Arendt, Hannah. Marx y la tradicón del pensamiento occidental

Karl Marx and theTradition of WesternPolitical Thought BY HANNAH ARENDT

The following excerpts from Hannah Arendt's manuscripts on Karl

Marx are published here for the first time. When Arendt refers to the pre-

sent—for instance, luhen she says "now"—it is important to be atvare that

she refers to the early 1950s, the period during which the excerpts were com-

posed. Arendt always wrote in great haste, but never more so than here.

Consequently, these writings have required rather extensive "Englishing, "

a process to which Arendt always submitted whatever she tvrote in English

prior to publication. In this case the "Englishing" has consisted primarily

in breaking overly long sentences and paragraphs into several shorter

ones, and in correcting what are clearly errors in English grammar and

syntax. But at the same time every effort has been made to retain the raw,

racing quality of Arendt's thought, as well as the immediacy of her voice,

both of which are nowhere more abundantly manifest than in her writings

on Marx. The reader is referred to the first part of the preceding Introduc-

tion for more detailed information, f. K.

The Broken Thread of Tradition

I has never been easy to think and write about Karl Marx. Hisimpact on the already existing parties of the workers, who hadonly recendy won full legal equality and political franchise in thenation states, was immediate and far-reaching. His neglect, more-over, by the academic, scholarly world hardly lasted more thantwo decades after his death, and since then his influence has

Copyright © 2002. Jerome Kohii, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust.

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Summer 2002)

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risen, spreading from strict Marxism, which already by the 1920shad become somewhat outmoded, to the entire field of social andhistorical sciences. More recently, his influence has been fre-quently denied. That is not, however, because Marx's thought andtbe methods he introduced have been abandoned, but ratberbecause they have become so axiomatic that their origin is nolonger remembered. The difficulties that previously prevailed indealing with Marx, however, were of an academic nature com-pared with the difficulties that confront us now. To a certainextent they were similar to those tbat arose in the treatment ofNietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Kierkegaard: struggles pro andcontra were so fierce, tbe misunderstandings that developedwithin them so tremendous, that it was difficult to say exacdy whator who one was thinking and talking about. In the case of Marx,tbe difficvilties were obviously even greater because tbey con-cerned politics: from the very beginning positions pro and contrafell into the conventional lines of party politics, so that to his par-tisans, whoever spoke for Marx was deemed "progressive," andwhoever spoke against him "reactionary."

This situation changed for the worse wben, witb tbe rise of oneMarxian party, Marxism became (or appeared to become) the rul-ing ideology of a great power. It now seemed that tbe discussionof Marx was bound up not only with party but also with power pol-itics, and not only with domestic but also with world political con-cerns. And while tbe figure of Marx himself, now even more sothan before, was dragged into the arena of politics, his influenceon modern intellectuals rose to new heights: the chief fact forthem, and not wrongly so, was that for the first time a thinker,rather than a practical statesman or politician, bad inspired thepolicies of a great nation, thereby making the weight of thoughtfelt in the entire realm of political activity. Since Marx's idea ofright government, oudined first as the dictatorship of the prole-tariat, which was to be followed by a classless and stateless society,had become the official aim of one country and of political move-ments throughout the world, then, certainly, Plato's dream of sub-

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jecting political action to the strict tenets of philosophic thoughthad become a reality. Marx attained, albeit posthumously, whatPlato in vain had attempted at the court of Dionysios in Sicily.Marxism and its influence in the modern world became what it istoday because of this twofold influence and representation, flrstby the political parties of the working classes, and, second, by tbeadmiration of the intellectuals, not of Soviet Russia per se, but forthe fact that Bolshevism is, or pretends to be, Marxist.

To be sure, Marxism in this sense has done as much to hide andobliterate the actual teachings of Marx as it has to propagatethem. If we want to find out who Marx was, what he thought, andhow he stands in the tradition of political thought, Marxism alltoo easily appears mainly as a nuisance—more so than, but notessentially different from, Hegeiianism or any other "ism" basedon tbe writings of a single author. Through Marxism Marx him-self has been praised or blamed for many things of which he wasentirely innocent; for instance, for decades be was highlyesteemed, or deeply resented, as the "inventor of class struggle,"of which he was not only not the "inventor" (facts are notinvented) but not even the discoverer. More recently, attemptingto distance themselves from the name (though hardly the influ-ence) of Marx, others have been busy proving how mucb befound in his avowed predecessors. This searching for influences(for instance, in the case of class struggle) even becomes a bitcomical when one remembers that neither the economists of thenineteenth or eighteenth centuries nor tbe political philosophersof the seventeenth century were needed for a discovery of whatwas already present in Aristotle. Aristotle deflned the substance ofdemocratic government as rule by the poor and of oligarchic gov-ernment as rule by the rich, and stressed this to the extent that hediscarded the content of those already traditional terms, namely,rule by the many and rule by the few. He insisted that a govern-ment of the poor be called a democracy, and that a governmentof the rich be called an oligarchy, even if the rich should out-number the poor.^ Tbe political relevance of class struggle could

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hardly be more emphatically stated than by basing two distinctforms of government on it. Nor can Marx be credited with havingelevated this political and economic fact into the realm of history.Eor such elevation had been current ever since Hegel encoun-tered Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing in him the "world spirit onhorseback."

