ously threatens all overly wealthy communities.77 Necessity and
life are so intimately related and connected that life itself is
threatened where necessity is altogether eliminated. For the
elimination of necessity, far from resulting automatically in the
establishment of freedom, only blurs the distinguishing line be-
tween freedom and necessity. (Modern discussions of freedom,
where freedom is never understood as an objective state of human
existence but either presents an unsolvable problem of subjectivity,
of an entirely undetermined or determined will, or develops out
of necessity, all point to the fact that the objective, tangible differ-
ence between being free and being forced by necessity is no longer
perceived.)
The second outstanding non-privative characteristic of privacy
is that the four walls of one's private property offer the only reli-
able hiding place from the common public world, not only from
everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from
being seen and being heard. A life spent entirely in public, in the
presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it
retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from
some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose
its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense. The only efficient
way to guarantee the darkness of what needs to be hidden against
the light of publicity is private property, a privately owned place
to hide in.78
While it is only natural that the non-privative traits of privacy
should appear most clearly when men are threatened with depriva-
tion of it, the practical treatment of private property by premod-
ern political bodies indicates clearly that men have always been
conscious of their existence and importance. This, however, did
not make them protect the activities in the private realm directly,
but rather the boundaries separating the privately owned from
other parts of the world, most of all from the common world itself.
The distinguishing mark of modern political and economic theory,
77. The relatively few instances of ancient authors praising labor and poverty
are inspired by this danger (for references see G. Herzog-Hauser, op. cit.).
78. The Greek and Latin words for the interior of the house, megaron and
atrium, have a strong connotation of darkness and blackness (see Mommsen,
op. cit., pp. 22 and 236).
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The Human Condition
on the other hand, in so far as it regards private property as a
crucial issue, has been its stress upon the private activities of
property-owners and their need of government protection for the
sake of accumulation of wealth at the expense of the tangible
property itself. What is important to the public realm, however,
is not the more or less enterprising spirit of private businessmen
but the fences around the houses and gardens of citizens. The
invasion of privacy by society, the "socialization of man" (Marx),
is most efficiently carried through by means of expropriation, but
this is not the only way. Here, as in other respects, the revolu-
tionary measures of socialism or communism can very well be
replaced by a slower and no less certain "withering away" of the
private realm in general and of private property in particular.
The distinction between the private and public realms, seen
from the viewpoint of privacy rather than of the body politic,
equals the distinction between things that should be shown and
things that should be hidden. Only the modern age, in its rebellion
against society, has discovered how rich and manifold the realm
of the hidden can be under the conditions of intimacy; but it is
striking that from the beginning of history to our own time it has
always been the bodily part of human existence that needed to be
hidden in privacy, all things connected with the necessity of the
life process itself, which prior to the modern age comprehended
all activities serving the subsistence of the individual and the sur-
vival of the species. Hidden away were the laborers who "with
their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life,"79 and the
women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of
the species. Women and slaves belonged to the same category and
were hidden away not only because they were somebody else's
property but because their life was "laborious," devoted to bodily
functions.80 In the beginning of the modern age, when "free"
79. Aristotle Politics 1254b25.
80. The life of a woman is called ponetikos by Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 775a33. That women and slaves belonged and lived together, that no
woman, not even the wife of the household head, lived among her equals—other
free women—so that rank depended much less on birth than on "occupation" or function, is very well presented by Wallon (op. cit., I, 77 ff.), who speaks of a
"confusion des rangs, ce partage de toutes les fonctions domestiques": "Les
[ 72 1
The Public and the Private Realm
labor had lost its hiding place in the privacy of the household, the
laborers were hidden away and segregated from the community
like criminals behind high walls and under constant supervision.81
The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes
and the women at nearly the same historical moment must cer-
tainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no
longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should
be hidden. It is all the more symptomatic of the nature of these
phenomena that the few remnants of strict privacy even in our
own civilization relate to "necessities" in the original sense of
being necessitated by having a body.
