Polytropy

Index to this series

CHAPTER II The Public and the Private Realm [1]

4 man: a social or a political animal

¶ 4.1

The vita activa, human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man­made things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man’s activities, which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity

• which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things;
• which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or
• which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic.

No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

¶ 4.2

All human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together, but it is only action that cannot even be imagined out­side the society of men.

• The activity of labor does not need the presence of others, though a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans in the word’s most literal significance.
• Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god—not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.

Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god [22] is capable of it,¹ and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.

¶ 4.3

This special relationship between action and being together seems fully to justify the early translation of Aristotle’s zōon politi­kon by animal socialis, already found in Seneca, which then became the standard translation through Thomas Aquinas: homo est natu­raliter politicus, id est, socialis (“man is by nature political, that is, social”).² More than any elaborate theory, this unconscious sub­stitution of the social for the political betrays the extent to which the original Greek understanding of politics had been lost. For this, it is significant but not decisive that the word “social” is Roman in origin and has no equivalent in Greek language or thought. Yet the Latin usage of the word societas also originally had a clear, though limited, political meaning; it indicated an alliance between people for a specific purpose, as when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime.³ It is only with the later [23] concept of a societas generis humani, a “society of man-kind,”⁴ that the term “social” begins to acquire the general meaning of a fundamental human condition. It is not that Plato or Aristotle was ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the fact that man cannot live outside the company of men, but they did not count this condition among the specifically human characteristics; on the contrary, it was something human life had in common with animal life, and for this reason alone it could not be fundamentally human. The natural, merely social companionship of the human species was considered to be a limitation imposed upon us by the needs of bio­logical life, which are the same for the human animal as for other forms of animal life.

¶ 4.4

According to Greek thought, the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct oppo­sition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family. The rise of the city-state meant that man received “besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios politikos. Now every citizen belongs to two orders of existence; and there is a sharp distinction in his life between what is his own (idion) and what is communal (koinon).”⁵ It was not just an opinion or theory of Aristotle but a simple historical fact that the foundation of the polis was preceded by the destruction of all organized units resting on kinship, such as the phratria and the phylē.⁶ Of all the activities [24] necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bios politikos, namely

• action (praxis) and
• speech (lexis),

out of which rises the realm of human affairs (ta tōn anthrōpōn pragmata, as Plato used to call it) from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded.

¶ 4.5

However, while certainly only the foundation of the city-state enabled men to spend their whole lives in the political realm, in action and speech, the conviction that these two human capacities belonged together and are the highest of all seems to have preceded the polis and was already present in pre-Socratic thought. The stature of the Homeric Achilles can be understood only if one sees him as “the doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words.”⁷ In distinction from modern understanding, such words were not considered to be great because they expressed great thoughts; on the contrary, as we know from the last lines of Antigone, it may be the capacity for “great words” (megaloi logoi) with which to reply to striking blows that will eventually teach thought in old age.⁸ Thought was secondary to speech, but [25] speech and action were considered to be coeval and coequal, of the same rank and the same kind; and this originally meant not only that most political action, in so far as it remains outside the sphere of violence, is indeed transacted in words, but more fundamentally that finding the right words at the right moment, quite apart from the information or communication they may convey, is action. Only sheer violence is mute, and for this reason violence alone can never be great. Even when, relatively late in antiquity, the arts of war and speech (rhetoric) emerged as the two principal political subjects of education, the development was still inspired by this older pre-polis experience and tradition and remained sub­ject to it.

¶ 4.6

In the experience of the polis, which not without justification has been called the most talkative of all bodies politic, and even more in the political philosophy which sprang from it, action and speech separated and became more and more independent activi­ties. The emphasis shifted from action to speech, and to speech as a means of persuasion rather than the specifically human way of answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done.⁹ To be political, to live in a polis, meant that every­thing was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding,

• to force people [26] by violence,
• to command rather than persuade,

were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic

• of life outside the polis,
• of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncon­tested, despotic powers, or
• of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household.

¶ 4.7

Aristotle’s definition of man as zōon politikon

• was not only un­related and even opposed to the natural association experienced in household life; it
• can be fully understood only if one adds his second famous definition of man as a zōon logon ekhon (“a living being capable of speech”).

