Arendt and the Social Question: A Post-Marxist Analysis

1. Introduction

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt offers an original concept of “social” via which she proposes a radical critique of the subject of “social” science, ¹ that is the notion of “society.” For Arendt, two dimensions of the human condition may be accurately conceptualized: the domestic order and the economy on one hand, and the public space and political life on the other. Between the two, there is nothing which is conceptually solid. The notion of society is simply all-encompassing and vague, and Arendt stigmatizes it in speaking of the “social.” Stemming from the modern period, this notion does not belong to the basic anthropological categories of labor, work, and action. It consists of nothing more than a collection of discourses attempting, after the fact, to rationalize a modern historical transformation: the domestic order’s invasion of the public space—which empties the latter of its substance.

We may question whether this perspective allows us to take account of our modern experience of democracy. If we just focus on Western nations, this experience developed in societies where the economic order was dominated by capitalism and where the wage system gained ascendancy. In such a “capitalist-democratic” framework (Boltanski 2011), we are forced to admit that the notion of the “social” has a positive connotation. Among other post-Marxist theoreticians, Robert Castel ([1995] 2002, 2009) mobilized the French regulationist theory of wage-labor nexus (Boyer 1993; Boyer and Saillard 2002; Sobel and Postel 2014) and proposed a conceptualization of this in which the “social” is envisaged as an assortment of collective institutions, the fruit of conflicts, and constructed to strengthen the life of workers, and becomes something like a prepolitical condition of political life.

This article does not seek to confront these contrasting conceptions—which would be artificial because the two perspectives are not at the same analytical level and their reflections do not have the same scope—but rather to raise questions concerning the limitations of Arendt’s concept of what is social, with the help of Robert Castel’s historical sociology of the emancipation of the working class. ² It is not simply a matter of critiquing Arendt’s abstract perspective which places citizens in an historical and institutional void and stigmatizes everything which is “social,” which is reduced to the domestic order’s invasion of the modern public space. It is a question of outlining a political theory relevant to our “capitalist-democratic” societies. Now, to do so, Arendt is missing the idea of institutional and collective supports for the effective exercise of democracy by the greatest number, that is, precisely those who work for a living. It is this idea which is emphasized in the historical analyses of working-class emancipation developed by Robert Castel through the concept of “social property” and which, we contend, constitutes the missing component of Arendt’s political theory.

Let us summarize the problem. If we situate ourselves in modern societies where the economic order is dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the question is whether what is “social” is apolitical, indeed antipolitical (which is essentially what emerges from Arendt’s interpretation), whether it is prepolitical (a possibility that we may draw from Arendt, but which Arendt did not exploit), or whether it is political. It is the last position that our article defends. We propose to call this position “post-Marxist,” and we believe that it is possible to develop it based on Robert Castel’s notion of “social property.”

2. The Emergence of the Social and the Dissolution of the Political in Arendt’s Theory

To understand what Arendt means by “social,” a detour through her general anthropology is required. For Arendt, this anthropology is a discourse on the human condition in general, aiming to understand the salient traits independently of the sociohistorical forms in which this condition can be seen concretely, always in singular fashion. The specificity of her anthropology, thoroughly explored in The Human Condition, is twofold. On one hand, she is seeking the essence of the human condition from the perspective of the “active life” (vita activa), and not from that of the contemplative life (vita contemplativa). On the other hand, she does not reduce this active life to work alone but makes the henceforth famous hierarchical distinction within this type of life between action, work (the fabrication of something), and labor (the reproduction of human life). Arendt’s thought is complex and connects two distinctions. A first is that between action, activity belonging to the public domain (Bowen-Moore 1989; Calhoun and McGowan 1997; Canovan 1992), and the very production of the necessary conditions for life, an activity which falls under the private domain. This first distinction extends Aristotle’s differentiation between “praxis” and “poiesis.” A second distinction is within production, between “labor” and “work” or “fabrication.” The social can only be analyzed starting from these precise categorizations.

