being with others manifest in action and speech. At its best, political action is marked by a concern for the public, political world itself, care that may even take the form of activities associated with the oikos. Consider the attention paid to the integrity of the public space, the world created through political action, by the men and women revolutionaries in Egypts Tahrir Square. As well as calling for the overthrow of Mubarak, these actors self-organised during the many weeks of the occupation, cleaning the square, organising food, and recycling. Later, volunteers would clear rubble, mend pathways, and remove paint. The square had literally become the space for freedom and the concern for and care for the public space itself shown by the revolutionaries was paradigmatic of what they were doing: attempting to found freedom. Arendts point is that the worldliness of political action is irreducible. She suggests that the political realm itself is more than the sum of the individuals or citizens who constitute it; political space has interests and needs of its own. Strictly speaking, she wrote, politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endured beyond them (Arendt 2005, p. 175). To engage in political action is to participate with plural others in founding and sustaining a common, public political world that can last longer than a natural human life. Notes
1. Arendt despised social science. The confusion over these matters among intellectuals in immense. The blame lies with the sociologists and psychologists in whose conceptual swamps everything founders and sinks. They, too, of course, are only a symptom of the mass society, but they play an independent role as well (Arendt in Arendt and Jaspers 1992, p. 236). These events were the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the Reformation, which by expropriating ecclesiastical and monastic possessions started the twofold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth; the invention of

2.

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

References
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