data obtained from an analysis of the laboring activity is likely to
disappear upon closer inspection of the labor movement's develop-
ment and substance. The chief difference between slave labor and
modern, free labor is not that the laborer possesses personal free-
dom—freedom of movement, economic activity, and personal in-
violability—but that he is admitted to the political realm and fully
emancipated as a citizen. The turning point in the history of labor
came with the abolition of property qualifications for the right to
vote. Up to this time the status of free labor had been very similar
to the status of the constantly increasing emancipated slave popula-
tion in antiquity; these men were free, being assimilated to the
status of resident aliens, but not citizens. In contrast to ancient
slave emancipations, where as a rule the slave ceased to be a laborer
when he ceased to be a slave, and where, therefore, slavery re-
mained the social condition of laboring no matter how many slaves
were emancipated, the modem emancipation of labor was intended
to elevate the laboring activity itself, and this was achieved long
before the laborer as a person was granted personal and civil rights.
However, one of the important side effects of the actual emanci-
was: Soviets without Communism; and this at the time implied: Soviets without
parties.
The thesis that the totalitarian regimes confront us with a new form of govern-
ment is explained at some length in my article, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel
Form of Government," Review of Politics (July, 1953). A more detailed analysis of the Hungarian revolution and the council system can be found in a recent
article, "Totalitarian Imperialism," Journal of Politics (February, 1958).
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The Human Condition
pation of laborers was that a whole new segment of the population
was more or less suddenly admitted to the public realm, that is,
appeared in public,63 and this without at the same time being ad-
mitted to society, without playing any leading role in the all-impor-
tant economic activities of this society, and without, therefore,
being absorbed by the social realm and, as it were, spirited away
from the public. The decisive role of mere appearance, of distin-
guishing oneself and being conspicuous in the realm of human
affairs is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the fact that
laborers, when they entered the scene of history, felt it necessary
to adopt a costume of their own, the sans-culotte, from which, dur-
ing the French Revolution, they even derived their name.64 By this
costume they won a distinction of their own, and the distinction
was directed against all others.
The very pathos of the labor movement in its early stages—and
it is still in its early stages in all countries where capitalism has not
reached its full development, in Eastern Europe, for example, but
also in Italy or Spain and even in France—stemmed from its fight
against society as a whole. The enormous power potential these
movements acquired in a relatively short time and often under very
53. An anecdote, reported by Seneca from imperial Rome, may illustrate how
dangerous mere appearance in public was thought to be. At that time a proposition
was laid before the senate to have slaves dress uniformly in public so that they
could immediately be distinguished from free citizens. The proposition was turned
down as too dangerous, since the slaves would now be able to recognize each
other and become aware of their potential power. Modern interpreters were of
course inclined to conclude from this incident that the number of slaves at the
time must have been very great, yet this conclusion turned out to be quite er-
roneous. What the sound political instinct of the Romans judged to be dangerous
was appearance as such, quite independent from the number of people involved
(see Westermann, op. cit., p. 1000).
54. A. Soboul ("Problemes de travail en l'an II," Journal depsychologic normale etpathologique, Vol. LII, No. 1 [January-March, 1955]) describes very well how the workers made their first appearance on the historical scene: "Les travailleurs ne sont pas designes par leur fonction sociale, mais simplement par leur costume.
Les ouvriers adopterent le pantalon boutonne a la veste, et ce costume devint une
caracteristique du peuple: des sans-culottes . . . 'en parlant des sans-mlottes, declare Perion a la Convention, le 10 avril 1793, on n'entend pas tous les citoyens,
les nobles et les aristocrates exceptes, mais on entend des hommes qui n'ont pas,
pour les distinguer de ceux qui ont.' "
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Action
adverse circumstances sprang from the fact that despite all the talk
and theory they were the only group on the political scene which
not only defended its economic interests but fought a full-fledged
political battle. In other words, when the labor movement ap-
peared on the public scene, it was the only organization in which
men acted and spoke qua men—and not qua members of society.
For this political and revolutionary role of the labor movement,
which in all probability is nearing its end, it is decisive that the
economic activity of its members was incidental and that its force
of attraction was never restricted to the ranks of the working class.
If for a time it almost looked as if the movement would succeed in
founding, at least within its own ranks, a new public space with
new political standards, the spring of these attempts was not la-
bor—neither the laboring activity itself nor the always Utopian re-
bellion against life's necessity—but those injustices and hypocrisies
which have disappeared with the transformation of a class society
into a mass society and with the substitution of a guaranteed an-
nual wage for daily or weekly pay.
