Abstract
Terms such as ‘public’, ‘public good’, ‘public value’ and ‘public domain’ occur frequently in policy documents. Without a sense of what ‘public’ means, however, not just in everyday language, but as a ‘thick concept’ that has acquired resonance over time, there can little point deploying the terms in policymaking. The dilemma is especially acute for those trying rethink the relationship between economics and its conventional hierarchy of concepts and culture as a public good (‘the foundations’). This includes both heterodox economic approaches and policymakers working pragmatically to add legitimacy to their terms, by expanding how they are classified and operate. This article examines the concept of ‘the public realm’ as found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and as it might be taken up by cultural policymaking today. The first section examines innovation economist Mariana Mazzucato’s arguments for revising the concept of ‘the common good’. The second section tackles the parts of The Human Condition dealing with ‘the public realm’ directly. The broad argument is that the histories, interdisciplinary existences and patterns of use of thick concepts are crucial to their meaning and sense as policymaking terms. I argue that Arendt’s ‘thinking thickly’ is instructive for those aiming to engage questions around the public value of culture and to repurpose state action in the cultural sector. The conclusion examines the UK Bennett Institute’s Working Paper, ‘Measurement of Social and Cultural Infrastructure’ (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, 2024) asking whether its use of key term is adequate to its policy object. What challenges do policymakers face now as they try to tack away from neoliberalism’s impasses but with no obvious alternative pathway on offer?
The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people. . . but the fact that the world between [us] has lost its power to gather [us] together. . . The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where. . . people around a table suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish. . . so that two persons sitting opposite each other [are] no longer separated but [are] unrelated. . . by anything tangible. The Human Condition (pp. 52–53)
Terms such as ‘the public’, ‘public good’, ‘public value’ and ‘public domain’ appear frequently in contemporary policymaking. Without a sense of what ‘public’ means, however, not just in everyday language, but also as a ‘thick concept’ that has acquired resonance over time, there can little point in deploying them. Renewed interest in thick concepts – and in ‘public’ especially – can be seen in recent scholarship (for the former, cf. Antoine-Moussiaux and Leyens, 2023; Alexandrova and Fabian, 2022; Danielsson and Westrup, 2022; for the latter, cf. Daly, 2023; Olssen, 2021; Warner et al., 2021; Whetsell 2024). No doubt this reflects the deleterious impact of the 2020–2021 pandemic and dissatisfaction with the actions (and inactions) of conservative rule in Australia (2013–2022) and the United Kingdom (2010–2024). Now both countries have Labour regimes, the idea of “public” is the focus of positive attention once again. After 40 years of social fragmentation and a ‘shift from government to governance’ (Chodor & Hameiri 2024: 24), what does this involve? As Justin O’Connor (2024) observes,
The global financial crisis of 2008-10 opened a period in which the dominant model of market-led reforms. . . was increasingly compromised. Growing inequality, insecurity of work, rising indebtedness, stalled wages and rising living costs, and stagnation of growth and investment, along with a hollowing out of democratic institutions amid a deepening cynicism and a volatile populist ‘anti-politics’. Martin Wolf. . . has declared neoliberalism a failed experiment, though it is by no means clear what is to replace it. (O’Connor, p. 3)
The dilemma is especially acute for those trying to reconceive the relationship between economics and its conventional hierarchy of concepts – called here ‘mainstream economics’ – and the provision of culture as a public good (‘the foundations’). This sweeps in challenges from heterodox approaches such as Modern Monetary Theory (Kelton, 2020), the Foundational Economy Collective (FEC, 2018) and ‘doughnut’ economics (Raworth, 2017). But it also includes policymakers working pragmatically in existing administrations who seek to legitimate policy terms by expanding how these are classified and operate. This requires engaging the intellectual debates from whence they emerged, a journey typically lost in the ahistorical mentalité that marks neoliberalism as a political and managerialist ideology (Yeatman and Costea, 2018).
As a contribution to such rethinking, this article examines the idea of ‘the public realm’ as found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (THC) (1958) and as it might be taken up by cultural policy today. The broad argument is that the histories, interdisciplinary existence and patterns of use of thick concepts are crucial to their meaning and sense, and that ignoring these deprives them of the benefit they have as policymaking terms. Building on my previous engagement with Arendt (Meyrick, 2023a; Meyrick and Barnett, 2017), the first section examines economist Mariana Mazzucato’s (2023) arguments for revising the concept ‘the common good’ in a similar way. While not unsuccessful, her approach calls for further elaboration.