These distinctions can be explained in greater detail. To labor is not to build or to make something. Labor is linked to vital necessity and to its undefined cyclical movement of pure consumption. “Life” is here employed in the Greek sense of “zoe” and not of that of “bios.” Life which requires of each of us our service as “labor” is not the same as that existence which goes in a single direction from birth to death, or specifically human life—bios. This life is a story which is recounted, every biography a tale through which each is understood anew in his or her human uniqueness—Zoe, it is biological life. It is maintained through the regular movement of creation and exhaustion; it is both the effort of work and consumption, imposing itself indefinitely on our body not only as effort and suffering but also as joy. Zoe involves cyclical time, repetition, and the indefinite return of some of the same moments, leaving nothing and nobody as a stable or lasting presence. In contrast, manufacturing, which is the work of our hands and not the labor of our bodies, produces no nondurable objects for “consumption”; it produces objects for use, forming a stable, artificial, and unnatural context which is always already there, which welcomes each human being and which outlasts them all. This framework, created by homo faber, is what Arendt calls the world. In this sense, it is between two artificial factors which both separate people and bring them together, in other words, the stable habitat which welcomes the plurality of human beings and allows them to appear, that is, to be visible and to be able to act, in each individual and on each, one with the other, to be political. Meanwhile, everyone supposes—but not visibly—that the labor of homo laborans can only be maintained if everyone is born, operates, and is structured thanks to homo faber and his durable works.

For the ancient Greeks or Romans, there is the domestic order and the economy, on one hand, and the public space on the other; the two are separated. The domestic sphere is basically organized around the need to reproduce the biological conditions for human life. In contrast, the public domain is where the free individual, the citizen, can, with all the other free individuals, the other citizens, devote himself to common affairs. In the former, in the oikos, there is a twofold constraint. The constraint which results from vital necessities, and to which all human beings are naturally subject, is coupled with the domination exercised by the pater familias, whose power is almost absolute. The household is not merely the place of necessity; it is also the site of inequality and the absence of liberty. Slaves never leave the sphere of animal activities related to physical needs. They are excluded from logos or, more precisely, they do not participate in it inasmuch as they obey the master’s word. ³ On the contrary, the citizens who participate in the construction of the City are freed from this constraint.

Compared with this representation, modern society is characterized by the process in the course of which what is vital penetrates the political and dictates its rules; in other words, this is the invasion of the public by the private. It is precisely this evolution which Arendt calls the emergence of the social: economic self-production becomes an absolute priority, and the public space or the common world is, consequently, perverted or destroyed. ⁴ Thus defined, modern society has two faces. On one hand, it represents an aggregate of isolated individuals, incapable of envisaging their mutual relationships differently than in terms of competition. On the other hand, it constitutes a collective of an amazing sort, namely a type of larger than life family, an enormous household. Therefore, it is quite right that the new entity finds itself at the basis of an original science, political economy, the very name of which indicates that we are dealing with a hybrid phenomenon. Arendt writes that “… society constitutes the public organization of the vital process,” and,

Perhaps the clearest indication that society constitutes the public organization of the life process itself may be found in the fact that in a relatively short time the new social realm transformed all modern communities into societies of laborers and jobholders; in other words, they became at once centered around the one activity necessary to sustain life. (To have a society of laborers, it is, of course, not necessary that every member actually be a laborer or worker—not even the emancipation of the working class and the enormous potential power which majority rule accords to it are decisive here—but only that all members consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their family.) Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 46)

Coming back to Marx on this point, Arendt clearly indicates that the cause is constituted by the “modern” event of expropriation (of peasants and monasteries) and the enormous accumulation of wealth. It must be noted that, for Arendt, ⁵ the propertied classes did not really aspire to govern, being satisfied, for better or worse, with any form of state, provided that this guaranteed property rights and, therefore, the prospects of accumulating wealth. ⁶ Now, this has led to the emergence of problems (destitution, vagrancy, riots, etc.) which threaten the new social order and, thus, the development of a state and its bureaucracy as a novel form of governance adapted to this situation. The impact on public life is considerable:

Public life, obviously, was possible only after the much more urgent needs of life itself had been taken care of… To own property meant here to be master over one’s own necessities of life and therefore potentially to be a free person, free to transcend his own life and enter the world all have in common. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 65)

The problem occurs when the owner decides that increasing the quantity of his goods becomes an end in itself and when he sacrifices his liberty to become a slave of that necessity. Until the massive event of expropriation, this pathology of ownership remained limited. Yet it assumed another dimension and multiplied its excessiveness:

What we call earlier the rise of the social coincided historically with the transformation of the private care for private property into a public concern. Society, when it first entered the public realm, assumed the disguise of an organization of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 68)

The process of accumulation—when wealth becomes capital, that is when it seeks to grow for its own sake, does not actually give rise to a world because wealth as capital is merely an expansive process, and has only the permanence of an expansive process, and not the stability of a structure. If this process stops, then everything collapses. This is the crux of the contradiction of a world where human beings only have their private interests and the indefinite pursuit of these interests in common.