The workers today are no longer outside of society; they are its
members, and they are jobholders like everybody else. The politi-
cal significance of the labor movement is now the same as that of
any other pressure group; the time is past when, as for nearly a
hundred years, it could represent the people as a whole—if we
understand by le peuple the actual political body, distinguished as
such from the population as well as from society.55 (In the Hun-
garian revolution the workers were in no way distinguished from
the rest of the people; what from 1848 to 1918 had been almost a
monopoly of the working class—the notion of a parliamentary sys-
tem based on councils instead of parties—had now become the unan-
imous demand of the whole people.) The labor movement, equivocal
in its content and aims from the beginning, lost this representation
and hence its political role at once wherever the working class be-
came an integral part of society, a social and economic power of its
own as in the most developed economies of the Western world, or
55. Originally, the term le peuple, which became current at the end of the
eighteenth century, designated simply those who had no property. As we men-
tioned before, such a class of completely destitute people was not known prior to
the modern age.
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The Human Condition
where it "succeeded" in transforming the whole population into a
labor society as in Russia and as may happen elsewhere even under
non-totalitarian conditions. Under circumstances where even the
exchange market is being abolished, the withering of the public
realm, so conspicuous throughout the modern age, may well find its
consummation.
31
T H E T R A D I T I O N A L S U B S T I T U T I O N O F
M A K I N G F O R A C T I N G
The modern age, in its early concern with tangible products and
demonstrable profits or its later obsession with smooth functioning
and sociability, was not the first to denounce the idle uselessness of
action and speech in particular and of politics in general.66 Exasper-
ation with the threefold frustration of action—the unpredictability
of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity
of its authors—is almost as old as recorded history. It has always
been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of
thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of
human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsi-
bility inherent in a plurality of agents. The remarkable monotony
of the proposed solutions throughout our recorded history testifies
to the elemental simplicity of the matter. Generally speaking, they
always amount to seeking shelter from action's calamities in an
activity where one man, isolated from all others, remains master of
his doings from beginning to end. This attempt to replace acting
with making is manifest in the whole body of argument against
"democracy," which, the more consistently and better reasoned
it is, will turn into an argument against the essentials of politics.
The calamities of action all arise from the human condition of
plurality, which is the condition sine qua non for that space of ap-
pearance which is the public realm. Hence the attempt to do away
with this plurality is always tantamount to the abolition of the pub-
lic realm itself. The most obvious salvation from the dangers of
56. The classic author on this matter is still Adam Smith, to whom the only
legitimate function of government is "the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all" (pp. cit., II, 198 ff.; for the quotation see II, 203).
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Action
plurality is mon-archy, or one-man-rule, in its many varieties, from
outright tyranny of one against all to benevolent despotism and to
those forms of democracy in which the many form a collective
body so that the people "is many in one" and constitute themselves
as a "monarch."67 Plato's solution of the philosopher-king, whose
"wisdom" solves the perplexities of action as though they were
solvable problems of cognition, is only one—and by no means the
least tyrannical—variety of one-man rule. The trouble with these
forms of government is not that they are cruel, which often they
are not, but rather that they work too well. Tyrants, if they know
their business, may well be "kindly and mild in everything," like
Peisistratus, whose rule even in antiquity was compared to "the
Golden Age of Cronos";68 their measures may sound very "un-
tyrannical" and beneficial to modern ears, especially when we hear
that the only-—albeit unsuccessful—attempt to abolish slavery in
antiquity was made by Periandros, tyrant of Corinth.69 But they
all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public
realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while
only "the ruler should attend to public affairs."60 This, to be sure,
57. This is the Aristotelian interpretation of tyranny in the form of a democ-
racy (Politics 1292al6 ff.). Kingship, however, does not belong among the tyrannical forms of government, nor can it be defined as one-man rule or monarchy.
While the terms "tyranny" and "monarchy" could be used interchangeably, the words "tyrant" and basileus ("king") are used as opposites (see, for instance, Aristotle Nkomachean Ethics 1160b3; Plato Republic S76D). Generally speaking, one-man rule is praised in antiquity only for household matters or for warfare,
and it is usually in some military or "economic" context that the famous line from the Iliad, ouk agathm polykoiranie; heis koircmos esto, heis basileus—"the rule by many is not good; one should be master, one be king" (ii. 204)—is quoted.
