Arendt and the Social: A Modern Flaw?

Abstract

According to Arendt, socioeconomic issues should be divorced from politics. This claim can only be puzzling today, when socioeconomic issues are at the very core of politics. Indeed, Arendt’s sharp distinction between the political and the social space strikes many as nonsensical, if not outrageous. Habermas goes so far as to argue that it ‘leads to absurdities’. For Habermas, Arendt’s ideas cannot be applied to the modern world. The inadequacy of her view, he holds, depends on her revival of Aristotelian praxis, which would condemn her to an inevitable anachronism. In this paper, I argue that Habermas misreads Arendt. I claim that Arendt can help us understand the modern erosion of public space and how to rescue politics from such deterioration. I consider two features of her conception of politics: the notion of ‘respect’ and the ‘self-containedness’ of action, both derived from Aristotle’s concepts of ‘political friendship’ and ‘self-contained praxis’.

Introduction

According to Arendt (1958: 28), socioeconomic issues should be divorced from politics. Such a claim can only be puzzling today, when socioeconomic issues are at the very core of politics. Indeed, Arendt’s sharp distinction between the political and the social space strikes many as nonsensical, if not outrageous (Benhabib 2003; Bernasconi 1996; Bernstein 1986; Canovan 1985; Pitkin 1981). Habermas (1977, 15) goes so far as to argue that it ‘leads to absurdities’. For Habermas, Arendt’s ideas cannot be applied to the modern world, ushered in the market society, the Industrial Revolution and the leap of capitalism (Villa 2021, 145). The inadequacy of her view, he holds, ultimately depends on her revival of Aristotelian praxis (Aristotle 1956, 1140a24), which would condemn her to an inevitable anachronism. He maintains that modern society is quite different from Aristotle’s polis. Therefore, Arendt’s Graecism would be obsolete (Habermas 1977, 14). In other words, Arendt’s narrowing of politics to praxis leads her to separate political action, concerned with freedom, from the private dimension of necessity (Arendt 1958, 13). For Habermas (1977, 15-6), this separation – valid for the Ancients – is inapplicable to the present, as ‘she removes politics from its relations to the economic and social environment in which it is embedded through the administrative system’.

In contrast, I argue that Habermas misreads Arendt. The aim of this paper is to show that Arendt’s political/social distinction is valuable as it reflects the sick heart of modernity.

Indeed, as Habermas (1977, 16) himself notices, modernity has been reducing more and more the practical dimension of politics. A public arena where we are truly free to act and debate is missing, drowned in the rule of capital. The ‘intrusion of social and economic matters into the public realm’ has turned citizens into mere productive animals (Arendt 1990a, 86), devaluing our democratic participation (Agamben 1998, 10). This is why Arendt urges us to separate the political and the social. What appears to be an extreme critique of the social is actually an unfiltered confrontation with our political decay. It uncovers the naked reality: when our material needs become public priorities and absorb all our attention, the agora remains empty. Arendt wants to free politics from socioeconomic issues to restore the public space we have forgotten. From this perspective, her ideas are far from being misplaced as Habermas thinks. Rather, I claim that Arendt can help us understand the erosion of public space we are witnessing today and how to rescue politics from such deterioration.

In order to make my case, I will first illustrate how Arendt distinguishes between the political and the social space, in the context of her interpretation of Aristotle.

Second, I will show how Habermas misinterprets Arendt’s project. This, I argue, is clear if we consider two complementing features of her conception of politics, which Habermas deliberately ignores: the notion of ‘respect’ and the ‘self-containedness’ of action (Cain 2024; Villa 1996), both derived from Arendt’s creative appropriation of Aristotle’s concepts of ‘political friendship’ (Aristotle 1956, 1167b1) and ‘self-contained praxis’ (Aristotle 1956, 1140b7).

These will reveal how the remedy to the modern loss of public space is the recovery of a political arena where citizen participation is an end in itself, namely, not subordinated to other motives or activities. In other words, Arendt builds a dam against the anti-political forces of modernity to regain an independent polis.