From what we have discussed, we understand the basis of the process of development of what Arendt calls “social.” Yet why precisely is this such a tragedy? To clarify this, we need to return to the political question from another perspective, coming back to the relationships between work and property in modern societies dominated by capitalism. Now, as we demonstrate in section 2, for Arendt, these relationships are—to say the least—problematic, revealing a flaw in her approach (section 3) and constituting a point supporting the beginning of a positive reversal of the notion of the social (section 4).

3. The Problem of Workers’ Sudden Entrance onto the Public Scene

For Arendt, the paradox is the following: while the life of “tradespeople”—understood here as workers—can, therefore, be apolitical, it is certainly not antipolitical. The argumentation is based on the rigorous distinctions of her anthropology which we have just presented:

Yet this is precisely the case of laboring, an activity in which man is neither together with the world nor with other people, but alone with his body, facing the naked necessity to keep himself alive. To be sure, he too lives in the presence of and together with others, but this togetherness has none of the distinctive marks of true plurality. It does not consist of the purposeful combination of different skills and callings as in the case of workmanship… This collective nature of labor, far from establishing a recognizable, identifiable reality for each member of the labor gang, requires, on the contrary, the actual loss of all awareness of individuality and identity; and this is the reason that all those values which derive from laboring, beyond its obvious function in the life process, are entirely “social” and essentially not different from the additional pleasure derived from eating and drinking in company. The sociability arising out of those activities which spring from the human body’s metabolism with nature rests not on equality, but on sameness… (Arendt [1958] 1998: 212–13)

For Arendt, political equality is something very specific; it cannot be taken for granted, a product of human nature, but presents itself as a condition of the city-state and of living together:

The equality attending the public realm must necessarily be an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human nature but from outside, just as money—to continue the Aristotelian example—is needed as an outside factor to equate the unequal activities of physician and farmer. Political equality, therefore, is the very opposite of our equality before death which, like the common fate of all men, arises out of the human condition, or of equality before God, at least in its Christian interpretation, where we are confronted with an equality of sinfulness inherent in human nature… From the point of view of the world and the public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 215)

Now, for Arendt, work must be distinguished from the modern working class, which has burst into the public space, from which it had been excluded, to demand this political equality. While, for a long historical period, there were few revolts demanding political equality, Arendt claims that we must stress the strength of the workers’ movement in modern capitalist societies:

No less striking, however, is the sudden and frequently extraordinarily productive role which the labor movements have played in modern politics. From the revolutions of 1848 to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the European working class, by virtue of being the only organized and hence the leading section of the people, has written one of the most glorious and probably the most promising chapters of recent history. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 215)

The rise of the working masses in the public arena is a power play bringing about what is universal (the demand for political equality and the adoption of universal suffrage) in a very specific fashion; this was the case of men and women who had nothing, who were, therefore, nothing (in terms of property), but who sought to participate in the debate:

The enormous power potential these movements acquired in a relatively short time and often under very adverse circumstances sprang from the fact that, despite all the talk and theory, they were the only group on the political scene which not only defended its economic interests but fought a full-fledged political battle. In other words, when the labor movement appeared on the public scene, it was the only organization in which men acted and spoke qua men—qua members of society. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 218–19)

Yet, for Arendt, this revolutionary occurrence always tends to be institutionalized and therefore integrated into the functioning of the social—in the “negative” sense discussed in section 1—absorbed by it, digested by its self-obsessed approach. Politics is seen as ephemeral, becoming bogged down due to institutionalization:

The trade unions, defending and fighting for the interests of the working class, are responsible for its eventual incorporation into modern society, especially for an extraordinary increase in economic security, social prestige, and political power. (Arendt [1958] 1998: 216)

For Arendt, once the material situation was improved and, thus, once workers were integrated into the social domain, and were fully fledged “members” of society, the movement fell back again. Despite this attempt that we have just presented, Arendt ultimately does not manage to give the “social” a permanent positive status. Through the establishment and deployment of the social, there is ultimately nothing more than the domestication of the public space. Arendt is incapable of seeing in the social the institutionalization of prepolitical conditions of democracy, conditions which are necessary for the genuine exercise of this democracy in societies dominated by capitalism.