10
T H E
L O C A T I O N
OF HUMAN A C T I V I T I E S
Although the distinction between private and public coincides
with the opposition of necessity and freedom, of futility and per-
manence, and, finally, of shame and honor, it is by no means true
that only the necessary, the futile, and the shameful have their
proper place in the private realm. The most elementary meaning
of the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be
hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are
to exist at all. If we look at these things, regardless of where we
find them in any given civilization, we shall see that each human
activity points to its proper location in the world. This is true for
the chief activities of the vita activa, labor, work, and action; but
there is one, admittedly extreme, example of this phenomenon,
whose advantage for illustration is that it played a considerable
role in political theory.
Goodness in an absolute sense, as distinguished from the "good-
for" or the "excellent" in Greek and Roman antiquity, became
known in our civilization only with the rise of Christianity. Since
femmes . . . se confondaient avec leurs esclaves dans les soins habituels de la
vie interieure. De quelque rang qu'elles fussent, Ie travail etait leur apanage, com-me aux hommes la guerre."
81. See Pierre Brizon, Histoire du travail et des travailleurs (4th ed.; 1926), p.
184, concerning the conditions of factory work in the seventeenth century.
[ n ]
The Human Condition
then, we know of good works as one important variety of possible
human action. The well-known antagonism between early Chris-
tianity and the respublica, so admirably summed up in Tertullian's
formula: nee ulla magis res aliena quam publica ("no matter is more
alien to us than what matters publicly"),82 is usually and rightly
understood as a consequence of early eschatological expectations
that lost their immediate significance only after experience had
taught that even the downfall of the Roman Empire did not mean
the end of the world.83 Yet the otherworldliness of Christianity
has still another root, perhaps even more intimately related to the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and at any rate so independent of
the belief in the perishability of the world that one is tempted to
see in it the true inner reason why Christian alienation from the
world could so easily survive the obvious non-fulfilment of its
eschatological hopes.
The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity
of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide
from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public
realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as
far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be under-
stood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works,
independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that
the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its
specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but good-
ness' sake. When goodness appears openly, it is no longer good-
ness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act
of solidarity. Therefore: "Take heed that ye do not your alms
before men, to be seen of them." Goodness can exist only when
it is not perceived, not even by its author; whoever sees himself
performing a good work is no longer good, but at best a useful
member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore:
"Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth."
It may be this curious negative quality of goodness, the lack of
outward phenomenal manifestation, that makes Jesus of Naza-
82. Tertullian op. at. 38.
83. This difference of experience may partly explain the difference between
the great sanity of Augustine and the horrible concreteness of Tertullian's views
on politics. Both were Romans and profoundly shaped by Roman political life.
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The Public and the Private Realm
reth's appearance in history such a profoundly paradoxical event;
it certainly seems to be the reason why he thought and taught that
no man can be good: "Why callest thou me good? none is good,
save one, that is, God."84 The same conviction finds its expression
in the talmudic story of the thirty-six righteous men, for the sake
of whom God saves the world and who also are known to nobody,
least of all to themselves. We are reminded of Socrates' great in-
sight that no man can be wise, out of which love for wisdom, or
philo-sophy, was born; the whole life story of Jesus seems to
testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man
can be good.
Love of wisdom and love of goodness, if they resolve them-
selves into the activities of philosophizing and doing good works,
have in common that they come to an immediate end, cancel them-
selves, so to speak, whenever it is assumed that man can be wise
or be good. Attempts to bring into being that which can never
survive the fleeting moment of the deed itself have never been
lacking and have always led into absurdity. The philosophers of
late antiquity who demanded of themselves to be wise were absurd
when they claimed to be happy when roasted alive in the famous
Phaleric Bull. And no less absurd is the Christian demand to be
good and to turn the other cheek, when not taken metaphorically
but tried as a real way of life.
But the similarity between the activities springing from love ot
goodness and love of wisdom ends here. Both, it is true, stand in
a certain opposition to the public realm, but the case of goodness
is much more extreme in this respect and therefore of greater rele-
vance in our context. Only goodness must go into absolute hiding
and flee all appearance if it is not to be destroyed. The philosopher,
even if he decides with Plato to leave the "cave" of human affairs,
does not have to hide from himself; on the contrary, under the sky
of ideas he not only finds the true essences of everything that is,
84. Luke 18 : 19. The same thought occurs in Matt. 6 : 1-18, where Jesus
warns against hypocrisy, against the open display of piety. Piety cannot "appear unto men" but only unto God, who "seeth in secret." God, it is true, "shall reward" man, but not, as the standard translation claims, "openly." The German word Scheinhdligkeit expresses this religious phenomenon, where mere appearance is already hypocrisy, quite adequately.