The second section tackles the parts of THC dealing with ‘the public realm’ directly, showing the intellectual depth this idea can supply when viewed through a lens of philosophical and political discernment. Arendt is a unique 20th-century figure in this respect. Her writings blend fluency in European post-Socratic thought (“the tradition”: 17) 1 with the outlook of a modern social scientist. THC touches on ideas such as making, laboring, working, contemplating, forgiving, promising and, most importantly, action, all of which Arendt sees as crucial to the conduct of public life. They are not the focus here. Yet, it is in the muddling of these ideas in the contemporary world, particularly its substitution of making for action, that Arendt sees the roots of ‘the waste economy’ (p. 134).
I argue that Arendt’s ‘thinking thickly’ is instructive for those engaging questions around the public value of culture and the repurposing of state action in the cultural sector today. By her careful investigation of key concepts, she not only indicates how they apply to what kind of situations, but also shows how to actively think with them. Here, I respond to Angela McRobbie’s (2024) call to widen the readership of Arendt’s work at a time when ‘liberal and leftist values have been eroded [and confront] the loud noise of populism, neo-nationalism and racism, amplified by the social media feeds to global populations’ (p. 3).
Culture is threaded throughout THC as both physical object and mode of thought. This lifts it out of the category of discretionary good and service, where it has languished in mainstream economics since the 1970s, and gives it a place in the public realm as ‘the dead letter in which the living spirit must survive’ (p. 169). If culture is to supply a foundation for policymaking, recognizing its political role is crucial. And if economists are to parse a meaningful notion of public value, they must tackle the concept of ‘public’ in a thick way. In its self-conscious divorce from philosophy and politics, economics often seems like a ‘thin’ discourse, failing to display awareness of the historical and interdisciplinary dimensions of ideas it naively disposes of as its own (cf. Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2016). The definition of key concepts cannot be decided mono-perspectively. Where they are not contested, they are invariably shared, and these multiple existences rarely condense into a simple view. A policy discourse that truncates the meaning of its terms and/or ignores different epistemic outlooks is one peddling ‘folk theories’ to groups of believers, not addressing problems in a grounded way (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013).
The conclusion examines the UK cultural policy document, Measurement of Social and Cultural Infrastructure (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, 2024), asking if its understanding of its key concepts is adequate to its policy object. What can be said about UK cultural policymaking on the basis of this Working Paper? What challenges do policymakers face as they try to tack away from neoliberalism’s ‘semblance of action [and] hollowing out of State capacity’ (Chodor & Hameiri: 31) with no obvious alternative pathway on offer? The Paper is briefly compared to the approach taken by Justin O’ Connor (2024) in his book Culture is Not an Industry.
A declaration: Although this article is concerned with concepts and their handling, and is largely theoretical, my aim is a practical one: to assist policymakers to think beyond the impasses of a decontextualized, hyper-instrumental approach to culture. The burden of this often falls on the cultural domain itself; that is, it is left to those in arts and culture to make a case for why it is an appropriate policy object, and in what ways. I argue the opposite. It is policymakers who must find concepts adequate to the culture they confront so that effective courses of action may be identified and pursued. Language, not data, is crucial to this task. Hence, the turn to Arendt and her sensitizing treatment of ideas.
A comment on my own handling of concepts. The article stays within an Arendtian register of address. Thus, I discuss ‘public realm’ not ‘public sphere’, which comes from a different, if not incompatible, Frankfurt School lineage and finds expression in the work of Jűrgen Habermas and cultural theorists like Nancy Fraser, Terry Eagleton and Jim McGuigan. THC is influenced by a philosopher who never appears in it by name – Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (Dasein) phenomenology forms the submerged background to Arendt’s project. It gives an embodied, human-centric, verstehen dimension to her analysis. It is clumsy to talk about a re-existentialization of policymaking implicit in her conception of ‘the public realm’. But it suggests what it encompasses as a practical task. It does not involve minatory sparring over taxonomic distinctions or disciplinary borders, real or imagined. It involves greater attention to experience, moral values, place and time. This increase in specificity bolsters techne to assist poesis. Attending to notions of meaning and authenticity feels urgent now, when policymaking appears stuck in deracinated conceptual binaries – state versus individual, objective versus subjective, structure versus agency and so on – to sterile effect.
Thinking thickly
What is thinking thickly? How can we judge whether policymakers are doing so? ‘Thinking – in philosophy, art and science – is the conceptual counterpart of the ability to enter modes of relation to affect and be affected, sustaining qualitative shifts and creative tensions accordingly’, writes Braidotti (2019: 46). It involves reading concepts into actual or possible situations to render them more legible. Thinking thickly thus activates concepts in a process of critical investigation and argument, exploring their capacity to apply to actual or possible situations, thereby utilizing their integrative force. Key concepts have more than a correspondent relation to reality but are potentially world-disclosing in a Heideggerian sense. They illuminate situations over time (diachronic purchase) and/or over a range of instances (synchronic purchase). Terms such as ‘public’, ‘common’ and ‘collective’, and ‘value’, ‘benefit’ and good’ reflect overlapping problem areas that are dialogic and multivalent. The tool-ification of ideas characteristic of contemporary Western discourse – their treatment as having invariant content and value-neutral functioning – is erroneous. Key concepts own to (1) intellectual histories, (2) interdisciplinary lives and (3) complex patterns of use.