Before coming back to this positive aspect of the social, we must say a few words about such a purely deliberative conception of politics. For Arendt, what is political action’s particular consistency? If we base ourselves on D. R. Villa’s (1996) remarks, we may say that it presents itself as a sort of conversation; this is the debate and deliberation between equals, concerning questions of common interests. The site of this conversation is the public space, a sphere distinct from the state and the economy. This sphere is characterized by plurality (which is the condition according to which there are differing viewpoints on the common world), equality (otherwise those with differing perspectives may not enter into a discussion, and domination or violence will ensue; as a citizen, each has an equal opportunity to be seen and heard, and to take part in public affairs), and competence. This last characteristic poses a problem: for Arendt, all opinions with respect to the common world do not deserve to be considered and debated. To be a citizen, one requires judgment, integrity, and a passion for public affairs. ⁷ The question of the participation of all in political life is raised, but Arendt does not reflect on this prepolitical dimension of politics. Arendt does not confront this question in the sense that she is on the side of the liberals (formal equality is sufficient, and then effort and individual merit are determining factors), not the social democrats. (Formal equality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition; a collective foundation is needed to assure the social being of the individual who may then, on this basis, stand out as a citizen.)

4. A Critical Digression in Considering the Post-Marxist Approach: Politics under Socioeconomic Conditions

For the moment, let us leave aside this question of elitism ⁸ and concentrate on Arendt’s perspective on the content of politics. What exactly are citizens talking about? This is the question posed by Hannah Arendt’s friend, Mary McCarthy (1979: 315):

What are we supposed to do on the political scene, in the public space when we are not personally affected by the social? What remains…? If all the questions of economics, human well-being, and racial mixing, if everything that stems from the social sphere, is excluded from politics, then I am duped. All that is left is war and speeches. But speeches cannot be merely speeches. They must have a purpose. ⁹

There seems to be no extrapolitical referent, because politics presents itself as a conversation about policy, or more precisely, as the context which makes a veritable political conversation possible. This is surely a much too narrow framework for the modern world, and we need to extend it to take account of socioeconomic relations which now constitute a vital dimension of the modern world. If we stay with democratic capitalist societies (Boltanski 2011), the question is whether what is “social” is apolitical, indeed antipolitical (which is essentially what emerges from Arendt’s interpretation), whether it is prepolitical (a possibility that we may draw from Arendt, but which Arendt did not exploit), or whether it is political. It is the last option which we defend here, characterizing it as “post-Marxist.” As we explain later, we believe that it is possible to develop this position based on Robert Castel’s notion of “social property,” as long as this concept is fully exploited and, therefore, placed in perspective, starting from a Marxist analysis of the wage-earning relationship.

The construction of such a position supposes that we link together a number of stages. We must start from several stylized facts of our modern world. Our Western societies have never been entirely autonomous societies or, in other words, societies within which the affirmation of democracy and the principle of political equality (Balibar 2014) are fully put into practice, that is, abstractly, in a sort of socioinstitutional void. What the works of critical theoreticians (post-Marxists, in particular) have shown is that, in fact, our societies remain affected by structural forms of oppression (notably the wage-labor Nexus, the social relationships of the sexes, and the social relationships of the “races”; Balibar 1994; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991), forms which limit efficacy, and the spread of the democratic principle. Yet, unlike heteronomous societies which in their collective imagination did not see the unconditional principle of political equality emerge, in our still somewhat heteronomous societies, autonomy has become a regulatory idea from the perspective of which the processes of emancipation and social transformation are positioned (Balibar 2014; Castoriadis 1992). When we refer to the effective nature of the democratic principle, we are not attempting to qualify the exercise of political activity itself but are referring to the level of conditions from which citizenship can be exercised. Thus, our thesis may be formulated as follows: while what is “social” is ambivalent, it is also ¹⁰ the form which institutionalization has adopted in our modern complex and differentiated societies, the institutionalization—partial and provisional—of prepolitical conditions of politics. In particular, in what is “social,” one must stress the importance of institutions linked to the improvement of the situation of “workers.”

Why should a particular fate be reserved for the issue of the consolidation of the situation of workers? As we have seen, the question of democracy should not be addressed as independent of any institutional space, that is, separately from fundamental social relationships and their codification, as Arendt did to a certain extent. This is why we need to turn to Marx.

