ABSTRACT
Having traced the genealogy of the social as Blob and examined the historical, personal, and intellectual context of The Human Condition, we are now ready to ask what the social is in that book, what Arendt means by that phrase. This requires separating the idea of the social from the image of the Blob, for whatever Arendt meant by the phrase, she surely did not intend a monster from outer space. She meant to address what she regarded as an enormously important, urgent, growing problem in the real world of politics and history, where real people live and suffer. We shall return later to the Blob, but for now set it aside to ask, simply: What is the social for Arendt when it is not mystified? This chapter pursues that question twice, from two different angles: first by
trying to map the social onto Arendt’s other central concepts, and then, second, by trying to reconcile its two so disparate roots, joined in The Human Condition into a single concept: the conformist, or parvenu, social and the economic, or biological, social. To anticipate the results in brief, both approaches lead to the same conclusion: that the social corresponds to none of the ordinary uses or dictionary senses of “society” or “social” but instead greatly resembles what I have sketched as Marx’s fundamental notion of alienation. The way to begin is by asking how the social, juxtaposed as always for Arendt in
a dyadic contrast to politics, maps onto the basic conceptual trilogy that structures The Human Condition: labor, work, and action.1 The question may initially seem trivial and its answer obvious. Indeed, the first few steps are obvious, but after that things become problematic, and their investigation therefore rewarding. Clearly politicsthe opposite of the social-sorts with action; they are almost synonyms for Arendt (1974a: 180, 188). So the social must contrast to action, but how is it related to work and labor? Answering is not easy, because the concept of the social is conspicuously absent from the chapters where labor and work are discussed, and neither labor nor work is mentioned much where the social appears. Instead of
labor or work, what appears alongside the social, as action appears alongside politics, is something Arendt calls “behavior.” So our question can be reformulated as: How is behavior related to labor and work?