What is a concept? 2 Repko and Szostak write, ‘A concept is a symbol expressed in language that represents a phenomenon, or an abstract idea generalized from particular instances. For example, chairs come in various shapes and sizes, but once a child acquires the concept chair, that child will always refer to anything that has legs and a seat as a chair’ (p. 22, original emphasis). Concepts do the job of joining our inner and outer worlds, turning sensory experience into categories of thought, and vice-versa. They are devices that mediate between our minds and material conditions, putting into manageable discursive packages aspects of the world and aspects of thought. Different concepts do this in different ways. In policymaking, three main classes may be identified. The first are terms of general description, for example, Repko and Szostak’s example ‘chair’. These map tightly onto the objects to which they refer. The second are collations of observable effects whose existence as policy objects rely on accepting these effects as interrelated, for example, ‘the global economy’. They map in a looser way onto their empirical referent and are more controversial. The third class of concepts originate in the mind to begin with and are normative ideals, for example, ‘universal human rights’. Even when their effects are empirically observable, they have a prior mental existence that can be discussed separately. In thinking thickly, a concept’s mode of relation is acknowledged, even though it may operate across part or all of the classificatory spectrum, as below.
Table 1 is a heuristic. No doubt other classes of concept can be identified. But the Table provides some distinctions that can be used to determine in what ways the construction of policy categories reflects conceptually thick thinking. It is clearly important that in any policy document, things, effects and ideals are not conflated or confused.
Different types of concepts.
The common good
Mariana Mazzucato’s (2023) ‘Governing the Economics of the Common Good’ aims to expand mainstream economics’ understanding of the concept ‘the good’ (in the singular). As part of her analysis, Mazzucato examines its idea of ‘goods’ (in the plural), and perforce the related concepts of ‘public’ and ‘value’.
3
From this, she develops a philosophically aware ‘five-pillars’ model for reactivating the policy category ‘the common good’ that would shift it out of a narrow econometric frame and allow economic theory to inform, rather than dictate, a conversation about policy purposes:
A renewed conception of the common good, one that is nested in market-shaping and public value may be a productive way of forming synergies between previous contributions while moving beyond existing shortcomings and informing what is being considered at an urgent moment for collective action. It draws valuable insight from political philosophy as highlighting the relational and mutual nature of the common good. [My] article puts forth a framework where the ways in which actors work together towards collective goals is guided by five key principles: (1) purpose and directionality; (2) co-creation and participation; (3) collective learning and knowledge-sharing; (4) access for all and reward-sharing; and (5) transparency and accountability.
Mazzucato’s interest in public value is long-standing (e.g. Mazzucato, 2013, 2018, 2021; Mazzucato et al., 2020; Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2022). As someone knowledgeable in mainstream economics who wants to expand its aperture of understanding, she considers the problems with its conventional concepts in detail. More than half of ‘Governing the Economics of the Common Good’ is focused on this style of negative critique. She questions its assumptions around ‘market failure’ and ‘market correction’, as well as its nugatory view of government. For Mazzucato, the common good is not the public good as currently found in the economics literature, where it is sutured to a belief that individuals and private firms provide the rationale, as well as the practical unit, for government intervention (where this is required at all). She discusses the United Nations’ concept of Global Public Goods (GPGs). Acknowledging this is a step on from a market-based view of value, she expresses reservations about the UN’s lack of enthusiasm for ‘capable states . . . governing the economy to achieve collective goals’ (p. 9). She notes the distortions inherent in mainstream economics’ distinction between private and public goods; the limits of its theory of public goods which ‘treats . . . the most systemic problems in global capitalism (e.g. climate change and inequality), as externalities’ (Mazzucato, 2018: 6); and GPGs’ reliance on the conceptual foundations of this theory. In another section, she tackles ‘common-pool resources’, observing that, as with the literature on public goods, ‘whenever the state has been the concern of commons scholarship, its role has mostly been deemed inadequate or remained rooted in neoclassical microeconomic theory and welfare economics’ (Mazzucato, 2013: 8).