The Latin translation of this term into animal rationale rests on no less fundamental a misunderstanding than the term “social animal.” Aristotle meant neither to define man in general nor to indicate man’s highest capacity, which to him was not logos, that is, not speech or reason, but nous, the capacity of contemplation, whose chief characteristic is that its content cannot be rendered in speech.¹⁰ In his two most famous definitions, Aristotle only formulated the current opinion of the polis about man and the political way of life, and according to this opinion, everybody outside the polis—slaves and barbarians—was aneu logou, deprived, of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other.

¶ 4.8

The profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin transla­tion of “political” as “social” is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aquinas compares the nature of household rule with political rule: the head of the household, he finds, has some similarity to the head of the kingdom, but, he adds, his power is not so “perfect” as that of the king.¹¹ Not only in Greece and the polis but throughout the whole of occidental an­tiquity, it would indeed have been self-evident that even the power of the tyrant was less great, less “perfect” than the power with which the paterfamilias, the dominus, ruled over his household of slaves and family. And this was not because the power of the city’s [27] ruler was matched and checked by the combined powers of house­hold heads, but because absolute, uncontested rule and a political realm properly speaking were mutually exclusive.¹²

5 the Polis and the household

¶ 5.1

Although misunderstanding and equating the political and social realms is as old as the translation of Greek terms into Latin and their adaption to Roman-Christian thought, it has become even more confusing in modern usage and modern understanding of society. The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a rela­tively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emer­gence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state.

¶ 5.2

What concerns us in this context is the extraordinary difficulty with which we, because of this development, understand the deci­sive division

• between the public and private realms,
• between the sphere of the polis and the sphere of household and family, and, finally,
• between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life,

a division upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic. In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping. The scien­tific thought that corresponds to this development is no longer political science but “national economy” or “social economy” or Volkswirtschaft, all of which indicate a kind of “collective house- [28] keeping”;¹³ the collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family is what we call “society,” and its political form of organization is called “nation.”¹⁴ We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term “political economy” would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was “eco­nomic,” related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition.¹⁵

¶ 5.3

Historically, it is very likely that the rise of the city-state and the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family and household.¹⁶ Yet the old sanctity of the hearth, though much less pronounced in classical Greece than in ancient Rome, was never entirely lost. What prevented the polis from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold sacred the bound­aries surrounding each property was not respect for private prop­erty as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house [29] a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he had no location in it which was properly his own.¹⁷ Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing any contradiction.¹⁸

¶ 5.4

The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself—the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, “the gods who make us live and nourish our body”¹⁹—which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others. That

• individual maintenance should be the task of the man and
• species survival the task of the woman

was obvious, and both of these natural functions,

• the labor of man to provide nourishment and
• the labor of the woman in giving birth,

were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household there­fore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it.

¶ 5.5

The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of free­dom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life [30] in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society—

• a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or
• a society of property-owners, as in Locke, or
• a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or
• a society of producers, as in Marx, or
• a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or
• a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries.

In all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government.

¶ 5.6

What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is

• that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm,
• that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenome­non, characteristic of the private household organization, and
• that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free.

Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condi­tion of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health.

• To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical neces­sity, and
• to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man­made violence.

This twofold and doubled “unhappiness” of slavery is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave. Thus, a poor free man preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing labor market to regular assured work, which, because it restricted his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be servitude (douleia), and even harsh, painful labor was preferred to the easy life of many household slaves.²⁰ [31]

¶ 5.7

The prepolitical force, however, with which the head of the household ruled over the family and its slaves and which was felt to be necessary because man is a “social” before he is a “political animal,” has nothing in common with the chaotic “state of nature” from whose violence, according to seventeenth-century political thought, men could escape only by establishing a government that, through a monopoly of power and of violence, would abolish the “war of all against all” by “keeping them all in awe.”²¹ On the contrary, the whole concept of rule and being ruled, of govern­ment and power in the sense in which we understand them as well as the regulated order attending them, was felt to be prepolitical and to belong in the private rather than the public sphere.

¶ 5.8

The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only “equals,” whereas the household was the center of the strict­est inequality. To be free meant both

• not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and
• not to be in command oneself.