His “discovery” in this case is to have brought together what is so opposed both in classical political philosophy and in Arendt herself. We do not live and, furthermore, have never lived, in democratic societies with a market economy, in which each member of the society recognized as a citizen in the democratic political order ¹¹ would find himself participating in the economic order in a similar fashion, as a “merchant,” except that—but secondarily from the point of view of political life—certain citizens would sell a particular piece of merchandise: “their” labor or, more precisely, “their” labor power. To be a member of society like the others in the political order, while having only the sale of one’s labor power as a form of integration into the economic order, apparently poses no major theoretical problem for classical political philosophy nor for Arendt’s critique of it. In other words, the particular social form assumed by labor in our capitalist economies is not supposed to have genuine implications for the form of democracy.

Marx’s contribution, as long as he is being radical, ¹² is falsely considered to be opposed to these views. For him, we are living in societies dominated by the capitalist economy, and it is within this institutional framework that it is advisable to think about the forms of sociopolitical integration. The concepts of “living labor” and “labor power” allow Marx to specify the essence of the mode of historical subjectivization which the extension of the wage system involves. In a society where the mode of capitalist production dominates (our societies, until better informed), work—directly (employment in capitalist sector) or indirectly (public service employment, domestic work, or, based on unrestricted time, autonomous activities)—never exists for itself and outside of an overall subsumption under the approach of the valorization and accumulation of capital. Marxist concepts profoundly express the notions of labor and politics. There is certainly no question of affirming that labor is becoming an object of political action, as if “labor” and “politics” were confronting each other like two social practices, distinct and external. Thus, here, at this level, we clearly fall under the critique of Arendt and her notion of “social.” For Marx, this is a matter of saying that work is intrinsically a political relationship (a relationship of human beings to human beings), as well as an instrumental relationship (a relationship between human beings and things), and praxis as well as poiesis (Markus 1986). Therefore, we should not let ourselves be taken in by the current technical and instrumental reduction of labor, which fixes the political relationship in the “objectivity” of the economy. In theoretical terms, we should firmly adhere to Marx’s discovery.

This is true, despite Arendt, in particular, whose interpretation of Marx, which seems to be returning to all those who call upon their resolution of a new practical philosophy to counter the dominant economism, appears, at a minimum, to be simplistic. For Arendt, viewed from outside of any social relationship, the Marxist concept of “living labor” is transformed into a metabolism between human beings and nature, an activity in which the human being is neither part of this world nor associated with other human beings, and is alone with his body, faced with the need to stay alive. This assimilation of labor into a purely instrumental activity allows Arendt to seek in action this pure relationship to the other and to base an autonomous political practice on this, leading to this “aristocratic” conception of the political for which she is often reproached. Yet Marx’s concept of labor power is much more complex than Arendt’s caricature. In the concept of labor power, two dimensions are jointly provided. On one hand, there is “living labor,” that is “labor” as a human activity of affirmation, creation, and cooperation. Labor power is expressed here as an autonomous subject participating in an experienced and common world, and acting in this world. On the other, there is “capital-labor,” that is to say, “labor” as submission to the logic of the valorization of capital. Labor power is reduced to functioning as a “factor” in production stemming from the convenient fiction of its “commodification.” ¹³ According to the analysis of Habermas (1985), the wage-labor nexus must be interpreted as a relationship of political perversion, capable of transforming the action experienced in the world as an undefined functioning of a system of valorization which places the autonomy of living labor under the yoke of capitalist heteronomy. For Marx, it is in this functional reduction that the political question emerges in the form of its denial for most (experienced as class struggles, to come back to Marxist terminology), and it presents itself as a requirement for emancipation.

Yet, for Marx, the emancipation of labor (the emergence of wage earners as political subjects in their own right in industrial societies) can only lead to a radical solution, that is, one beyond any internal arrangement of the wage relationship, to make it “compatible” with the “formal” character of “bourgeois” democracy which was in the process of establishing itself at the time he was writing. For Marx, only the abolition of the wage relationship and the establishment of a communist society constitute the necessary prepolitical institutional conditions to deploy politics (in the form, as we know, of the free association of producers ¹⁴ ). Thus, Marx’s critique has its limitations because it is normative and only clarifies the reality of the process of democratization of Western societies from the perspective of what is lacking when contrasted with the plenty to come with the advent of communism. To understand the way we use Marxian approach, we have to precise this argument. If, in capitalism, labor power is inevitably integrated into the functioning of the system of valorization and accumulation, the forms of this integration are not quite equivalent from a social and political point of view; in fact, class struggles produced some forms of partial emancipation within which the worker was able to have his specific mode of existence recognized. We can blame Marx for not having sufficiently exploited this tension and this ambivalence and—let us insist on this point—for having settled for an approach of all (communist emancipation) or nothing (capitalist oppression). In other words, we can blame Marx for not having known how to anticipate that the gradual transformations of the wage-labor nexus could expand workers’ social and political emancipation. Yet we have to recognize that Marx has left the question of the sociopolitical integration of workers in a state of irreducible tension and has, thus, allowed us to think that, within an open capitalist system, social conquests are always ultimately political conquests. At this stage, our idea is that Robert Castel allows to go beyond the Marxian logic of “all or nothing” while still preserving the critical dimension of the Marxian approach.