As an attempt to recast governments as capable of taking positive action and expanding their role from one where ‘public intervention in the economy is only justified if it is geared towards fixing situations in which markets fail to efficiently allocate resources’ (p. 9), Mazzucato’s arguments are persuasive. Her conclusion that the common good ‘needs to be based on a conception of public value as collectively negotiated and generated by a range of stakeholders’ (p. 10) follows logically. ‘Rethinking the role of the state in modern market economies requires an underlying theory of public value’, she observes, ‘one that . . . focuses on how public organisations interact with private and civil society actors to deal with the major challenges facing society’. She acknowledges that public value is ‘inherently contested in the political arena where different interests are resolved and conflict and argument lead to decision and action’. The model she puts forward is designed to facilitate a ‘correction [that] focuses as much on the “how” as the “what” . . . guided by a market shaping view of government, driven by public value’.
Mazzucato’s five-pillars model positions the common good as a multivalent concept. However, with economics the dominant disciplinary influence, there is little room to explore insights from politics or philosophy. The section devoted to this discussion is just a page long and mentions only Aristotle, Mill and Rawls. This ‘thins’ her model, depriving it of support from the wider intellectual conversation that has historically occurred around ‘the good’, ‘value’ and ‘public’, all of which she sees – correctly – as dependent on each other if they are to cohere as policy terms. Though things, effects and ideals are for the most part distinguished, there is a lack of interdisciplinary perspective such that different epistemic outlooks might be integrated in an equal way. Yet activating ‘the common good’ in policymaking absolutely requires discovering such common ground, otherwise the ‘collective learning and knowledge-sharing’ timed to occur in pillar three (p. 15) will be economic in character, entrenching the very conceptual limits Mazzucato wants to overcome.
It is a simplification, but perhaps an accurate one, to say that ‘Governing the Economics of the Common Good’ aims to unite economic and political understandings of ‘the good’, and so reach across the value and values divide that bedevils contemporary debate about collective action (Meyrick and Barnett, 2017). By acknowledging politics as the arena for articulating what Max Weber called ‘ultimate values’ (Weber, 1948: 51), Mazzucato recognizes that policy decisions about the common good involve choices between incommensurable activities and outcomes. However, when economic concepts of efficiency are displaced from a superordinate role, the resulting value pluralism is, as Weber grimly saw, and as contemporary culture wars viscerally attest, significantly conflictual. The vital question arises of why Mazzucato’s five pillars should be accepted as ‘active areas . . . for the skills needed by governments to govern in the public interest’ (p. 17). Why should governments take the trouble or the risk? Folding the ‘why’ question back onto the ‘how’ question, by what means can a cooperative common good model ensure it is not overwhelmed by majoritarian power, elite dominance or simply the loudest voices? What new understanding of ‘public’ can turn a fragmented array of special interests into a cohesive community with meaningful and authentic collective goals?
It is here, at a stubborn and frightening impasse, with mainstream economics searching for a revised understanding of its own terms, and governments and activists needing better definitions of them for policy purposes, that turning to Hannah Arend is useful.
Arendt and the public realm
The Human Condition is a dense book. Addressing the evolution of nodal ideas in Western philosophy, it is intricate in argument and wide-ranging in reference, touching on Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in respect of the state, politics, public and private realms, labour, work and the vita activa (active life). It would be a mistake to think of Arendt’s concerns as terminological. Rather, THC is an exercise in conceptual sensitization (Blumer, 1954), in raising awareness of the enrichment key ideas have received over the centuries by different schools of thought, and showing the benefit of considering them in this way now. By the standards of contemporary scholarship, the book is remarkably free of neologisms and claims to innovation. Arendt is not interested in putting forward new paradigms or systems of thought. She takes ideas in everyday circulation and illuminates their historical trajectories and interdisciplinary dimensions. She is thus exemplary of treating such concepts in a thick way.
Questions of policy are an ongoing preoccupation for Arendt. While she does not offer Weberian-style analysis of bureaucratic structures and processes, she probes the logic of policymaking, showing how it can adopt a blind consistency destructive of moral values and political experience. Thus, despite its flaws and the fact that it is of its time, the book has an aura of lively engagement that makes it useful when considering the function of key concepts in policymaking now. Policy is not philosophy. But when policymakers invoke ideas that emerge from long philosophical inquiry, an important question is whether these have been taken up in ways that respond to that legacy. Even if critique is an esoteric exercise, as “policy moment” researchers argue (Meyrick, 2023), conceptual history is a different matter. At a minimum, it is the locating of an idea in the pathway of its historical development, not to reduce it to that history, but to benefit from its resonances (Koselleck et al., 2006).