It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled. Thus within the realm of the household, freedom did not exist, for the household head, its ruler, was considered to be free only in so far as he had the power to leave the household and enter the political realm, where all were equals. To be sure, this equality of the political realm has very little in common with our concept of equality: it meant to live among and to have to deal only with one’s peers, and it presupposed the existence of “unequals” who, as a matter of fact, were always the majority of the population in a city-state.²² Equality, therefore, far from being connected with [32] justice, as in modern times, was the very essence of freedom: to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed.

¶ 5.9

However, the possibility of describing the profound difference between the modern and the ancient understanding of politics in terms of a clear-cut opposition ends here. In the modern world, the social and the political realms are much less distinct. That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the politi­cal economists of the modern age. This functionalization makes it impossible to perceive any serious gulf between the two realms; and this is not a matter of a theory or an ideology, since with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the “household” (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all mat­ters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a “collective” concern.²⁴ In the modern world, the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process itself.

¶ 5.10

The disappearance of the gulf that the ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and “rise” into the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon. Such a gulf between the private and the public still existed some­how in the Middle Ages, though it had lost much of its significance [33] and changed its location entirely. It has been rightly remarked that after the downfall of the Roman Empire, it was the Catholic Church that offered men a substitute for the citizenship which had formerly been the prerogative of municipal government.²⁵ The medieval tension between the darkness of everyday life and the grandiose splendor attending everything sacred, with the con­comitant rise from the secular to the religious, corresponds in many respects to the rise from the private to the public in antiq­uity. The difference is of course very marked, for no matter how “worldly” the Church became, it was always essentially an other­worldly concern which kept the community of believers together. While one can equate the public with the religious only with some difficulty, the secular realm under the rule of feudalism was in­deed in its entirety what the private realm had been in antiquity. Its hallmark was the absorption of all activities into the household sphere, where they had only private significance, and conse­quently the very absence of a public realm.

¶ 5.11

It is characteristic of this growth of the private realm, and inci­dentally of the difference between the ancient household head and the feudal lord, that the feudal lord could render justice within the limits of his rule, whereas the ancient household head, while he might exert a milder or harsher rule, knew neither of laws nor justice outside the political realm.²⁷ The bringing of all human [34] activities into the private realm and the modeling of all human relationships upon the example of the household reached far into the specifically medieval professional organizations in the cities themselves, the guilds, confrèries, and compagnons, and even into the early business companies, where “the original joint household would seem to be indicated by the very word ‘company’ (com­panis) … [and] such phrases as ‘men who eat one bread,’ ‘men who have one bread and one wine.’”²⁸ The medieval concept of the “common good,” far from indicating the existence of a politi­cal realm, recognizes only that private individuals have interests in common, material and spiritual, and that they can retain their privacy and attend to their own business only if one of them takes it upon himself to look out for this common interest. What dis­tinguishes this essentially Christian attitude toward politics from the modern reality is not so much the recognition of a “common good” as the exclusivity of the private sphere and the absence of that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call “society.”

¶ 5.12

It is therefore not surprising that medieval political thought, concerned exclusively with the secular realm, remained unaware of the gulf between the sheltered life in the household and the merciless exposure of the polis and, consequently, of the virtue of courage as one of the most elemental political attitudes. What remains surprising is that the only postclassical political theorist who, in an extraordinary effort to restore its old dignity to poli­tics, perceived the gulf and understood something of the courage needed to cross it was Machiavelli, who described it in the rise “of the Condottiere from low condition to high rank,” from privacy to princedom, that is, from circumstances common to all men to the shining glory of great deeds.²⁹ [35]

¶ 5.13

To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life

• obstructed free­dom,
• was a sure sign of slavishness.³⁰

Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who pos­sessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere together­ness imposed on all—slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life.³¹ The “good life,” as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more care­free or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different [36] quality. It was “good” to the extent that

• by having mastered the necessities of sheer life,
• by being freed from labor and work, and
• by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival,

it was no longer bound to the biological life process.