This is Robert Castel’s historical perspective, allowing us to assign a “positive” content to the notion of the social for thinking about the necessary prepolitical prerequisites for citizenship in “capitalist-democratic societies” (Boltanski 2011), that is to say in societies which are structured by the wage-labor nexus. We might think that earlier analyses of prepolitical conditions’ impact on the relative efficacy or inefficacy of democracy and, in particular, the status of the worker, which Jacques Donzelot (1984) and Robert Castel ([1995] 2002) refer to as the “social question” distance us from Arendt and from the level of general theoretical distinctions which she forged. In fact, this is not really the case. She confronted the question of the “emergence of the world of labor on the public stage” through the development of capitalism. Yet her analysis falls by the wayside, as she is a prisoner of her critical concept of the “social.” Ultimately, this makes her political theory ambiguous, although this can be corrected by furthering her analysis using Robert Castel’s insights.

5. Elements for a Positive Interpretation of What Is Social in a Post-Marxist Perspective: Robert Castel’s Concept of “Social Property”

This long detour through an institutionalist and critical Marxist perspective also allows us to situate Robert Castel’s alternative position concerning the problem of the prepolitical status of what is “social” in capitalist democracies. ¹⁵ Clearly, it is he who gave a positive status to the social. We deliberately group him with those employing a neo-Marxist perspective, while very aware that neither he nor his commentators do this explicitly, preferring to link him to Durkheim. Now, his analytical theme is the wage system, a particular form of socioeconomic integration, which he does not confuse—returning here to Marx’s contribution and his contemporary revival to regulation theory (Boyer and Saillard 2002)—with commercial transactions. He employs a sociological historical perspective to display the centrality of the construction of what were finally called “wage-earning societies.” ¹⁶ In his history of the wage system (Castel [1995] 2002), Robert Castel precisely demonstrates how the emergence of the modern social question leads to the existence of a class of nonowners, at the heart of the modern wage system, who are apparently condemned to poverty and social indignity. This question emerged throughout the nineteenth century in France and in all of Western Europe and became the major issue of the century, notably with industrialization, because the proletarian worker in Marx’s sense became the driving force behind the production process. Proletarian workers are necessary to the production of wealth; however, although they were increasingly numerous, they remained without resources or protection. Consequently, there was the considerable risk of seeing a mass of almost “bipedal instruments” (as the French revolutionary, Abbot Sieyès, said) installed and expanding at the very center of the social structure, of destitute workers and their families perceived at the same time as immoral and dangerous. As the French historian Louis Chevalier ([1967] 2000) said, “working classes, dangerous classes.” With industrialization and urbanization, the wage system spread, and we began to realize that this was an irreversible state, the expansion of which was organically tied to the transformation of modern society. While the worker’s condition remained in its usual state of impoverishment and indignity, we saw increasingly numerous permanently insecure masses develop at the heart of society. They were not integrated into the emerging industrial society and risked either being tipped into further degradation or pushed to rebel and attempt to subvert the social order. For Castel, the invention of social property was the preferred response to this enormous difficulty. Nonetheless, Robert Castel is a historian and does not provide any conceptual development of this notion although this strikes us as pertinent. Here, we allow ourselves to risk presenting several theoretical developments to clarify the ins and outs of this notion, and thus base Arendt’s critique of the notion of what is social on a conceptual (and not simply historical) plan.