Arendt is a brilliant essayist, as Men in Dark Times (1968) and Responsibility and Judgement (2003) attest. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1994 [1950]) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) are books with powerful messages and epic explanatory sweeps. In contrast, THC is self-consciously scholarly and theoretical. An exploration of ancient Greek, Roman and early Christian thought, its tone is expository, at times, in its numerous clarifications and qualifications, pettifogging. At others, Arendt puts forward generalizations that feel over-blown. Missing is systematic engagement with early modern political philosophy. Discussion of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Mill is brief. Yet, there are advantages to not footing the book on the origin story of the modern nation state, and focusing, instead, on ideas inherited from the ancient world by both Marxian and liberal capitalist theories of human relations. By insisting on a long durée tracing of key concepts, Arendt not only holds these ideologies to account in respect of their own claims to originality, but also reveals the continuities and fractures between older definitions of the state, leadership and political rule, and their contemporary understanding. The result is an interrogation of words that have ended up in policymaking today but are often muddied, muddled or truncated.
The main body of The Human Condition is an examination of three concepts: labour, work and action (chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively). There is considerable overlap between them; however, while other concerns regularly break in (the book is nothing if not digressive. Discussion of culture, for example, occurs in chapter 4 (§23 ‘The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art’), while discussion of the rise and fall of trade unionism appears in chapter 5 (§30 ‘The Labor Movement’)). The concluding chapter is hard to summarize. Its 11 sections include an examination of the step-change from ancient to modern worldviews (§38 ‘The Rise of Cartesian Doubt’) and analysis of the differences between production and consumer capitalism (§43 ‘The Defeat of Homo Faber and the Principle of Happiness’). Yet, if the shape of the book is not straightforward, its main theme is clear enough: ‘the withering of the public realm, so conspicuous throughout the modern age’ (p. 220). Arendt connects this decline to two phenomena: the corrosion of language and the rise of automation. The connection between ‘thought’, ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ is a central plank of the ancient Greek polis as Arendt sees it, the essence of its democratic politics. All three inform her conception of ‘action’. They stand in contrast not to each other, but to another mode of inquiry, ‘contemplation’. Tracing the vita activa through Homeric, Socratic and Augustinian schools of thought, Arendt sees it as an explicitly political understanding of collective existence:
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition . . . of all political life . . . Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. (pp. 7–8)
If parts of The Human Condition feel abstruse or forced, others are powerful and prescient. This is especially true of those passages where Arendt addresses the idea of the public realm and of our appearance in it. For Arendt, it is politics, and not science, and certainly not economics, that captures reality, because it is politics where people are both the same and different, a result of the conjunction of a principle of parity (arising from our common appearance as human beings) and a principle of singularity (because we each hold a unique perspective). The combination of sameness and difference allows us to see each other as compeer individuals with non-identical views, and to negotiate them. We have inimitable outlooks, yet can allow our understanding of the world to be conditioned by others we encounter. This develops our common sense – ‘the sixth and highest sense’ (p. 274) – that integrates our five physical senses and is the crucial driver of political life.
Without following Arendt down her numerous philosophical rabbit-holes, it is possible to see the relevance of this elucidation for policymaking now. If the world was one of difference only, no general approach to it would be possible; it would be a parade of one-off objects, relations, and events. If it was just one of sameness, no general approach would be required, only study of the laws governing that sameness; that is, the public realm would be identical to the natural one. As it is, the difference/sameness conjunction creates a zone of interaction that is formally equal (from our appearance in it qua appearance) but functionally unequal (in the different perspectives it continuously and unavoidably generates). Difference and sameness produce distinction. It is as distinct human beings that we take our place in the public realm, and this decisively conditions it as a moral and political environment. 4
Chapter 2 deals with the concepts of public and private realms directly, although the division is central to Arendt’s discussion of action later, and informs her overall argument about the disintegration of public life. She writes,
The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even the richest and most satisfying family life can offer only the prolongation or multiplication of one’s own position with its attending aspects and perspectives. . . Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear. (57 emphasis added)
Within the public realm, thinking things, saying things and doing things are ‘coeval and coequal, of the same rank and the same kind’ (p. 26). They are all action, as opposed to the mute efforts of labouring (animal laborans), or the restricted field of craft and manufacture (homo faber). However, there is an important connection between culture, the vita activa, and craft and manufacture, in which ‘reification’ plays a creative role. Turning thoughts, words and deeds into artefacts is the job of the artist, and this is one of many points in THC where talk of culture deepens and extends its arguments about politics. 5 Sometimes Arendt turns to art for her examples. Sometimes she cites Greek and Roman writers who do so. THC is naturally inclusive of the cultural domain, in part because the public realm relies on arts and culture as a mnemonic resource – ‘Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment . . . the living activities of action, speech, and thought would . . . disappear as though they never had been’ (p. 95) – in part because Arendt sees no hard and fast distinction between culture and action. In short, she treats culture as both a relation of thought and a domain of artistic objects and activities, and so as having a self-evident place in the public realm.