In this light, the exclusion of the social from politics becomes not only meaningful, but also imperative. Elon Musk’s hunger for popularity is evidence of why we should recover this distinction. Musk is an individual of enormous economic power, the attestation of how we have lost sight of the free public space. He is an exponent of an economic elite way richer than the rest of the planet, interested in increasing its wealth disproportionately. He is a representative of an oligarchy which, with its propaganda, tries to direct people’s instincts and impulses. In this way, it tries to steer their choices towards its own economic aims of ever greater wealth polarization. The entire global order converges towards leaders who rule without troublesome counterweights, having immediate hold on a people manipulated by the economic power of the overrich. Take Donald Trump, who has leveraged people’s wants and needs to monetize his presidency (his posts on his ‘Truth’ Social are explanatory). Among the other things, a custom he seems fond of is pursuing the interests of his private investments and those of his circle by manipulating the stock market through decisions he can make thanks to his presidential power, causing prices to rise and fall. At the expense, of course, of the public space he opposes. In front of all this, we must ask, What are we doing wrong? Arendt might have an answer.

Arendt’s Conception of Politics

To comprehend why Habermas accuses Arendt of anachronism, we have to address her separation of the political and the social. This distinction stems from her claim that, in modernity, the boundary between the public and private space has been erased. Arendt (1958, 28) recalls how, in contrast, in ancient Greece this boundary was well defined. The private space – ‘the household’ – was based on wants and needs. As Aristotle (1885, 1252b16-8) notices, it was the realm of labour. That is, of biological and economic sustenance (Arendt 1958, 30), such as providing for food. Self-reproduction and self-survival were the concern in that space. Moreover, men – heads of their families – ruled over women, slaves and children (Aristotle 1885, 1260a12-4). According to Aristotle (1885, 1260a16-8), women were not master of their deliberative power, while slaves did not even have one. Finally, that of children still had to become mature. For this reason, the household was built on force and violence (Arendt 1958, 31), exercised by its head. The private dimension revolved around necessity and inequality (Arendt 1958, 32). On the other hand, the polis was rooted in equality. Men were not subject to the necessities of life nor to other men. As opposed to the household, the public space was grounded in freedom, granted by the inequality of the private space (Arendt 1958, 30-1). Thanks to the labour of his subordinates, the head of the household could be free from every day natural necessity and be involved in the polis (Aristotle 1885, 1252b42-6).

Arendt (1958, 27) recalls Aristotle’s definition of the human being as an ‘animal with the gift of speech’ (Aristotle 1885, 1253a11-2). She explains how, in the polis, ‘the concern of all citizens was to talk with each other’. As equals, citizens acknowledged the perspective of others. This implied plurality, as the expression of their point of view therefore required considering that of others (Held 2022, 173). The public space of the polis was based on a dialogue springing from logon didonai, namely, the urge of citizens to provide reasons for what they would say (Held 2022, 178). Public talk entailed citizens’ responsibility for the position they put forward, in their relation with the other participants to public life. The agora hosted a debate where citizens disagreed and discussed, trying to get to a common resolution (Alweiss 2025, 12). Speech was then the highest manifestation of action, or, in Aristotle’s terms, of praxis (Aristotle 1956, 1140a24): the very essence of politics. Word was the fortress of freedom. This is how Greek citizens appeared in a shared world, unlike the barbarians, who were considered devoid of speech proper, namely, of the genuinely political life of the polis (as they were excluded from it). There citizens showed who they were – their unique personality (Fazekas 2024) – instead of what they were. That is, instead of accidents such as skills or defects (Arendt 1958, 179-80). They persuaded others, negotiated and found compromises (Arendt 1990b, 86-7). In the agora, action represented the ‘capacity of beginning something anew’. This is what Arendt (1958, 9) calls ‘natality’. The consequence of plurality was that the outcome of individual contributions to public discourse was always unpredictable. Everyone offered something new to the community, opening up to the unknown of how it would be received (Alweiss 2025, 13). Arendt (1958, 7) believes that, without this, politics would not even exist, as all individuals would be absorbed in One. This would annihilate the diversity of our points of view on shared concerns. And, indeed, why would we even need politics, if ‘Man’ and not ‘men […] inhabit [ed] the world’? Arendt tells us that ‘this plurality is the condition […] of all political life’. Our uniqueness resides in our never being identical to someone else (Arendt 1958, 8).

Habermas (1977, 7) complains about this return to the Aristotelian distinction. In divorcing the public and the private space, Arendt would end up with a conception of politics way too narrow. He maintains that politics today is not all about praxis (Habermas 1977, 15). Habermas (1977, 16) notices that politics also includes material production, which the Greeks confined to the private sphere. For Habermas, the strict separation of public and private prevents Arendt from grasping modernity in its wholeness. Arendt would be missing a relevant part of our modern political life. This would make her conception flawed, inhabiting a distant and no longer existing polis.