Indeed, a stylized description of the wage relationship demonstrates that this encompasses at least three heterogeneous dimensions which reveal it to be a veritable nodal point for the development of a social connection in societies where the capitalist economy is dominant. First and most visibly, this is a monetary relationship of wage earners as subjects able to participate in commercial consumption through spending their wages. This monetary aspect of the wage relation is such that it is often confused with a commercial exchange. Next, it is about a technical-economic organization of the labor process during the time determined for the wage earner to provide his labor power. Moreover, as a counterpart of the former, during which the wage earner’s free will is eclipsed by that of his employer, it allows for the definition of the wage relationship as being, from the wage earner’s perspective, a relationship of submission and, if we link this to what was previously discussed, a relationship of monetary submission (Sobel and Postel 2014). Finally, in a broader sense, this is about a sociopolitical relationship in which the social figure of the wage earner is not consumed by the objectivity of pure labor power which a production process exploits under capitalist domination; neither is it reduced to simple consumer power functioning as a support for capital accumulation (Fordist consumerism, that is the extension of the domestic order), but it acquires a certain statutory identification by which the wage earner is supported in his survival as a free individual, equal to any other (Castel and Haroche 2001) and, thus, in particular to his employer, when he participates, for example, in the labor contract. It is at this level that Robert Castel finds what he calls “social property.”

Very clearly, as Robert Castel’s historical studies have revealed, and as Arendt’s historical analyses had also stressed, workers’ sociopolitical integration does not come about automatically through capitalism’s fundamental institutions. In fact, we should recall that, generally, any employment must be considered as the articulation of two moments in time or, more precisely, of two heterogeneous dimensions of perspectives on existence (physiological, as well as psychological and social) of the one who is set to work: (1) the use of “labor power” in specific conditions of time and place and (2) the maintenance and reproduction of this “labor power,” which, for the most part, take place beyond the space and time of the exploitation of the labor power through the employment process. In precapitalist societies, setting people to work was largely organized around personal relationships of dependence, while reproduction of labor power would still function, primarily, in the also very personalized context of the domestic economy. For a growing population, the development of capitalism, in conjunction with the monetization of social relationships, liberates “labor” under a contradictory form of supposedly impersonal hiring of “labor power,” pseudo-contractualization violently staged in what, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, is still not a genuine labor market framing the usage of labor and protecting the worker (Polanyi 1944). Now, having only his labor power to rent out to survive, in a capitalist economic order which still promotes a social relation based on property, a relationship from one to the other which is extremely ambiguous, constitutes a very precarious world of existence, for oneself and one’s family, and a disgraceful social condition which excludes genuine citizenship. It is often this situation of wage earners, its original precariousness, that one considers in pitying workers, becoming indignant or denouncing the “absolute wrong” that one class violently commits against another. This differs from the Fordist contemporary wage relationship and, doubtless, it is this difference which Hannah Arendt failed to weigh sufficiently when she definitively condemns what is “social.”

It is against this precarious integration and individualized dependence that the citizen wage system was constructed over the course of numerous battles in the advanced capitalistic nations. ¹⁷ What the analysis of transformations of the wage-earning relationship reveals is that “labor power” is no longer the “false” property which hypocritically supposes the liberal direction of the wage system ¹⁸ (which imbues the Marxist critique of “formal democracy” with its full significance). Instead, it is rather, at the end of the societal construction of its symbolic objectification, the result of a certain sociopolitical mode of recognition of labor and subjectivization of the workers at the very heart of a society which remains dominated by the capitalist mode of production. In other words, to simply speak of the “society of work” and of the centrality of labor in general is blatantly conceptually insufficient. The economic order of our societies is dominated by the mode of capitalist production, in various historical forms which, different though they are (Taylorism, Fordism, post-Fordism, the net economy, etc.), have the same basic nature (involving the valorization of capital through the exploitation of living labor). This domination is especially characterized by a definition of labor understood principally as labor which is productive for capital. Suddenly, the “centrality of work” must deal with the exigencies of the capital/labor power struggle and structure itself based on the dominant form of employment, that is, wage labor. In this context of the centrality of labor under capitalist domination, having only one’s labor to sell to survive—the common fate of most—is not a viable situation and, on the contrary, reveals the worker’s intrinsic socioeconomic fragility. Since the first victories of laborers in the nineteenth century but especially in the twentieth century, the assertiveness of the working world against capitalist logic was not merely a simple uprising—as Arendt concludes—but went through the consolidation of the wage condition, which, stemming from social struggles, progressively transforms our “societies of labor” into “wage-earning societies.”