Economics is at odds with the thought-words-deeds idea of politics. This arises from two aspects of its outlook. First, its marginalization of the concept of the public realm. For Arendt, ancient Greek life rests on a fundamental division between private and public domains. It locates politics in the latter. This is the zone of individual and collective freedom. In a democracy, the public realm is inclusive, participatory and loquacious – ‘the most talkative of all bodies politic’ (p. 26). Its basic unit is the polis and its mode of address is persuasive rhetoric. Its formal equality fosters ‘a fiercely agonal spirit’. In contrast, the private realm is the site for the struggle for material subsistence. It is closed and hierarchical, removed from the diversity and disputes of the agora. Its basic unit is the oikia (household), and its mode of address is one of command and control. Arendt describes how the rise of ‘the social’ – a concept found in ancient Roman but not ancient Greek thought – undermines this division. In the modern era, ‘society’ dissolves the politics of the polis, replacing the plurality of the public realm with ‘one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest’ (p. 31). 6 The inflation of the social at the expense of the political constructs a polis with the coercive force of the oikia. Averse to negotiating multiple perspectives, its inclination is to concentrate ‘[such] that distinction and difference . . . become private matters of the individual’ (p. 41). The social recasts the public realm as a version of the private one, driven by command and control.
Arendt’s understanding of ‘the social’ is complex (cf. Ricoeur, 1983). However, what is clear is that by adopting the oikia and not the polis as its foundational unit, economics subtracts economic decision-making from politics and the agonal spirit of the public realm. All economic activity becomes private activity, be it that of the individual, the firm or the state, while the acknowledgement of human plurality (people as citizens) is replaced by a mental abstraction with supposed uniform qualities (people as consumers). Arendt writes,
It is [this] conformism, the assumption that men behave and do not act with respect to each other, that lies at the root of the modern science of economics, whose birth coincided with the rise of society and which, together with its chief technical tool, statistics, became the social science par excellence. Economics – until the modern age a not too important part of ethics and politics . . . could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behaviour, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal. (p. 42, original emphasis)
The second aspect that contributes to economics’ disavowal of the public realm is its antipathy to the frailty and uncertainty of the action that occurs within in. The indeterminate nature of action is a major point of discussion in THC, and the chapter dedicated to it one of the longest in the book. If politics is an expression of human freedom, what imbues politics with its emancipative charge is its unpredictability and open endedness, the quality of always-already beginning that characterizes the true political life. 7 The capacity to act and not merely behave, and to put acts into thoughts and words – to argue for them, against them, remember them – is the engine that supplies politics with meaning and purchase. For Arendt, it is the essence of the human condition as perceived through the lens of vita activa. Her examination of the concept of action includes reflection on its capacity to reveal the selfhood of the agents behind it (‘without the disclosure of the agent in the act, action loses its specific character and becomes one form of achievement among others’, p. 180); to negotiate different interests and perspectives (‘the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together’, p. 184); to tell a narrative of which human beings are both initiators and inheritors (‘to do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings’, p. 190); to link individual identity and notable deeds (‘The Greek Solution’, pp. 192–198); to require power to unfold and flourish (p. 200); and to find mitigating resources in forgiveness and promises, the former releasing us from the consequences of our past actions, the latter binding us to consistency in relation to future ones (p. 237).
The fundamental challenge to the public realm, and to the vita activa, therefore comes from those who would put the economy before ‘the conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualisation’ (p. 208). This claim is the subject of two sections in the middle of THC. ‘The Traditional Substitution of Making for Acting’ (pp. 220–229) overviews Western philosophy’s struggle to avoid the contingency of politics, ‘to escape from action into rule’ (p. 222). 8 ‘The Process Character of Action’ (pp. 230–235) presents the case for why indeterminacy is a pre-given fact of collective life and why attempts to repudiate it stifle human plurality and the understanding of reality as such. The core of Arendt’s arguments about the impoverishment of the public realm may be found here. She shows how, in the contemporary era, though the fragility of action has declined, the uncertainty of its outcomes has increased. Unlike craft and manufacture, action has no clear beginning, middle and end. This is true not only of politics, but of science and technology too as they go beyond investigating natural forces, to harnessing and directing them. Modern scientists are no more capable of foreseeing the full impact of what they do than Plato’s philosopher-kings. ‘Not even oblivion and confusion, which can cover up so efficiently the origin and the responsibility for every single deed, are able to undo a deed or prevent its consequences’, Arendt writes. ‘And this incapacity to undo what has been done is matched by an almost equally complete incapacity to foretell the consequences of any deed or even to have reliable knowledge of its motives’ (p. 233).