However, Habermas fails to see that Arendt is not blind to modernity. Rather, her Graecism brings it into purview. As I will argue, in agreement with Arendt, the modern fusion of material production and politics has made the Citizen disappear, reducing them to a mere socioeconomic object and killing their freedom. This will prove how modernity has devoured a shared public space where authentic political dialogue can take place.

Therefore, we now turn to examining why a thesis which may seem so obsolete strikes at the core of modernity instead.

The ‘Rise of the Social’

Arendt (1958, 28) maintains that the distinction between public and private has been blurred by the rise of the social dimension in modernity. The social is a ‘curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’ (Arendt 1958, 35). It is the transformation of the household into a public interest, namely, an interest which should transcend the mere individual life process as it is part of what citizens all share. This breaks the wall between the two spaces (Arendt 1958, 33). Necessity invades the public. Our bodily needs spill over into the realm of public appearance, sunk into the preoccupation for our biological and economic sustenance (Arendt 1958, 47). Society rests on our physical and material existence. We reduce everything we do to this. And this, in turn, endangers our humanity: that freedom, practiced by the Ancients, to show who we are (Arendt 1958, 46). As individuals are homogenized into a single mass, the shared world is lost, submerged by the conformism of modernity disguised as equality (Arendt 1958, 40). The law of conformity enslaves us, imposing one sole interest: what is best for my own survival and reproduction as an animal (Arendt 1958, 46).

In On Revolution, Arendt (1990a, 60) addresses the social question – or ‘the existence of poverty’ – in detail. She notices how masses of poor determined the fate of the French Revolution, driven by the ‘absolute dictate of their bodies’. Poverty is vile because it strips us of our humanity and makes us servants of need. It is terrible because it totally subjugates us to nature, depriving us of everything else. Freedom, which presupposes the satisfaction of that need, disappears. This is why Arendt (1990a, 59-61) tells us that, during the French Revolution, necessity, emerging from the private dimension, crushed the realization of freedom. The chains of the social made the French Revolution fail.

Arendt’s claim lends itself to easy accusations. Is she taking a stand against the poor? Is she defending the privilege of a few, who can enjoy the efforts of others, excluded from politics? What exactly should the debate of free human beings be about today, if the social is to be divorced from politics? (Pitkin 1981, 336). This is indeed why Habermas dismisses Arendt’s claim: in the modern world, Arendt’s ideas are a scandal.

Yet, Arendt responds to these objections by moving even further in showing how, in modernity, we no longer recognize the distinction between public and private. We are absorbed by bureaucracy: the ‘most social form of government’. Bureaucracy annihilates spontaneity, ¹ requiring from everyone a determinate behaviour (Arendt 1958, 40). Economics then emerges as the first among all social sciences, using statistics to investigate that imposed behaviour, in accordance with the established rules (Arendt 1958, 42).

As a result, politics resembles a family which relies on ‘a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping’ (Arendt 1958, 28). According to Arendt (1990a, 237), administration should have nothing to do with politics, having rather a pre-political character. The role it has assumed in modernity is instead anti-political, since administration deals with that necessity which for Arendt should remain separate from the public (Villa 1996, 31). Today an administrative apparatus that governs and manages socioeconomic issues has replaced a public discourse based on how to share our world. Socioeconomic issues, moving from the private to the public, have conquered and obfuscated the latter, turning the former into our prime concern (Arendt 1958, 33). We even take for granted that politics is all about socioeconomic issues (Villa 2021, 145), since biological and economic processes have gained such public relevance. When the rule of the market replaces the polis, citizens are reduced to productive animals, which are expected to serve the greater socioeconomic good (Agamben 1998, 10). We have become so used to this contamination that we tend to think we are only free if we are free from politics (Villa 2021, 139).

The modern ‘public’ space fails to give voice to our plurality, draining our ability to act (Arendt 1958, 40). For this reason, Arendt wants to grasp a distinct political space, revaluating plurality and action, as in the Athenian agora. This is how Arendt detects the decay of modernity, which has cancelled politics as a sphere of freedom. In other words, Arendt identifies that modern erosion of a practical space Habermas himself is concerned with, when he diagnoses the modern breakdown of rational public discourse (Habermas 1977, 16). That is, her strict and ancient distinctions serve to illuminate the very root of modern anti-political forces.

