Table Of ContentNatality and the Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt‘s Political Thought
by
Jeanette Parker
BFA, University of Calgary, 2005
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in the Department of English
With a Concentration in Cultural, Social and Political Thought
Jeanette Parker, 2011
University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy
or other means, without the permission of the author.
ii
Supervisory Committee
Natality and The Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt‘s Political Thought
by
Jeanette Parker
BFA, University of Calgary, 2005
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Evelyn Cobley, (Department of English)
Supervisor
Dr. Nicole Shukin, (Department of English)
Departmental Member
Dr. Arthur Kroker, (Department of Political Science)
Outside Member
iii
Abstract
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Evelyn Cobley, (Department of English)
Supervisor
Dr. Nicole Shukin, (Department of English)
Departmental Member
Dr. Arthur Kroker, (Department of Political Science)
Outside Member
This thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt‘s theory of natality, which is identified with the
event of birth into a pre-existing human world. Arendt names natality the ―ontological
root‖ of political action and of human freedom, and yet, as critics of Arendt‘s political
writings have pointed out, this notion of identifying freedom with birth is somewhat
perplexing. I return to Arendt‘s phenomenological analysis of active human life in The
Human Condition, focusing on the significance of natality as the disclosure of a unique
―who‖ within a specific relational web. From there, I trace the distinct threats to natality,
speech-action, and worldly relations posed by the political philosophical tradition, on the
one hand, and by the modern biopolitical ―rise of the social‖ on the other. Drawing
connections between Arendt‘s theory of the social and Michel Foucault‘s work on the
biopolitical management of populations, my thesis defends Arendt‘s contentious
distinction between social and political life; the Arendtian social, I argue, can fruitfully
be read as biopolitical.
iv
Table of Contents
Supervisory Committee ...................................................................................................... ii
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v
Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi
List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ vii
Introduction: A Biopolitical Reading of Arendt‘s Theory of the Social ............................ 1
Arendt and Foucault on Modernity: Logics of Process and the ―Entrance of Life into
History‖ ........................................................................................................................... 9
Overview of the Thesis Chapters .................................................................................. 11
Chapter 1: Hannah Arendt‘s Phenomenological Analysis of The Vita Activa: Labor,
Work, Action and the Condition of Natality ..................................................................... 17
Arendt‘s Phenomenological Method and the Significance of Distinctions .................. 28
The Tradition of Political Philosophy and the Securitization of the Public Realm: the
Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa .............................................................................. 32
The Public/Private Divide: The Traditional Conception of Freedom versus Necessity 40
Labor and the Eternal/Cyclical Condition of ―Life Itself‖: animal laborans‘
―Metabolism with Nature‖ ............................................................................................ 44
Work and the Means-Ends Logic of Homo Faber ........................................................ 53
The Significance of Action: Unpredictable Appearances ............................................. 62
Action and the ―Space of Appearance‖: Reality and the Public Sphere ....................... 70
Speech and the Disclosure of the Agent: Natality, Plurality, and World-Creation ...... 80
Conclusion: Situation Action in the Vita Activa ........................................................... 94
Chapter 2: The Rise of the Social and the Biopolitics of Population: Arendt and Foucault
on the Modern Securitization of ‗Life Itself‘ .................................................................. 105
Modernity as ―Crisis‖ and the Breach with Tradition ................................................ 121
The Rise of the Social in The Human Condition: distinguishing Behavior from Action
..................................................................................................................................... 128
The Discovery of the Archimedean Point and ―Acting into Nature‖ ......................... 138
Population versus Populousness in Foucault‘s Lectures ............................................ 160
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 162
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 166
v
Acknowledgments
The experience of planning and writing this thesis has confirmed for me Hannah Arendt‘s
insight that no one, and certainly not the fabricating author, is a self-sufficient being. I
would like to thank the members of my supervisory committee for their encouragement
and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the thesis. I am especially grateful to Dr.
Evelyn Cobley and Dr. Nicole Shukin. Without their patient guidance and unfaltering
support, I would surely not have been able to see this project through to completion.
And to my best friend and favourite conversation partner, Timothy Fryatt, any ―thank
you‖ proves insufficient, but I extend my thanks for your help with every stage of this
project. Thank you, too, for making me laugh.
vi
Dedication
To Frances Irwin, my mother and the first philosopher to inspire my thinking: your
support, love, and immense courage throughout the last few difficult years have taught
me the true meaning of gratitude.
vii
List of Abbreviations
Works by Hannah Arendt:
BPF Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
CCMS ―The Crisis Character of Modern Society‖
EJ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
EU Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, 1930-
1954
HC The Human Condition
JP The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age
LWA ―Labor, Work, Action‖
LKPP Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
LM The Life of the Mind
LSA Love and Saint Augustine
OR On Revolution
OT The Origins of Totalitarianism
OV On Violence
PP The Promise of Politics
RJ Responsibility and Judgement
Works by Michel Foucault:
HS The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
SMBD Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976
STP Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-
1978
BB The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979.
Works by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl:
FLW Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (biography)
WAM Why Arendt Matters
Works by Dana R. Villa
AH Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political.
TMT ―Totalitarianism, Modernity, and Tradition‖
.