Exploring this paradox – the need for action, on the one hand, the impossibility of knowing its full impact on the other – returns Arendt to policymaking, and the vital requirement for policymakers to be aware of the ‘authentic perplexities inherent in the human capacity for action and [avoid] the . . . temptation to eliminate its risks and dangers by introducing . . . the categories . . . with which we . . . build the world of human artifice’ (p. 230). This means being knowledgeable about the development of concepts as concepts, and of the purchase they have when deployed in an interdisciplinary way. It is this style of historical excavation that thinking thickly demands. It is very different from the style of mainstream economics literature today, which valorizes ‘recent scholarship’ to construct an echo chamber around its own hallmark assumptions.
The Human Condition provides no easy prescriptions in respect of realizing the common good. Instead, it offers an exploration of politics as a good in itself, thus answering the question of why human beings should engage in it in the first place – why we should prefer the polis to the oikia in pursuing our flourishing as human beings. THC reveals what politics is as an ontological condition. In this, Arendt shares Weber’s political realism and commitment to an ‘ethics of responsibility’ which he contrasts with an ‘ethics of conviction’ (Weber 2004 [1919]: 90). Convictions are necessary to politics, but politics involves more than just stating convictions. Impinging on all aspects of human life, it must be fully accountable for its processes and results. If thinking is a form of action, action is a form of thought. THC makes it plain: this comes with rigorous intellectual demands that cannot be avoided if concepts are to play a meaningful and authentic part in policy debates.
Conclusion: the Bennett Institute and cultural infrastructure
How might Arendt’s style of thinking thickly apply to cultural policymaking now? The Bennett Institute is a Cambridge University UK consultancy addressing problems in public policy in Britain. Its website slogans are ‘Driving forward key policy questions in a turbulent world’ and ‘Undertaking interdisciplinary research that has impact and contributes to improvements in people’s lives’. 9 The Working Paper, Measurement of Social and Cultural Infrastructure: Vision and Approach, dropped in March 2024. The Institute claims it ‘explores the importance of social and cultural infrastructure for society and probes the implications of understanding and measuring its value for policymaking’ (p. 1). Though only 21 pages long, the fact that three of the Paper’s four authors are senior researchers, that the commissioning body is the British Academy and that it has the status of an ‘Inception Report’ makes it an important document. The authors note ‘one of the reasons why infrastructure is poorly understood is because it represents what philosophers call a “thick concept”, one which both describes and evaluates at the same time, and hence makes it difficult to define in a way amenable to measurement’ (p. 2). Given this statement, the Paper is a useful test of whether contemporary cultural policymaking treats its key concepts in a historically informed and interdisciplinary way.
Diagram 1 is a Voyant word cloud which shows that, despite its avowed concern with thickness, the dominant term in the Working Paper is ‘economic’. After the title terms, this is the most commonly used word, at 38 mentions. Frequently occurring cognate terms are ‘growth’ (16 mentions), ‘economy’ (13 mentions), and ‘productivity’, ‘capital’ and ‘development’ (11 mentions each). ‘Culture’ has just 19 mentions, ‘public’ 13 mentions and ‘political’ 8 mentions. Close reading of the Paper confirms a mainstream economic understanding of ‘cultural infrastructure’ as the central one, to which variations and extensions of the concept are referred. No reason is given for why this definition is chosen as the default. The concept of infrastructure, taken from engineering, has a substantial literature around it in sociology, anthropology and political science. The Bennett Institute authors reprise some of this research in the second half of their Paper, but do not bring it into dialogue with the first half. Thus, the dominance of mainstream economics remains unchallenged.
Voyant word cloud.
This has a number of consequences. First, it makes it difficult for the authors to discuss cultural infrastructure as a multivalent policy object in the public realm, even though the Paper indicates a strong desire to do so. That is, the concern is clearly with public infrastructure, and the public value that might attach to it were this to be acknowledged and assessed. But with mainstream economics as the primary perspective comes economic growth as the primary aim. Infrastructure dissolves in a circular logic: the economy contributes to cultural infrastructure so that cultural infrastructure can contribute to the economy. This decontextualization and hyper-instrumentalism can be found in other parts of the Paper too, for example, in its discussion of institutions (pp. 4–5).
A more serious problem relates to the lack of a temporal perspective. While extensive historical research is not to be expected from a pilot report, cultural infrastructure involves objects and relations that persist through time. Understanding this trajectory is a fundamental policy challenge. ‘[R]esearch has shown the impact that the “Beeching Axe” had on unprofitable railway lines on rural areas and peripheral towns’ (p. 4), the authors write,
Some newer types of statistics are now becoming available . . . Still, the picture is dramatically incomplete. Little is known about . . . the availability of social and cultural infrastructure in different localities; or about the extent to which different types of tangible and intangible infrastructures either complement or substitute for each other.