Habermas, however, might still object. Even if Arendt highlights what has gone wrong with modernity, her conception remains inadequate when it comes to remedying this decay. What is the point of identifying it, if she then fails to capture how the world really works and how to make it better effectively? Habermas (1977, 15) protests: ‘a state which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a politics which is cleansed of socio-economic issues; […] this path is unimaginable for any modern society’. This is well expressed by Bernstein, who, at a conference, turned to Arendt exclaiming, ‘You know darn well that – at least, for us, now – one can’t consistently make that [political/social] distinction!' (Arendt 1979, 316). To our modern mentality, socioeconomic issues are political issues. On Arendt’s reading, they are not. Arendt (1979, 318) argues that only experts should take care of them. She urges us to distinguish between things that are debatable and things, such as socioeconomic issues, ‘we can figure out’. The former should be the concern of politics, the latter should be the concern of specialists, who have the skills to address them. Arendt (1979, 318-9) explains this in answering to Baird, who presented her with the following question: ‘From an administrative point of view, the British government described as inadequate a huge percentage of the housing stock of Britain in a way that makes no sense to a large proportion of the inhabitants who actually live there’. Arendt answered thus, ‘The political issue is that these people love their neighbourhood and don’t want to move, even if you give them one more bathroom. This is indeed entirely a debatable question, and a public issue, and should be decided publicly and not from above [by the experts]. But if it’s a question of how many square feet every human being needs in order to be able to breathe and to live a decent life, this is something which we really can figure out’. That is, it does not require any discussion, just doing the maths. ²

Many today, just as Habermas, would be shocked when confronted with this claim. Still, Habermas is missing the point again. Also, he fails to see how Arendt actually appropriates Aristotle’s thought and how this is more of a strength than a weakness of her account of politics. As we are about to realize, Arendt’s ideas – far from being scandalous or absurd – are in fact also an antidote to modern decay.

How to Save Modern Politics: an Arendtian Solution

So far, I have shown that Arendt’s Aristotelianism can bring modernity into purview. Now I wish to prove that it can also fill the political void modernity has left. I will do so in two steps. I will address (a) Arendt’s conception of ‘respect’ as the precondition of (b) the ‘self-containedness’ of action.

The public space today has lost its independence because modernity has polluted it with motives and activities that have reduced democratic participation and the possibility of free debate. The distinction between politics and the social is aimed precisely at restoring that independence. We will therefore understand how Arendt’s ideas can come to terms with modernity.

Aristotle’s ‘Political Friendship’ and Arendtian ‘Respect’

Arendt presents the notion of ‘respect’ as a precondition of action (Villa 1996, 34). This is an appropriation and de-materialization of Aristotle’s notion of ‘political friendship’ (Cain 2024, 2).

According to Aristotle (1956, 1156a-b), there are three kinds of friendship (philia): utility friendship, pleasurable friendship, and perfect friendship. In utility and pleasurble friendships, the friend is a means to get a personal advantage. Perfect friendships, on the other hand, are grounded in the love for the friend for their own sake.

As a precondition of action, Arendt refers to Aristotle’s political friendship (philia politikē), which is a type of utility friendship. For Aristotle (1956, 1167b4-9), political friends use one another for some political purpose. Arendt (2018, 200) would not say that we should ‘use’ one another in the public dimension. Rather, her interpretation of Aristotle’s political friendship signifies that, in politics, we should not be concerned about others as we might do in our personal relationships: we should be ‘concerned with the world as such and not with those who live in it’. This is why Arendt (1958, 243) tells us that respect is ‘a kind of “friendship without intimacy and without closedness”’. Respect allows us ‘to put the world between us’ for the benefit of the polis. Respect as political friendship does not envolve any consideration for the admiration or esteem we feel for the other person: it is radically different from the modern notion of respect. Arendtian respect is divorced from love, which, according to her, endangers politics (Arendt 1994, 17). Indeed, love would make us prioritize the interests of our friend rather than those of the polis. Heart undermines the public space (Cain 2024, 4). The large role of compassion in the French Revolution and how it diverted attention from freedom is a good example. Compassion makes the world between us – the very foundation of our political dialogue – vanish. Compassion only relates to the suffering of one person. As it moves us towards that singular individual, it makes us forget about the public, that is, what is common to us all (Arendt 1990a, 85-6). Political action in the public sphere is not about how we feel, but about how to construct and maintain our shared world. For instance, if we felt affection for a friend and had to, for some reason, choose between that friend and the public, affection would probably lead us to choose our friend. This is why Arendt (1968, 25) says that political friendship ‘is not intimately personal but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world’.