¶ 5.14

At the root of Greek political consciousness we find an un­equaled clarity and articulateness in drawing this distinction. No activity that served only the purpose

• of making a living,
• of sus­taining only the life process,

was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufac­ture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of con­sumers” which Max Weber so vividly described.³² The true char­acter of this polis is still quite manifest in Plato’s and Aristotle’s political philosophies, even if the borderline between household and polis is occasionally blurred, especially in Plato who, proba­bly following Socrates, began to draw his examples and illustra­tions for the polis from everyday experiences in private life, but also in Aristotle when he, following Plato, tentatively assumed that at least the historical origin of the polis must be connected with the necessities of life and that only its content or inherent aim (telos) transcends life in the “good life.”

¶ 5.15

These aspects of the teachings of the Socratic school, which soon were to become axiomatic to the point of banality, were then the newest and most revolutionary of all and sprang not from actual experience in political life but from the desire to be freed from its burden, a desire which in their own understanding the philosophers could justify only by demonstrating that even this freest of all ways of life was still connected with and subject to necessity. But the background of actual political experience, at least in Plato and Aristotle, remained so strong that the distinction between the spheres of household and political life was never doubted. Without mastering the necessities of life in the house­hold, neither life nor the “good life” is possible, but politics is never for the sake of life. As far as the members of the polis are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the “good life” in the polis. [37]

6 the rise of the social

¶ 6.1

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 significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age.

¶ 6.2

This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the bar­barian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authen­tically related.

¶ 6.3

The first articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of [38] intimacy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, characteristically enough, is the only great author still frequently cited by his first name alone. He arrived at his discovery through a rebellion

• not against the oppression of the state
• but against society’s unbearable perversion of the human heart, its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until then had needed no special protection.

The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be localized with the same cer­tainty as the public space. To Rousseau, both the intimate and the social were, rather, subjective modes of human existence, and in his case, it was as though Jean-Jacques rebelled against a man called Rousseau. The modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart. The authenticity of Rousseau’s discovery is beyond doubt, no matter how doubtful the authenticity of the individual who was Rousseau. The astonishing flowering of poetry and music from the middle of the eighteenth century until almost the last third of the nine­teenth, accompanied by the rise of the novel, the only entirely social art form, coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture, is sufficient testi­mony to a close relationship between the social and the intimate.

¶ 6.4

The rebellious reaction against society during which Rousseau and the Romanticists discovered intimacy was directed first of all against the leveling demands of the social, against what we would call today the conformism inherent in every society. It is impor­tant to remember that this rebellion took place before the prin­ciple of equality, upon which we have blamed conformism since Tocqueville, had had the time to assert itself in either the social or the political realm. Whether a nation consists of equals or non-equals is of no great importance in this respect, for society always demands that its members act as though they were mem­bers of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest. Before the modern disintegration of the family, this com­mon interest and single opinion was represented by the household head who ruled in accordance with it and prevented possible dis- [39] unity among the family members.³³ The striking coincidence of the rise of society with the decline of the family indicates clearly that what actually took place was the absorption of the family unit into corresponding social groups. The equality of the mem­bers of these groups, far from being an equality among peers, 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 exerted by one man, representing the common interest and the right opinion, could eventually be dispensed with. The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.

¶ 6.5

It is true that one-man, monarchical rule, which the ancients stated to be the organizational device of the household, is trans­formed in society—as we know it today, when the peak of the social order is no longer formed by the royal household of an ab­solute ruler—into a kind of no-man rule. But this nobody, the assumed one interest of society as a whole in economics as well as the assumed one opinion of polite society in the salon, does not cease to rule for having lost its personality. As we know from the most social form of government, that is, from bureaucracy (the last stage of government in the nation-state just as one-man rule in benevolent despotism and absolutism was its first), the rule by nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and most tyrannical versions.

¶ 6.6

It is decisive that

• society, on all its levels, excludes the possi­bility of action, which formerly was excluded from the house­hold. Instead,
• society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.

With [40] Rousseau, we find these demands in the salons of high society, whose conventions always equate the individual with his rank within the social framework. What matters is this equation with social status, and it is immaterial whether the framework happens to be

• actual rank in the half-feudal society of the eighteenth cen­tury,
• title in the class society of the nineteenth, or
• mere function in the mass society of today.

The rise of mass society, on the con­trary, only indicates that the various social groups have suffered the same absorption into one society that the family units had suffered earlier; with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that dis­tinction and difference have become private matters of the in­dividual.