This example of UK public transport cuts in the 1960s vividly illustrates the difficulty of evaluating infrastructure: notions of costs and benefits fluctuate over time. Yesterday’s efficiency is today’s inequity. Without a gauge of long-term value, the Paper is stuck trying to solve a diachronic problem with (patchy) synchronic data.
This eventually leads the authors to broaden their economistic outlook. Yet, it does not generate an approach from which more meaningful and authentic assessment indicators might be drawn. Why not? The Paper excerpts a selection of current assessment frameworks (pp. 9–10). These represent starkly different worldviews, disciplinary perspectives and calculation methods. About this, the authors only say, “All of these differences in existing measurement frameworks highlight the fact that the normative perspectives of researchers invariably play a role in their decisions about which connections between different elements of infrastructure should be centred and emphasised” (p. 11). Mapping the examples given in the Paper onto the concept classes in Table 1 produces Table 2.
Bennett Institute: definitions of cultural infrastructure.
The fact that three conceptions of cultural infrastructure occur in the Paper shows that the authors want to grapple with it in a thick way. The reliance on mainstream economics for their epistemic outlook means that naming them is as far as they can get. The section dealing with the definition of culture is especially ‘thin’, a reprise of the culture-as-art versus culture-as-way-of-life ‘long debate’ (Goodall, 1995), with choice of the latter having a rote feel to it (unsurprisingly, it suits a mainstream economics idea of infrastructure). In the final pages, a ‘creative economy’ position is compared to one ‘evok[ing] the potential value of cultural infrastructure in relation to other social goods, such as civic pride, social cohesion and/or individual wellbeing’ (p. 16). But no practical insights are drawn from this, and the Working Paper is thus no closer to providing a thick understanding of its stated themes and concerns.
The Bennett Institute report can be contrasted with the approach taken by Justin O’Connor in Culture is Not an Industry, which also discusses cultural infrastructure as a policy object. Here, the concept is placed in an interdisciplinary vista that invites exploration of its implications for policymaking. It is important to note that economics is not in itself a problem. It is the assumptions of mainstream economics that create impasses for policy actions based on them. O’Connor grapples with his key ideas in tones and terms strikingly similar to those in THC. He draws on the work of the Foundational Economy Collective and its disaggregation of the economy into different zones to position cultural infrastructure as a public good:
Culture viewed entirely as a private consumption good undermines culture as part of a wider sociocultural infrastructure. To put it another way, cultural infrastructure is not just ‘out there’ in the local community but ‘right here’ at the heart of the household. If the social infrastructure is . . . about citizens equipped with Senian freedom and the capacities to flourish and realise themselves, then we must see cultural capacity as a crucial part of this citizenship. Household cultural consumption acquires its fuller meaning in a social context, in those sites and occasions for discussion, argument, learning and exchange. As well as collective celebration, or sub-cultural bonding. (pp. 171–172)
Measurement of Social and Cultural Infrastructure is a policy document written by academic researchers, and Culture is Not an Industry is a book by an academic researcher with a policy focus. The aims and language of the publications should converge. Yet, the gap between them feels immense. It is not just that the idea of ‘public’ is absent from the Working Paper where it should be present. It is that its aim of thinking thickly is defeated by a stance that abstracts its understanding from the politics that might ground it. Whether this is the fault of mainstream economics, or whether mainstream economics is the way it is because of the neoliberal governance model in which it is embedded, the challenge is the same. In taking up key concepts, policymakers must engage the intellectual debates from which they emerge, and to which they are beholden for their meaningful and authentic policy use. This is done better by Marianna Mazzucato than by the Bennett Institute, but the constricting mono-perspective of economics is felt in ‘Governing the Economics of the Common Good’ too. By working with concepts of ‘liveability’ and ‘citizenship’, O’Connor exposes the oikia–polis imbalance that Arendt sees as skewing contemporary society and shifts culture back to the public realm, where governments can take a more positive role than maximizing its benefits to the individuals who happen to consume it at any one moment in time. His approach draws on a wide body of scholarship that includes economics, history, sociology, political theory and cultural analysis. Things, effects and ideals are clearly distinguished. Different epistemic outlooks are considered. Cultural infrastructure emerges as an integrated concept as a result.
Culture is Not an Industry is an example of a researcher applying a key concept to a policy object in a world where technology, power and culture weave together in complex ways, that is, thinking thickly. By doing so, O’Connor follows in a tradition of public intellectual critique that is historically reflective, philosophically informed and politically engaged. As governments search for a foundation for cultural policy beyond the empty logic of neoliberal managerialism, the benefits of such a multivalent approach are significant.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research of this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council, “Meaningfully Communicating the Value of Arts and Culture Through Reporting” (LP170100933).