Yet, for Aristotle (1885, 1252b42-6), the polis exists ‘for the sake of a good life’. This is what Aristotle (1956, 1097b5-7) calls ‘flourishing’. The aim of the political community and therefore of political friendship is enabling individual citizens to actualize their own moral and intellectual virtues (Aristotle 1956, 1103a5-6). This requires the support of external material goods, for ‘it is impossible […] to do noble acts without the proper equipment’ (Aristotle 1956, 1099a31-2-1099b). The latter is provided by the polis, which ‘seems both to have come together originally and to endure’ for the advantage of its members (Aristotle 1956, 1160a13-4). That is, what they need to flourish (Aristotle 1956, 1160a11-2). As a consequence, political friends would benefit the polis, but the polis would ultimately turn to the individual and be the material condition of their good life (Arendt 1990a, 83). Aristotle falls back into the material concern for our self-survival and self-reproduction. The focus returns on the private, behind the walls of citizens’ houses.

Arendt wants to get rid of the materialism inherent in Aristole’s conception of political friendship, since this diverts attention away from the community. For Arendt (2002, 61), politics is about equality, plurality, action, and spontaneity. According to Arendt, Aristotle correctly considers the polis as the core of his political theory. Still, he fails to realize that the polis is exclusively about our appearance in the public dimension, not also about flourishing (Cain 2024, 8-9). Setting individual flourishing as the end of the political community functionalizes politics. It puts it at the service of something external to it. Therefore, Arendt (1968, 24-5) de-materializes Aristotle’s political friendship. When we respect each other, we recognize our different perspectives. At the same time, we are equal, as we spontaneously appear and speak together. Respect as political friendship is then the true house of politics. Arendt uses this de-materialization against modern respect, which stagnates in the private sphere. In modern respect, the admiration or esteem we feel bounces back at us, narcissists who have more or not enough when compared to others. We mirror ourselves, instead of embracing the community (Cain 2024, 6). We can see this when we ‘discuss’ socioeconomic issues in ‘politics’: our concern is only with our own needs, not those of the polis. This distracts us from a truly shared discourse and nullifies the public sphere. If, as it is the case, material resources are limited, and if a group wants to grab as much of those resources as possible – as it is very often the case – this can lead to a competitive and conflictual comparison with other groups, seen as rivals. Anyone excluded from the economically strongest group would then be considered as part of a separate community or, worse, as if they did not belong to any community at all, resulting in them being marginalized. This can give rise to a feeling of contempt, if not hatred, against whoever is excluded, which translates into a false equality. That is, it translates into the majority conforming to the rules of the dominant group in order to avoid this marginalization. A ‘perversion of equality from a political into a social concept’, which is all the more pronounced the less space society leaves ‘for special groups and individuals’ (Arendt 1962, 54). The very meaning of ‘community’ fades away.

Arendtian respect restores the freedom of the public dimension. It is how we can escape from our modern ‘bestialization’ (Foucault 1994, 719). It allows us to make our world better together, instead of acting for mere selfish motives that shift the attention from the political community to our personal necessities. We act with each other for the sake of the world between us. And yet, is this all too extreme?