For each position occupied by a wage-earning laborer, this consolidation of the wage condition operates on two levels: that of the regulation of the usage of labor (labor contracts, working conditions, and remuneration) and that of socialization of a large part of the maintenance and reproduction of workers over their entire life cycle (development of social protection and extension of public services). Given its twofold nature, this consolidation is supported by collective rules and institutions (social law, collective conventions, and social security agencies) which are largely responsible for the functioning of collective actors in the wage relationship (representatives of capital and representatives of labor) under the aegis of the welfare state:

“Restricted liberal modernity” ¹⁹ … excluded a majority of laborers comprising the “non-ownership class.” (This exclusion is even more radical if we consider, away from western civilization, the population of the rest of the planet: the savage, the indigenous, and the colonized, are even less considered to be members of the proletariat.) These miserable creatures have escaped their plight by acquiring strong protection which served the same function as private property for the owners: ownership for security. The constitution of what one could call social property, in returning to a premonition of Henri Hatzfeld, provided them this support. It offered them the necessary assistance to gain access to social independence through acquiring the status of totally separate individuals. On the basis of these social rights first attached to work, we may speak of a true generalization, or democratization of citizenship. This is the deep meaning we may give to social protection. It is the basic condition for social citizenship. We see that it concerns or should concern everybody, because it is also the basis of belonging to a democratic society… Restricted liberal modernity limited the possibility of being a complete fully-fledged individual (responsible and independent) to those who had support from private property. Organized modernity promotes the generalization of this capacity of being an individual by building a social citizenship based on social ownership. (Castel 2009: 258–61, authors’ translation)

This increasingly collective functioning of the wage relationship must be seen as a concrete factor in the emancipation of the masses, the wage laborers: it removes each wage earner from any individual and unequal relationship experienced in the microeconomic space of the firm and places him once again, through his work, through the occupation of work socially constructed, in a model of solidarity and collectivity, itself buttressed by its positive individuation, its socialization, its identity construction, and its political participation. The social realm is invisible for Arendt: she goes no further than restricted liberal modernity and, therefore, cannot accord it any status in her political theory. Consequently, it is only with a Marxist institutionalist perspective that one confronts the “social question,” and can analyze the “social” as the concrete foundation of democracy.

Our interpretation of “social property” certainly places Robert Castel more on the side of Marx although his theoretical basis is less Marxist and more Durkheimian. Yet, at its foundation, it is perhaps more political than theoretical. What Castel calls social property consists of attaching some protection and offering security to the worker himself, further “formally” recognized as a citizen. Yet, as Castel stressed, following many other nineteenth-century historians, there was another possible historical response to the social question (Donzelot 1984): the suppression of private property and its replacement by collective property. At the time, this response emerged in various currents of revolutionary socialism and, obviously, rulers and the propertied classes wanted no part of this. For Robert Castel, the invention of social property was the way to avoid the radical, revolutionary solution of collective property, to conserve the dominant social structure while ensuring a certain place for these nonowning workers in a society whose economic order remained dominated by the capitalist mode of production, by providing the minimum resources to integrate them. ²⁰ Social property allowed an escape from the dilemma, offering a third way between, on one hand, the defenders of private property (supporters of the status quo) who return to the social nonexistence of a majority of workers and, on the other hand, the supporters of socialism, collectivism, or communism (which was itself imposed on Russia starting in 1917 in the form of what one would call “real socialism”). ²¹ Social property is, thus, an analogue of private property. A property for security certainly differs from private property: it is not an inheritance which may be disposed of freely on the market; it depends on a system of rights and obligations and, thus, reflects social interdependence. For Castel, it is a transcription of the organic solidarity of Emile Durkheim; it expresses the need to maintain reciprocity, showing the participation of citizens in the same system so that, against the risks of social dissolution and against what one would call today exclusion, they continue to form a genuine society, to be mutually interdependent; indeed, what we refer to in political terms as “building a nation,” which sociologists call “social cohesion.”

6. Conclusion

The present article did not seek to oppose two conceptions of the social—which would be artificial because Arendt is mainly positioned within philosophical anthropology and Castel is embedded in the post-Marxist approach to political sociology—but rather to question the limits of Arendt’s concept of what is social, with the help of Robert Castel’s historical sociology regarding the emancipation of the wage system. Certainly, one could critique Arendt’s political “purism” which reduces the institutional links of citizens and thus has difficulty taking account of our modern experience of politics which she measures against a Greek democracy of citizens of the leisure class. Yet we believe that we have shown that it is possible, through bringing together these two perspectives, to discern several advantages of such a rapprochement in developing a relevant political theory. Overall, this is not a matter of dramatizing an opposition of “Castel (the progressive) and Arendt (the conservative, even reactionary),” but rather of contributing to a political theory in touch with the real world of today and inspired by a rapprochement of Arendt with Castel.