(Aristotle, who applies Homer's saying in his Metaphysics [1076a3 ff.] to political community life [politeuestkai] in a metaphorical sense, is an exception. In Politics 1292al3, where he quotes the Homeric line again, he takes a stand against the
many having the power "not as individuals, but collectively," and states that this is only a disguised form of one-man rule, or tyranny.) Conversely, the rule of the
many, later called polyarkhia, is used disparagingly to mean confusion of command in warfare (see, for instance, Thucydides vi. 72; cf. Xenophon Anabasis
vi. 1. 18).
58. Aristotle Athenian Constitution xvi. 2, 7.
59. See Fritz Heichelheim, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums (1938), I, 258.
60. Aristotle (Athenian Constitution xv. 5) reports this of Peisistratus.
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The Human Condition
was tantamount to furthering private industry and industriousness,
but the citizens could see in this policy nothing but the attempt to
deprive them of the time necessary for participation in common
matters. It is the obvious short-range advantages of tyranny, the
advantages of stability, security, and productivity, that one should
beware, if only because they pave the way to an inevitable loss of
power, even though the actual disaster may occur in a relatively
distant future.
Escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet
and order has in fact so much to recommend it that the greater part
of political philosophy since Plato could easily be interpreted as
various attempts to find theoretical foundations and practical ways
for an escape from politics altogether. The hallmark of all such
escapes is the concept of rule, that is, the notion that men can law-
fully and politically live together only when some are entitled to
command and the others forced to obey. The commonplace notion
already to be found in Plato and Aristotle that every political com-
munity consists of those who rule and those who are ruled (on
which assumption in turn are based the current definitions of forms
of government—rule by one or monarchy, rule by few or oli-
garchy, rule by many or democracy) rests on a suspicion of action
rather than on a contempt for men, and arose from the earnest
desire to find a substitute for action rather than from any irrespon-
sible or tyrannical will to power.
Theoretically, the most brief and most fundamental version of
the escape from action into rule occurs in the Statesman, where
Plato opens a gulf between the two modes of action, archein and
prattein ("beginning" and "achieving"), which according to Greek understanding were interconnected. The problem, as Plato saw it,
was to make sure that the beginner would remain the complete
master of what he had begun, not needing the help of others to
carry it through. In the realm of action, this isolated mastership
can be achieved only if the others are no longer needed to join the
enterprise of their own accord, with their own motives and aims,
but are used to execute orders, and if, on the other hand, the be-
ginner who took the initiative does not permit himself to get in-
volved in the action itself. To begin (archein) and to act (prattein)
thus can become two altogether different activities, and the begin-
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Action
ner has become a ruler (an archon in the twofold sense of the word)
who "does not have to act at all (prattein), but rules (archein) over those who are capable of execution." Under these circumstances,
the essence of politics is "to know how to begin and to rule in the
gravest matters with regard to timeliness and untimeliness"; action
as such is entirely eliminated and has become the mere "execution
of orders."61 Plato was the first to introduce the division between
those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know,
instead of the old articulation of action into beginning and achiev-
ing, so that knowing what to do and doing it became two alto-
gether different performances.
Since Plato himself immediately identified the dividing line be-
tween thought and action with the gulf which separates the rulers
from those over whom they rule, it is obvious that the experiences
on which the Platonic division rests are those of the household,
where nothing would ever be done if the master did not know what
to do and did not give orders to the slaves who executed them with-
out knowing. Here indeed, he who knows does not have to do and
he who does needs no thought or knowledge. Plato was still quite
aware that he proposed a revolutionary transformation of the polls
when he applied to its administration the currently recognized
maxims for a well-ordered household.62 (It is a common error to
interpret Plato as though he wanted to abolish the family and the
household; he wanted, on the contrary, to extend this type of life
until one family embraced every citizen. In other words, he wanted
to eliminate from the household community its private character,
and it is for this purpose that he recommended the abolition of pri-
vate property and individual marital status.)63 According to Greek
understanding, the relationship between ruling and being ruled,
61. Statesman 305.
62. It is the decisive contention of the Statesman that no difference existed between the constitution of a large household and that of the polls (see 259), so that the same science would cover political and "economic" or household matters.