[ 75 ]
The Human Condition
but also himself, in the dialogue between "me and myself" (erne
emauto) in which Plato apparently saw the essence of thought.85
To be in solitude means to be with one's self, and thinking, there-
fore, though it may be the most solitary of all activities, is never
altogether without a partner and without company.
The man, however, who is in love with goodness can never
afford to lead a solitary life, and yet his living with others and for
others must remain essentially without testimony and lacks first
of all the company of himself. He is not solitary, but lonely; when
living with others he must hide from them and cannot even trust
himself to witness what he is doing. The philosopher can always
rely upon his thoughts to keep him company, whereas good deeds
can never keep anybody company; they must be forgotten the
moment they are done, because even memory will destroy their
quality of being "good." Moreover, thinking, because it can be
remembered, can crystallize into thought, and thoughts, like all
things that owe their existence to remembrance, can be trans-
formed into tangible objects which, like the written page or the
printed book, become part of the human artifice. Good works,
because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part
of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They truly are
not of this world.
It is this worldlessness inherent in good works that makes the
lover of goodness an essentially religious figure and that makes
goodness, like wisdom in antiquity, an essentially non-human,
superhuman quality. And yet love of goodness, unlike love of wis-
dom, is not restricted to the experience of the few, just as loneli-
ness, unlike solitude, is within the range of every man's experience.
In a sense, therefore, goodness and loneliness are of much greater
relevance to politics than wisdom and solitude; yet only solitude
can become an authentic way of life in the figure of the philosopher,
whereas the much more general experience of loneliness is so con-
tradictory to the human condition of plurality that it is simply
unbearable for any length of time and needs the company of God,
the only imaginable witness of good works, if it is not to annihilate
human existence altogether. The otherworldiness of religious ex-
perience, in so far as it is truly the experience of love in the sense
85. One finds this idiom passim in Plato (see esp. Gorgias 482).
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The Public and the Private Realm
of an activity, and not the much more frequent one of beholding
passively a revealed truth, manifests itself within the world itself;
this, like all other activities, does not leave the world, but must be
performed within it. But this manifestation, though it appears in
the space where other activities are performed and depends upon
it, is of an actively negative nature; fleeing the world and hiding
from its inhabitants, it negates the space the world offers to men,
and most of all that public part of it where everything and every-
body are seen and heard by others.
Goodness, therefore, as a consistent way of life, is not only
impossible within the confines of the public realm, it is even de-
structive of it. Nobody perhaps has been more sharply aware of
this ruinous quality of doing good than Machiavelli, who, in a
famous passage, dared to teach men "how not to be good."86
Needless to add, he did not say and did not mean that men must be
taught how to be bad; the criminal act, though for other reasons,
must also flee being seen and heard by others. Machiavelli's cri-
terion for political action was glory, the same as in classical
antiquity, and badness can no more shine in glory than goodness.
Therefore all methods by which "one may indeed gain power,
but not glory" are bad.87 Badness that comes out of hiding is
impudent and directly destroys the common world; goodness that
comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good,
but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption
wherever it goes. Thus, for Machiavelli, the reason for the
Church's becoming a corrupting influence in Italian politics was
her participation in secular affairs as such and not the individual
corruptness of bishops and prelates. To him, the alternative posed
by the problem of religious rule over the secular realm was in-
escapably this: either the public realm corrupted the religious body
and thereby became itself corrupt, or the religious body re-
mained uncorrupt and destroyed the public realm altogether. A
reformed Church therefore was even more dangerous in Machia-
velli's eyes, and he looked with great respect but greater apprehen-
sion upon the religious revival of his time, the "new orders"
