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Dialectics and distinction: Reconsidering Hannah Arendt's critique of Marx

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Abstract

Perhaps the most often criticized element of Hannah Arendt's political theory is her insistence on the necessity of constructing and maintaining rigid boundaries between various activities of the human condition. Less often, however, is the attempt undertaken to determine the philosophical motivation stimulating this project of distinction. This article will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Arendt's imperative is rooted in a certain misreading of the Marxian dialectic. The first part of the article will outline the contours of Arendt's erroneous interpretation of Marx's understanding of labour, demonstrating the degree to which the latter breaks down the tripartite structure of the vita activa. The second part of the article will read Arendt's affirmation of distinction as being a response to what Arendt will take to be the problems of the dialectic, specifically the dialectic's allegedly necessary positing of conceptual contingency and logical necessity. Finally, the third part of the article will demonstrate, through an examination of two key passages in the work of Marx, the extent to which Marx himself was just as concerned with overcoming the type of homogeneous and abstract universalism rejected by Arendt. The ground will thus be provided for the overcoming of the necessity of Arendtian distinction, and perhaps also for a more fruitful engagement between the Marxian and Arendtian theoretical problematics.

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Notes

  1. It is perhaps worth noting that Bikhu Parekh calls into question the rigorousness of Arendt's philosophical readings more generally: ‘Although perceptive her interpretations of many major political philosophers are questionable. She detaches a specific aspect of a philosopher's thought and examines it in isolation. As a result her interpretations are like caricatures; while they highlight certain features of a philosopher's thought, they generally give a distorted and imbalanced account of it’ (Parekh, 1981, pp. 48–49). Not only this, though, but Arendt simply ignores much content within Marx that would seem to conform to or affirm her own theoretical problematic. It is often, for example, suggested that Arendt's concern with world-alienation is contiguous with Marx's concept of alienation, a fact that Arendt was unable to recognize as a consequence of her misreading of the latter. Although Arendt will concede that Marx's early writings do seem to think of alienation in terms of world-alienation (Arendt, 1998, p. 254n4), she fails to recognize the extent to which this Marxian concept is redeployed throughout Marx's later writings. Jennifer Ring notes that it is clear that both Marx and Arendt ‘share many substantive concerns, which may be subsumed under the category “alienation”. Both stress the urgency of making the world fully human, and insist that only human beings can actively “take back” their world, to ensure that their environment is habitable for all. Both insist that truly human life is something fuller than biologically dominated life’ (Ring, 1989, p. 446). Phillip Hansen observes that ‘Arendt fails to take adequately into account Marx's concern with an alienation not of the self, a concept which he seems in any case to have repudiated as an element of bourgeois ideology, but rather of the world as the forum for the exercise of human powers. In other words, she fails to recognize Marx's desire to promote the very possibilities for free action that so much concern her’ (Hansen, 1993, pp. 37–38). In addition to alienation, Hanna Pitkin argues finally that ‘Marx and Arendt largely agree also about what human fulfillment might look like, specifically that freedom would have to combine individuality with solidarity. They agree that in our present condition we are far from free because almost completely subjected to an enormous, seemingly alien power that debilitates and constrains us yet that is even now of our own making. And they agree that our hope for achieving freedom lies in the paradoxicality of this subjection – that the resultants of our own activity now dominate us only because that activity keeps us isolated from each other, incapable of solidarity’ (Pitkin, 1998, p. 141).

  2. For faithful reconstructions of Arendt's often scattered and not quite systematic critique of Marx, see Canovan (1992, pp. 63–98) and Parekh (1979, pp. 73–83).

  3. Mildred Bakan notes that Arendt's specific misunderstanding of the distinction between modes of labour arises as a consequence of the latter's failure to grasp the Hegelian origins of Marx's concept. As the dialectic of lordship and bondage makes clear, labour for Hegel represents the transcendence of mere appetite: ‘Because the slave defers desire – or appetite – he is open through labour to the object as independent of his desire. So labour, by virtue of its dialectical relation to nature, as split from and related to nature, is at the origin of the transformation of animal desire to human want. Wants are open to the world; wants can be cognized and criticized, recognized as shared by others, and gratified through collective action that is initiated and planned’ (Bakan, 1979, p. 53). Labour makes possible for Hegel the disclosure of a future reality in thought through the deferral of the desire for the immediate satiation which characterizes the satisfaction of appetite, to be determined by thought as opposed to appetite being for Hegel the indicator of freedom. Marx, of course, will shift the locus of freedom from thought to concrete material practice, but for him as well freedom is dependant upon movement beyond the simple and one-sided consideration of biological need. It is this consideration of need which Arendt identifies as labour, but which for Marx is just alienated labour. Hence ‘what Arendt attributes to the ideological dominance of man's lowest aspect – animal laborans – Marxists attribute to historically relative human relations of production that can be changed through our actions’ (p. 63). That said, it should still be noted that there are certainly passages in Marx that suggest the impossibility of the actualization of creative production in the realm of necessity, when this realm, that is, is posited as existing as distinct and before the realm of freedom (see, for example, Marx, 1981, p. 959). Commentators will often suggest that this points to a tension or oscillation in Marx between the desire to humanize labour and the desire to abolish labour. James Bernard Murphy, for example, writes, with respect to Marx, that ‘from his earliest writings he sometimes loses hope for the humanization of work and looks instead to the liberation from work. It is striking to note that at the very same time that Marx was developing his view that human beings realize their essential nature through labour he was also calling for the abolition of labour’ (Murphy, 1993, pp. 171–172). Although I think Murphy overstates the latter moment in Marx, it is certainly true that Arendt fails to recognize, at all, the former moment.

  4. See, for example, Marcuse (1972, pp, 59–79).

  5. Indeed, elsewhere Castoriadis will specifically maintain that Arendt ‘commits an enormous blunder’ in not recognizing that ‘the social question is a political question’ (Castoriadis, 1990, p. 125).

  6. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the volume of scholarship concerned with exploring the relationship between Arendt and Benjamin (see, for example, Eddon, 2006, Herzog, 2000, and Lee-Nichols, 2006).

  7. For an excellent account of the significance of these two texts in Marx's work, specifically in the context of Marx and the issue of radical democracy, see Abensour (2004).

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Martin Breaugh, Asher Horowitz, David McNally, Doug Torgerson and three anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Political Theory for their thoughtful commentary regarding certain of the issues presented here.

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Holman, C. Dialectics and distinction: Reconsidering Hannah Arendt's critique of Marx. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 332–353 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.11

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