I believe that, if Arendt’s view seems too extreme to us, we actually have one more reason to share it (Luban 1979, 92). For if it seems too extreme to us – as it seems too extreme to Habermas – it means that modernity has in fact so homogenized us that we ignore or underestimate the risk we are running: the loss of our humanity (Arendt 1958, 46). The latter, as Arendt (1958, 41) suggests, can only dwell in a world where we are spontaneous actors and not indistinct pawns of the mass society. Conformism – and the animality it conveys – reduces us to silence. Only in ‘discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it, [are] made manifest. […] We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human’ (Arendt 1979, 24-5). When we are objectified into labourers who survive and reproduce, we have nothing shared to talk about, we renounce an authentically human life as we disappear into our insticts. We lose our uniqueness. Once we turn into animals in the public, there is no more public. This is true even if we delude ourselves that we can equally regard private and public interests in politics. As soon as we are preoccupied with what we need for ourselves, the in-between drowns into selfishness. The French Revolution is, again, exemplary. In the face of hunger, no dream of freedom can endure. Arendt compares it to the American Revolution, expressing a more positive judgement on the latter, since what ‘were absent from the American scene were misery and want’. Of course, class distinctions were present in America as well, together with racism. Still, our focus here is only on what animates a revolution, as a model for what should animate the Citizen of the political arena. Addressing the American Revolution, Arendt qualifies further the poverty opposed to the political realm she has in mind, noticing that ‘the laborious in America were poor but not miserable […] they were not driven by want, and the revolution was not overwhelmed by them’. The American Revolution was ‘not social but political, it concerned not the order of society’, but the community, namely, the aspiration to a shared polis (Arendt 1990a, 68). While the ‘passion of compassion’ (Arendt 1990a, 72) was central to the French Revolution, it had no relevance in the American Revolution (Arendt 1990a, 71), whose sole driving force was freedom, immune to the social question. Thus, we can observe two revolutionary spirits in contrast, which correspond to two opposite concepts. On the one hand, there is the social spirit of the French Revolution, embodied in the individual who is passively and absolutely guided by material needs. On the other hand, there is the political spirit of the American Revolution, embodied in the Citizen, guided by the freedom that yearns for the public space. It is striking how this political spirit has been betrayed today, as the White House leadership is in charge precisely because its populism has exploited the misery and want from which the American Revolution had been immune. Trump has taken advantage of misery and want, a strategy which amplifies material needs – or even manufactures them, spreading fake news that instils the fear of losing one’s standard of living or of not being able to improve it because of some threat Trump will take care of (see his obsessive accusations against migrants) – so as to make people politically blind. The awful paradox is that people end up supporting leaders who, in the short or long run, will make their conditions worse off. While Trump appeals to needs and wants of people, his administration is run as a dealmaking enterprise whose mission is to increase its own financial needs and wants, namely, its wealth (the chain is long, just to mention the most popular assets: Trump perfume, Trump mobile telephone services, Maga accessories, Trump golf courses, his real estate and resorts, and his cryptocurrency holdings). ³ What this economic circle swallows up is the public space, at the expense of the people, while being supported by the people, held back by the materialism that the administration exacerbates in order to profit from it. To explain the concept in the words of a post by Trump on his ‘Truth’ Social (9 April, 2025): ‘BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!’ This rhetoric encourages blind faith and to abandon the polis, where discussions on different viewpoints can be had.

This is what Habermas fails to realize. Habermas is worried about the modern disappearence of rational public discourse. In what Habermas (1989) calls ‘the public sphere’, citizens should get together and communicate, deliberating about what concerns them all. Still, Habermas does not exclude material production from the public sphere. Therefore, he ignores that the public sphere falls apart once socioeconomic issues snake into it: we forget all the rest and there is no space left for what is really public. There are no genuine general interests anymore, as what is best for ourselves and our particular group easily absorbes all our attention. This is the cause of the destruction of rational public descourse, which worries Habermas. In this light, it is his view that turns out to be inapplicable to our modern societies, if we want to change them.

In the present, where social control stretches its tentacles over bodies and minds (Foucault 1995), Arendtian respect emerges as a form of rebellion. As Alweiss (2025, 14) notices, ‘in our times today, where we live in a world filled with the language of hate and revenge, nothing seems more urgent’. Arendtian respect urges us to regain our sense of community in the maelstrom of modernity. To do so, politics has to get rid of the very cause of our transformation into animal laborans, wallowing in its own survival and reproduction: the socioeconomic.

We are now starting to understand the deep sense of Arendt’s adversion for the emergence of the social. Yet, to truly grasp her message – which Habermas misreads – we need to move to the self-containedness of action. That is, what respect enables.

The Self-Containedness of Arendtian Action

Having centred the modern erosion of politics, the self-containedness of action – complemented with Arendtian respect – is what allows Arendt to preserve the public space eventually. A concept that seems reductive and outdated to Habermas is actually the path back to our freedom.

For Arendt, action is ‘self-contained’, namely, citizens should engage in politics for its own sake. As Aristotle (1956, 1140a24) had already argued about praxis, action is an end in itself (Arendt 1958, 206). We do not pursue it for some other reason – using it as a means – but for the sake of its own performance. We do not act and speak for some scope in view, but the end lies in the action and word itself (Arendt 1958, 206). Politics here is not functionalized: ‘the means to achieve the end would already be the end; and this “end,” conversely, cannot be considered a means in some other respect, because there is nothing higher to attain’ (Arendt 1958, 207). It is like a ballet: the performance is already the end of the dance.