which, by "saving religion from being destroyed by the licentious-
86. Prince, ch. 15.
87. Ibid., ch. 8.
[ 77 ]
The Human Condition
ness of the prelates and heads of the Church," teach people to be
good and not "to resist evil"—with the result that "wicked rulers
do as much evil as they please."88
We chose the admittedly extreme example of doing good works,
extreme because this activity is not even at home in the realm of
privacy, in order to indicate that the historical judgments of politi-
cal communities, by which each determined which of the activities
of the vita activa should be shown in public and which be hidden in
privacy, may have their correspondence in the nature of these
activities themselves. By raising this question, I do not intend to
attempt an exhaustive analysis of the activities of the vita activa,
whose articulations have been curiously neglected by a tradition
which considered it chiefly from the standpoint of the vita cmtem-
plativa, but to try to determine with some measure of assurance
their political significance.
88. Discourses, Book III, ch. 1.
[ 78 ]
C H A P T E R
I I I
In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized. This is
unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their
living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of
Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional
anti-Marxists, in the process of which one of them even discovered
that Karl Marx himself was unable to make a living, forgetting for
the moment the generations of authors whom he has "supported."
In this difficulty, I may recall a statement Benjamin Constant made
when he felt compelled to attack Rousseau: "J'eviterai certes de
me joindre aux detracteurs d'un grand homme. Quand le hasard
fait qu'en apparence je me rencontre avec eux sur un seul point, je
suis en defiance de moi-meme; et pour me consoler de paraitre un
instant de leur avis ... j'ai besoin de desavouer et de fletrir, autant
qu'il est en moi, ces pretendus auxiliaires." ("Certainly, I shall
avoid the company of detractors of a great man. If I happen to
agree with them on a single point I grow suspicious of myself;
and in order to console myself for having seemed to be of their
opinion . . . I feel I must disavow and keep these false friends
away from me as much as I can.")1
II
''THE L A B O U R OF O U R B O D Y AND
T H E W O R K O F O U R H A N D S " '
The distinction between labor and work which I propose is unu-
sual. The phenomenal evidence in its favor is too striking to be
1. See "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modernes" (1819),
reprinted in Cours de politique constitutionnelle (1872), II, 549.
2. Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, sec. 26.
[ 79 }
The Human Condition
ignored, and yet historically it is a fact that apart from a few scat-
tered remarks, which moreover were never developed even in the
theories of their authors, there is hardly anything in either the pre-
modern tradition of political thought or in the large body of mod-
ern labor theories to support it. Against this scarcity of historical
evidence, however, stands one very articulate and obstinate testi-
mony, namely, the simple fact that every European language, an-
cient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words
for what we have to come to think of as the same activity, and re-
tains them in the face of their persistent synonymous usage.a
Thus, Locke's distinction between working hands and a laboring
body is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Greek distinction
between the cheirotechnes, the craftsman, to whom the German
Handwerker corresponds, and those who, like "slaves and tame
animals with their bodies minister to the necessities of life,"4 or in
the Greek idiom, to somati ergazesthai, work with their bodies (yet
even here, labor and work are already treated as identical, since
the word used is not ponein [labor] but ergazesthai [work]). Only
in one respect, which, however, is linguistically the most impor-
tant one, did ancient and modern usage of the two words as
synonyms fail altogether, namely in the formation of a correspond-
ing noun. Here again we find complete unanimity; the word "la-
bor," understood as a noun, never designates the finished product,
the result of laboring, but remains a verbal noun to be classed with
the gerund, whereas the product itself is invariably derived from
the word for work, even when current usage has followed the
3. Thus, the Greek language distinguishes between ponein and ergazesthai, the Latin between laborare and facere or fabricari, which have the same etymological root, the French between travailkr and ouvrer, the German between arbeiten and werken. In all these cases, only the equivalents for "labor" have an unequivocal connotation of pain and trouble. The German Arbeit applied originally only to farm labor executed by serfs and not to the work of the craftsman,
which was called Werk. The French travailkr replaced the older labourer and is derived from tripalium, a kind of torture. See Grimm, Worterbuch,-pp. 1854 ff., and Lucien Febre, "Travail; evolution d'un mot et d'une idee," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (1948).
4. Aristotle Politics |l254b