Hannah Arendt on the social

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the social, together with her diagnosis that the modern era is beset by a crisis which she characterizes as the “rise of the social”, are difficult topics. They provoke and challenge her readers today at least as much as they did when she first presented them in her writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, although three generations of commentators have now weighed in on the issue, there is still no settled interpretation of exactly what she means by the phrase “the rise of the social”. In this contribution, I consider some of the various interpretations of the phrase, and propose that we consider Arendt’s concept of the social in the context of the general theory of human activity presented in The Human Condition. This involves interpreting some of Arendt’s claims about the category of labour in a way that yields a broader meaning of the concept of the social than is customarily presented. A subsidiary argument pursued throughout this chapter is the fruitfulness of interpreting Arendt through her relation to the works of the founders of the modern sciences of the social, especially Max Weber, Karl Marx and Karl Mannheim. This interpretation runs counter to some other interpretations, principally those that align her philosophically with existential individualism or politically with conservatism.