¶ 6.7

This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect dif­ferent from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek city-states. To belong to the few “equals” (homoioi) meant to be per­mitted to live among one’s peers; but the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all (aien aristeuein).³⁴ The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or less willing to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public affairs.

¶ 6.8

It is the same conformism, the assumption that men behave and [41] do not act with respect to each other, that lies at the root of the modern science of economics, whose birth coincided with the rise of society and which, together with its chief technical tool, statis­tics, became the social science par excellence. Economics—until the modern age a not too important part of ethics and politics and based on the assumption that men act with respect to their econom­ic activities as they act in every other respect³⁵—could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal.

¶ 6.9

The laws of statistics are valid only where large numbers or long periods are involved, and acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations or fluctuations. The justification of sta­tistics is that deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history. Yet the meaningfulness of everyday relation­ships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare deeds, just as the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large num­bers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the wilful obliteration of their very subject matter, and it is a hopeless enterprise to search for meaning in politics or signifi- [42] cance in history when everything that is not everyday behavior or automatic trends has been ruled out as immaterial.

¶ 6.10

However, since the laws of statistics are perfectly valid where we deal with large numbers, it is obvious that every increase in population means an increased validity and a marked decrease of “deviation.” Politically, this means that the larger the population in any given body politic, the more likely it will be the social rather than the political that constitutes the public realm. The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic and least conformable body politic known to us, were quite aware of the fact that the polis, with its emphasis on action and speech, could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted. Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresist­ible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule; and although statistics, that is, the mathematical treatment of reality, was unknown prior to the modern age, the social phenomena which make such treatment possible—great numbers, accounting for conformism, behavior­ism, and automatism in human affairs—were precisely those traits which, in Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own.

¶ 6.11

The unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its “laws” is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely to tolerate non-behavior. Statistically, this will be shown in the leveling out of fluctuation. In reality, deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time. Statistical uniformity

• is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it
• is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.

¶ 6.12

The uniform behavior that lends itself to statistical determina­tion, and therefore to scientifically correct prediction, can hardly be explained by the liberal hypothesis of a natural “harmony of interests,” the foundation of “classical” economics; it was not Karl Marx but the liberal economists themselves who had to in­troduce the “communistic fiction,” that is, to assume that there is [43] one interest of society as a whole which with “an invisible hand” guides the behavior of men and produces the harmony of their conflicting interests.³⁶ The difference between Marx and his fore­runners was only that he took the reality of conflict, as it pre­sented itself in the society of his time, as seriously as the hypo­thetical fiction of harmony; he was right in concluding that the “socialization of man” would produce automatically a harmony of all interests, and was only more courageous than his liberal teach­ers when he proposed to establish in reality the “communistic fic­tion” underlying all economic theories. What Marx did not—and, at his time, could not—understand was that the germs of communistic society were present in the reality of a national household, and that their full development was not hindered by any class-interest as such, but only by the already obsolete monarchical structure of the nation-state. Obviously, what pre­vented society from smooth functioning was only certain tradi­tional remnants that interfered and still influenced the behavior of “backward” classes. From the viewpoint of society, these were merely disturbing factors in the way of a full development of “social forces”; they no longer corresponded to reality and were therefore, in a sense, much more “fictitious” than the scientific “fiction” of one interest.

¶ 6.13

¶ 6.14

To gauge the extent of society’s victory in the modern age, its early substitution of behavior for action and its eventual substitu­tion of bureaucracy, the rule of nobody, for personal rulership, it may be well to recall that its initial science of economics, which substitutes patterns of behavior only in this rather limited field of human activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as “behavioral sciences,” aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal. If economics is the science of society in its early stages, when it could impose its rules of be­havior only on sections of the population and on parts of their ac­tivities, the rise of the “behavioral sciences” indicates clearly the final stage of this development, when mass society has devoured all strata of the nation and “social behavior” has become the stand­ard for all regions of life.