Citizens, time after time, disagree on some course of action. That is, they disagree on which action is best for the polis. Consequently, the decision can only be formed in the process of discussion, in a conflict of viewpoints which then becomes a coming-together, a dialogue in the frame of the community we want to be. The conflicting viewpoints of citizens gather in the agora. If this conflict did not exist, politics would be superfluous. It would be replaced by a technical decision, simply about the best means to achieve a predeterminate scope. A mere administrative office would suffice: for this very reason, administration should have nothing to do with politics (Villa 1996, 32). But since in modernity the public has become a simple useful bureaucratical means to meet our animal needs (Arendt 1958, 45), the public has been deprived of its intrinsic meaning (Arendt 1958, 154). Since today it has collapsed into socioeconomic issues, a real debate is not even necessary, as these are already a given which only requires some technical strategy to implement them. We can only reawaken the meaning of the public space if we understand that politics is all about politics (Villa 1996, 25): this is what we share. The polis only breathes in the clash and encounter of different positions. Citizens light up with what Aristotle (1956, 1140a26-7) called ‘practical wisdom’ (phronēsis) to ‘deliberate well about what is good’ for the polis. We do not deliberate about some particular scope where only some calculations are required. Rather, a human being who is practically wise is concerned with an end which ‘cannot be nothing other than the act itself: doing well is in itself the end’ (Aristotle 1956, 1140b). The practically wise has the shared world in view. The agora, animated by practical wisdom, is the place of deliberative exchange and criticism, the lighthouse of what is common to us all.

While Arendtian respect purges relations between citizens in the agora of non-strictly political motives, the self-containedness of action preserves the public dimension (Arendt 1990a, 86). Political action is concerned with the cure of our space of freedom. As Villa (1996, 39) suggests, ‘it is therefore less a question of what is being debated’. If Arendt narrows the scope of politics, this is because she wishes to take care of an agora where citizens are truly free to show who they are, something that modernity has swept away. Habermas fails to realize that a fair critique of Arendt should concern the ability of her theory to demarcate the public dimension from other dimensions. He might have argued that for this or that reason Arendt does not succeed in such demarcation. But he misses the point if he instead focuses on the content of Arendtian action, which is deliberately narrow (Villa 1996, 39-40). Her exclusion of socioeconomic issues from politics is not a shortcoming, but the assurance of the very preservation of the public space. This exclusion is necessary if indeed Arendt is to succeed in finding a criterion of separation that works well, with all the consequences (including ‘uncomfortable’ ones) this implies.

Habermas might insist that, nonetheless, this defence of Arendt just remains within the categories of her thought. Even if he misread her, and even if her theory, in this light, illuminates something important about politics, it is still empty when concretely applied. Arendt (1994) herself said, ‘I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can still call it that, is political theory’. Arendt here is contrasting mere speculation on the world from an armchair with political action that can have an effective impact on the world. Can her conception of politics have such an impact? Is it really possible that citizens can completely disregard socioeconomic issues?

However, if we recall the distinction between means and ends, we see how Arendt actually leaves intact the possibility for citizens to deal with socioeconomic issues, but in the only way the shared world is not lost. That is, the only way in which a socioeconomic issue can acquire political relevance and be worthy of debate.

Arendt (1979, 318) argues that a socioeconomic right should imply a univocal general agreement. For instance, we should all agree that citizens should be granted acceptable housing. ⁴ Two different questions arise from this. One regards the technical means to ensure that people do have acceptable housing. Experts should take care of this, as they have the required competencies. Instead, citizens can and should take action when ends are involved (second – and different – question). For instance, as Villa (2021, 152) notices, ‘whether such housing should be racially integrated (whether by law or some other form of mandate)’ concerns the preservation of our public space. Or, to give an example from current events, consider the widespread housing demonstration in Dublin on Saturday, 5 July, pressing the administration to address (put in place the technical means to deal with) the housing crisis in the country. More than eighty trade unions and organizations marched to reclaim affordable and acceptable housing as a basic right for everyone, not just the privileged. While vulture funds have invaded the country and are trying to turn the public space into a carcass, these protesters have raised their voices against this loss of freedom. ⁵ What is important to notice here is that this demonstration was not led by wants and needs. It was led by something higher: the perceived destruction of the democratic agora, of which the crisis is a consequence. The aim of demonstrations like this is to take action to achieve the end of regaining a shared polis, where the government – which should be at the service of the polis – adopts the necessary technical means to ensure that, as equality commands, everyone is granted acceptable housing. ⁶