63. This is particularly manifest in those passages of the fifth book of the
Republic in which Plato describes how the fear lest one attack his own son, brother, or father would further general peace in his Utopian republic. Because of
the community of women, nobody would know who his blood relatives were
(see esp. 463C and 465B).
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The Human Condition
between command and obedience, was by definition identical with
the relationship between master and slaves and therefore precluded
all possibility of action. Plato's contention, therefore, that the rules
of behavior in public matters should be derived from the master-
slave relationship in a well-ordered household actually meant that
action should not play any part in human affairs.
It is obvious that Plato's scheme offers much greater chances for
a permanent order in human affairs than the tyrant's efforts to
eliminate everybody but himself from the public realm. Although
each citizen would retain some part in the handling of public af-
fairs, they would indeed "act" like one man without even the pos-
sibility of internal dissension, let alone factional strife: through
rule, "the many become one in every respect" except bodily ap-
pearance.64 Historically, the concept of rule, though originating in
the household and family realm, has played its most decisive part
in the organization of public matters and is for us invariably con-
nected with politics. This should not make us overlook the fact
that for Plato it was a much more general category. He saw in it
the chief device for ordering and judging human affairs in every
respect. This is not only evident from his insistence that the city-
state must be considered to be "man writ large" and from his con-
struction of a psychological order which actually follows the pub-
lic order of his Utopian city, but is even more manifest in the
grandiose consistency with which he introduced the principle of
domination into the intercourse of man with himself. The supreme
criterion of fitness for ruling others is, in Plato and in the aristocrat-
ic tradition of the West, the capacity to rule one's self. Just as the
philosopher-king commands the city, the soul commands the body
and reason commands the passions. In Plato himself, the legitimacy
of this tyranny in everything pertaining to man, his conduct toward
himself no less than his conduct toward others, is still firmly
rooted in the equivocal significance of the word archein, which
means both beginning and ruling; it is decisive for Plato, as he says
expressly at the end of the Laws, that only the beginning (arche) is entitled to rule {archein). In the tradition of Platonic thought, this
original, linguistically predetermined identity of ruling and begin-
ning had the consequence that all beginning was understood as the
64. Republic 443E.
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Action
legitimation for rulership, until, finally, the element of beginning
disappeared altogether from the concept of rulership. With it the
most elementary and authentic understanding of human freedom
disappeared from political philosophy.
The Platonic separation of knowing and doing has remained at
the root of all theories of domination which are not mere justifica-
tions of an irreducible and irresponsible will to power. By sheer
force of conceptualization and philosophical clarification, the Pla-
tonic identification of knowledge with command and rulership and
of action with obedience and execution overruled all earlier experi-
ences and articulations in the political realm and became authorita-
tive for the whole tradition of political thought, even after the
roots of experience from which Plato derived his concepts had long
been forgotten. Apart from the unique Platonic mixture of depth
and beauty, whose weight was bound to carry his thoughts through
the centuries, the reason for the longevity of this particular part of
his work is that he strengthened his substitution of rulership for
action through an even more plausible interpretation in terms of
making and fabrication. It is indeed true—and Plato, who had
taken the key word of his philosophy, the term "idea," from ex-
periences in the realm of fabrication, must have been the first to
notice it—that the division between knowing and doing, so alien to
the realm of action, whose validity and meaningfulness are de-
stroyed the moment thought and action part company, is an every-
day experience in fabrication, whose processes obviously fall into
two parts: first, perceiving the image or shape (eidos) of the prod-
uct-to-be, and then organizing the means and starting the execu-
tion.
The Platonic wish to substitute making for acting in order to
bestow upon the realm of human affairs the solidity inherent in
work and fabrication becomes most apparent where it touches the
very center of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas. When Plato
was not concerned with political philosophy (as in the Symposium
and elsewhere), he describes the ideas as what "shines forth most"
(ekphanestaton) and therefore as variations of the beautiful. Only in
the Republic were the ideas transformed into standards, measure-
ments, and rules of behavior, all of which are variations or deriva-
tions of the idea of the "good" in the Greek sense of the word, that
[ 225 )
The Human Condition
is, of the "good for" or of fitness.65 This transformation was neces-
sary to apply the doctrine of ideas to politics, and it is essentially
for a political purpose, the purpose of eliminating the character of
frailty from human affairs, that Plato found it necessary to declare
the good, and not the beautiful, to be the highest idea. But this idea
of the good is not the highest idea of the philosopher, who wishes
to contemplate