attempt to create a new society or make history.2 Talk of "Man"
making his own history is misleading, for (as Arendt continually
reminds us) there is no such person: "men, not Man, live on the
earth and inhabit the world." To conceive of politics as making is
to ignore human plurality in theory and to coerce individuals in
practice. Nonetheless, Arendt found that Marx had inherited this
particular misconception of politics from the great tradition of
Western political thought. Ever since Plato turned his back on
the Athenian democracy and set out his scheme for an ideal city,
political philosophers had been writing about politics in a way
that systematically ignored the most salient political features of
human beings—that they are plural, that each of them is capable
of new perspectives and new actions, and that they will not fit a
tidy, predictable model unless these political capacities are
crushed. One of Arendt's main purposes in The Human Condition
is therefore to challenge the entire tradition of political philoso-
phy by recovering and bringing to light these neglected human
capacities.
But this critique of political philosophy is not the only grand
theme in the book that stems from her reflections on Marx. For
although Marx spoke of making, using the terminology of crafts-
manship, Arendt claims that he actually understood history in
terms of processes of production and consumption much closer
to animal life—labor, in fact. His vision of human history as a
predictable process is a story not of unique, mortal individuals
but of the collective life-process of a species. While he was in
Arendt's view quite wrong to suppose that this process could lead
through revolution to "the realm of freedom," she was struck by
his picture of individuality submerged in the collective life of a
human species, devoted to production and consumption and
moving inexorably on its way. She found this a revealing repre-
sentation of modern society, in which economic concerns have
come to dominate both politics and human self-consciousness.
2. Arendt's point is illustrated by Mussolini's admiring comment on the Bol-
shevik revolution, "Lenin is an artist who has worked in men as others have
worked in marble or metal," quoted by Alan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin; Parallel Lives (London: Fontana Press, 1993), page 374.