¶ 6.15

Since the rise of society, since the admission of household and housekeeping activities to the public realm, an irresistible tenden­cy to grow, to devour the older realms of the political and private as well as the more recently established sphere of intimacy, has been one of the outstanding characteristics of the new realm. This constant growth, whose no less constant acceleration we can ob­serve over at least three centuries, derives its strength from the fact that through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channeled into the public realm. The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessi­ties of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed. One of the character- [45] istics of privacy, prior to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity. The emergence of society has changed the estimate of this whole sphere but has hardly transformed its nature. The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is ultimately rooted in the one-ness of man-kind. It is because this one-ness of man-kind is not fantasy and not even merely a scientific hypothe­sis, as in the “communistic fiction” of classical economics, that mass society, where man as a social animal rules supreme and where apparently the survival of the species could be guaranteed on a world-wide scale, can at the same time threaten humanity with extinction.

¶ 6.16

Perhaps the clearest indication that society constitutes the public organization of the life process itself may be found in the fact that in a relatively short time the new social realm transformed all modern communities into societies of laborers and jobholders; in other words, they became at once centered around the one activity necessary to sustain life. (To have a society of laborers, it is of course not necessary that every member actually be a laborer or worker—not even the emancipation of the working class and the enormous potential power which majority rule accords to it are decisive here—but only that all members consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families.) Society is the form in which the fact of mutual depend­ence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public signifi­cance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.

¶ 6.17

Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of the public realm must change in accordance with the activities admit­ted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself changes its own nature too. The laboring activity, though under all circumstances connected with the life process in its most elementary, biological sense, remained stationary for thousands of years, imprisoned in the eternal recurrence of the life process to which it was tied. The [46] admission of labor to public stature, far from eliminating its char­acter as a process—which one might have expected, remembering that bodies politic have always been designed for permanence and their laws always understood as limitations imposed upon move­ment—has, on the contrary, liberated this process from its cir­cular, monotonous recurrence and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world.

¶ 6.18

The moment laboring was liberated from the restrictions im­posed by its banishment into the private realm—and this emanci­pation of labor was not a consequence of the emancipation of the working class, but preceded it—it was as though the growth ele­ment inherent in all organic life had completely overcome and overgrown the processes of decay by which organic life is checked and balanced in nature’s household. The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth, not merely against society but against a constantly growing social realm, that

• the private and intimate, on the one hand, and
• the political (in the narrower sense of the word), on the other,

have proved incapable of defending themselves.

¶ 6.19

What we described as the unnatural growth of the natural is usually considered to be the constantly accelerated increase in the productivity of labor. The greatest single factor in this constant increase since its inception has been the organization of laboring, visible in the so-called division of labor, which preceded the in­dustrial revolution; even the mechanization of labor processes, the second greatest factor in labor’s productivity, is based upon it. Inasmuch as the organizational principle itself clearly derives from the public rather than the private realm, division of labor is pre­cisely what happens to the laboring activity under conditions of the public realm and what could never have happened in the privacy of the household.³⁸ In no other sphere of life do we appear to have [47] attained such excellence as in the revolutionary transformation of laboring, and this to the point where the verbal significance of the word itself (which always had been connected with hardly bear­able “toil and trouble,” with effort and pain and, consequently, with a deformation of the human body, so that only extreme misery and poverty could be its source), has begun to lose its meaning for us.³⁹ While dire necessity made labor indispensable to sustain life, excellence would have been the last thing to expect from it.

¶ 6.20

Excellence itself, aretē as the Greeks, virtus as the Romans [48] would have called it, has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, could distinguish oneself from all others. Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors.⁴⁰ Not even the social realm—though it made excellence anonymous, emphasized the progress of mankind rather than the achievements of men, and changed the content of the public realm beyond recognition—has been able altogether to annihilate the connection between public per­formance and excellence.

• While we have become excellent in the la­boring we perform in public,
• our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm ban­ished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private.

This curious discrepancy has not escaped public notice, where it is usually blamed upon an assumed time lag

• between our technical capacities and our general humanistic development or
• between the physical sciences, which change and control nature, and the social sciences, which do not yet know how to change and control society.

Quite apart from other fallacies of the argument which have been pointed out so frequently that we need not repeat them, this criticism concerns only a possible change in the psychology of human beings—their so-called behavior patterns—not a change of the world they move in. And this psychological interpretation, for which the absence or presence of a public realm is as irrelevant as any tangible, worldly reality, seems rather doubtful in view of the fact that no activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for its exercise. Neither education nor ingenuity nor talent can replace the constituent elements of the public realm, which make it the proper place for human excellence. [49]