Socioeconomic issues, insofar as they only require some calculations, are to be excluded from politics. On the other hand, when a socioeconomic issue – from education to health care – is somehow related to how we want our community to be, then it is welcome (and must be welcome) in the agora. This can only happen if we are always guided by the regulative idea of the political/social distinction. Every time we approach an issue, such distinction can make us understand whether it is a matter of public or private. However, in our society, this regulative idea is overshadowed. The socioeconomic issues that, with the rise of the social, have contaminated the polis, distracting us from the shared world, are precisely those that have no political soul at all, because they are reducible to numbers. One only has to read the news to realize that the current ‘democratic debate’ revolves around quantification games. The cause of this is the inclusion in the public of the selfishness of material production, which Habermas refuses to exclude from politics. The risk of their fusion is well represented by Musk’s machinations, aimed at stimulating people’s wants through his American Dream rhetoric, as when, at the post-inauguration celebration for Trump, he shouted: ‘It’s going to be very exciting. As the president said, we’re going to have a golden age. It’s going to be fantastic. One of the fundamental things, one of the most American values I love is optimism. This feeling like we’re going to make the future good. We’re going to make it good’. Behind these words is the aim to nullify the political Citizen and transform people into followers for the benefit of his wealth. As long as Musk thought it convenient to show that his interests aligned with those of the administration, this entrepreneur took up residence at the White House to take advantage of it, being able to make decisions which affected the health of millions and accessing sensitive personal data. ⁷ After the apparent rupture with the White House, the announcement of his America Party wrote a new page in his greedy dreams, nourished by the materialistic slumber of the public space, which he has helped to put to sleep. As evidence that Musk’s intentions are anything but political, just consider that, a few days before the formation of the new party, Musk continued to donate millions to the Republicans. ⁸ If it is convenient to show again that his interests and those of the administration converge, it will come as no surprise if Musk and Trump return to acting as allies. Of course, in any case, this will not be the last page. What Musk (and Trump) has written so far is the story of how a tycoon with enormous influence over people can make fun of their needs, pushing them to focus solely on these and deluding them into believing that he will better their lives, thus distracting them from a public space where his egocentricity would crumble.

And yet this can still perplex us. Do we actually all agree on a catalogue of socioeconomic rights? Can we trust the experts? If we trust them on technical issues, could we run the risk of turning democracy into technocracy, given the increasing power experts have in our societies? Would we be able to control them? How would we control them?

Arendt leaves these important questions open, questions we must confront if we care about the polis today. These are all questions we are called upon to examine, if we want to rescue our world and who we are, that is, what makes us say, ‘I am a human being’, ‘We are human beings’, ‘I am and we are human beings together’. But here lies the very message of Arendt then. Precisely because these questions concern us all and we have different points of view on them, they are up for political discussion. They resonate in every corner of the polis and echo in the voices of the citizens, who appear in their uniqueness. I cannot address them on my own, as I believe no one could. The course of action is not predetermined here. We can get to a deliberation on what is best to do only in performing in the public space, where we can freely express ourselves and be open to other positions. Only then can we realize what is best for us all. Not as isolated and undistinguished objects, but as citizens giving birth to something new.

How this should be translated at the institutional-governmental level is out of the scope of this paper. My focus here has been on the political responsibility of the Citizen to act in harmony with the principle of the shared world in order to recover and preserve their freedom. Without this regulative idea driving us, we surrender our spontaneity to the logic of the market, as happened with the rise of Musk and Trump on the US scene. That is, with the ‘political’ rise of an economic and social overpower, produced by the chocking of authentic public debate under mere socioeconomic interests.

Citizens have different ways to make their voices heard. They can gather in town halls, they can organize protests, they can embrace civil disobedience. And, in so doing, they must always keep in mind the priority of the shared world. Only guided by this regulative idea can they create and recreate the public space of freedom. We must strive towards this idea, even when it sounds like a utopia. We must believe in it, if we want to save our humanity. Arendt’s thoughts are not ‘inapplicable’, as Habermas holds. We must indeed recover the political/social distinction and let it lead us to a better society: a human society. As citizens, we come into play when addressing how we wish our community to be. We gather in the agora and express (speech) our positions (plurality), as equals who respect each other. Ends open up the dimension of politics, where citizens (not experts) deliberate. There is still a dialogue between the socioeconomic and the political (Villa 2021, 152). But Arendt shows us something more important, which we have forgotten: as citizens, we are responsible for what is really fundamental – our freedom – from which everything else – such as mere socioeconomic issues – only follows.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have questioned Habermas’ critique of Arendt’s conception of politics. According to Habermas, Arendt’s ideas cannot deal with modernity as they exclude socioeconomic issues from the public dimension. However, I have argued that Habermas fails to grasp Arendt’s authentic position. I have shown that Arendt’s critique of the social well captures modernity and its pitfalls. Furthermore, I have argued that Arendt also suggests us how to heal politics from its modern decay. In order to do so, I have recalled her notion of ‘respect’ and her account of action as a ‘self-contained’ concept. These can lead us to the polis: a journey back to Ancient Greece and then right into the present to regain our freedom.