Introduction: A Biopolitical Reading of Arendt‟s Theory of the
Social
In the concluding chapter of The History of Sexuality‘s first volume, Michel
Foucault famously introduces the concept of bio-power and asserts that this relatively
new form of power over human life at the level of the of the species has had a profound
impact on virtually all phenomena shaping the ―social bodies‖ of populations from the
eighteenth century onward. Bio-power aims at calculating and governing the vitality of
whole populations. Foucault describes here, and in greater detail in his Collège de France
lectures,1 how bio-power functions in conjunction with other modes of power-knowledge
(disciplinary and sovereign) to administer, optimize, or deny ―life itself‖ on a grand scale.
Hannah Arendt‘s earlier assessment of the elevation of sheer biological life to the level of
the highest good in the modern era and her critique of the economic administration of the
―productive forces‖ of laboring societies bears a number of significant points of
intersection with Foucault‘s analysis of the biopolitical relations informing (neo)liberal
governmentality.2 In passages that seem to echo Arendt, Foucault writes that bio-power
was key to the development of capitalism, which ―would not have been possible without
the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of
1 See especially, Society Must Be Defended; Security, Territory, Population; Birth of Biopolitics.
2 The emergence of the population as a statistical ‗entity‘ endowed with a socio-economic life, as Foucault
demonstrates, emerges in the 18th and 19th centuries in relation to a changing understanding of the role of
the state as a governmental power; the ―governmentalization of the state‖ names a shift in the understanding
of politics, whereby the state becomes responsible not only for the defense of its sovereign territory, but
also for the directing and taking care of the (re)productive, bodily life of those living within its boundaries.
See ―Governmentality‖ in Power: the Essential Works of Michel Foucault (201-222). This governmental
taking charge of life by the state, and eventually by the economy ‗itself,‘ which Foucault traces in Security,
Territory, Population, was enabled through the co-emergence of ―practices, institutions, and new bodies of
knowledge , designed to take care of the physical aspects of human life such as fertility, health, disease,
longevity, or morbidity, in order to enhance the productivity of the population as well as its loyalty to the
state‖ (Braun 8).
Parker 2
the phenomena of population to economic processes‖ (HS 141). Much like Arendt, he
characterizes the vast transformation in the conceptualization of life arising from the
development of biopolitical techniques as ―nothing less than the entry of life into history‖
(HS 141).
Biopolitics extends control over populations through demography and statistics,
which function at once as forms of knowledge and as techniques of normalization.
Arendt‘s theory of the social brings together two separate conceptual strands: the social
as pervasive conformism, through which individuals and groups behave predictably in
accordance with rules and norms, and the social as economic-biological mass of isolated
laboring beings, in danger of being stripped of all meaningful difference (Pitkin 177).
The connections between these two strands, the social as conformist behavior and the
social as economically administered biological life, are not always clearly articulated in
Arendt‘s writing, and yet the outcome of both is the destruction of the conditions for free
political action as she understood it. The potential for free political action, in her view, is
not linked to the sovereign will of individuals (or states), but can only manifest itself
temporarily and without absolute stability in the context of an active and public ―web of
relationships.‖ In order to gain a better understanding of Arendt‘s theory of the social, I
propose to introduce Foucault‘s biopolitical theories as an interpretive lens for
reevaluating the significance and the limitations of this important aspect of Arendt‘s
political thought. This will provide a clearer picture of the place of the social within
Arendt‘s overall diagnosis of the loss of the public-political in the modern age, and will
also point to its overlooked relevance for contemporary political thinkers continuing to
grapple with the complex problems of population as Foucault articulates it; Arendt‘s
Parker 3
theory of the social, I argue, can be fruitfully read as biopolitical. Arendt offers a nuanced
account of dramatic shifts in relationships between (and internal to) the conditions of
political humanness, philosophical and scientific evaluations of ‗Man‘ as a species, and
the dominant approaches, traditional and modern, to controlling the unpredictable
elements of human living-together. Normalizing processes aimed at the socio-economic
administration of laboring life, in Arendt‘s view, are definitive of modern liberal mass-
societies and these processes of shaping (de)humanized life also reveal a menacing,
―proto-Totalitarian‖ potential.
By focusing on how the concept of the social serves as a link between Arendt`s
two most important works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Human Condition, I
hope to point out the depth and prescience of Arendt‘s understanding of biopolitical
power/violence and to identify a few of the many connections between her critical
reflections on the pre-eminence of ―life itself‖ in modern (social) politics and Foucault‘s
insights into the rise of biopolitics. Arendt articulates the subtle differences and
interconnections between various ―crystallizations‖ of biopolitics in the twentieth
century, including the unprecedented techniques of totalitarian terror.
Some contemporary political theorists, most notable Giorgio Agamben, have
begun to acknowledge commonalities between Arendt‘s work and the later writings of
Foucault, yet these tentative suggestions have not been substantiated by any sustained
comparison of their thought. Despite being one of the first and surely the most influential
thinkers to make this connection, Agamben does not follow up on it in any detail. The
present discussion of the biopolitical aspects of Arendt‘s theory of the social is a step in
that direction. Agamben‘s widely read Homo Sacer trilogy of books presents itself as a
Description:Natality and the Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought This
thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt's theory of natality, which is identified with the.