But the challenge with which Marx confronts us today is muchmore serious than these academic quarrels over influences andpriorities. The fact that one form of totalitarian domination uses,and apparently developed directly from, Marxism, is of course themost formidable charge ever raised against Marx. And thatcharge cannot be brushed off as easily as can charges of a similarnature—against Nietzsche, Hegel, Lutber, or Plato, all of whom,and many more, have at one time or another been accused ofbeing the ancestors of Nazism. Although today it is so conve-niently overlooked, the fact that the Nazi version of totalitarian-ism could develop along lines similar to that of the Soviet, yetnevertheless use an entirely different ideology, shows at least thatMarx cannot very well stand accused of having brought forth thespecifically totalitarian aspects of Bolshevik domination. It is alsotrue tbat tbe interpretations to which bis teachings were sub-jected, through Marxism as well as through Leninism, and thedecisive transformation by Stalin of both Marxism and Leninisminto a totalitarian ideology, can easily be demonstrated. Never-theless it also remains a fact that there is a more direct connectionbetween Marx and Bolshevism, as well as Marxist totalitarianmovements in nontotalitarian countries, than between Nazismand any of its so-called predecessors.

It has become fashionable during the last few years to assumean unbroken line between Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, therebyaccusing Marx of being the father of totalitarian domination.Vei-y few of those who yield to this line of argument seem to beaware that to accuse Marx of totalitarianism amounts to accusingthe Western tradition itself of necessarily ending in the monstros-ity of this novel form of government. Whoever touches Marx


touches the tradition of Western thought; thus the conservativismon which many of our new critics of Marx pride themselves is usu-ally as great a self-misunderstanding as the revolutionary zeal ofthe ordinary Marxist. The few critics of Marx who are aware oftheroots of Marx's thought therefore have attempted to construe aspecial trend in the tradition, an occidental heresy that nowadaysis sometimes called Gnosticism, in recollection of the oldest here-sies of Gatholic Christianity. Yet this attempt to limit the destruc-tiveness of totalitarianism by the consequent interpretation that ithas grown directly from such a trend in the Western tradition isdoomed to failure. Marx's thought cannot be limited to "imma-nentism," as if everything could be set right again if only we wouldleave Utopia to the next world and not assume that everything onearth can be measured and judged by earthly yardsticks. ForMarx's roots go far deeper in the tradition than even he himselfknew. I think it can be shown that the line from Aristotle to Marxshows both fewer and far less decisive breaks than the line fromMarx to Stalin.

The serious aspect of this situation, therefore, does not lie inthe ease with which Marx can be slandered and his teachings, aswell as his problems, misrepresented. The latter is of course badenough, since, as we shall see, Marx was the first to discern certainproblems arising from the Industrial Revolution, the distortion ofwhich means at once the loss of an important source, and possi-bly help, in dealing with real predicaments that ever moreurgently continue to confront us. But more serious than any ofthis is the fact that Marx, as distinguished from the true and notthe imagined sources of the Nazi ideology of racism, clearly doesbelong to the tradition of Western political thought. As an ideol-ogy Marxism is doubtless the only link that binds the totalitarianform of government directly to that tradition; apart from it anyattempt to deduce totalitarianism directly from a strand of occi-dental thought would lack even the semblance of plausibility.

A serious examination of Marx himself, as opposed to the cur-sory dismissal of his name and the often unconscious retention of

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the consequences of his teaching, is therefore somehow danger-ous in two respects: it cannot but question certain trends in thesocial sciences that are Marxist in all but name and the depth ofMarx's own thought; and it must necessarily examine tbe realquestions and perplexities of our own tradition with which Marxhimself dealt and struggled. The examination of Marx, in otherwords, cannot but be an examination of traditional thought inso-far as it is applicable to the modern world, a world whose pres-ence can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution on the onehand, and to the political revolutions of the eighteenth centuryon the other. The modern age presented modern man witb twomain problems, independent of all political events in the narrowsense of tbe word: the problems of labor and history. The signifi-cance of Marx's thought lies neither in his economic theories norin its revolutionary content, but in the stubbornness with whichhe clung to these two chief new perplexities.

One might argue that tbe thread of our tradition was broken,in the sense that our traditional political categories were nevermeant for such a situation, when, for the first time in our history,political equality was extended to the laboring classes. That Marxat least grasped this fact and felt that an emancipation of thelaboring class was possible only in a radically changed worid dis-tinguishes his thought from that of Utopian socialism, the chiefdefect of which was not (as Marx himself believed) that it wasunscientific, but its assumption tbat tbe laboring class was anunderprivileged group and that the fight for its liberation was afight for social justice. That the older convictions of Christiancharity should develop into fierce passions of social justice isunderstandable enough at a time when the means to put an endto certain forms of misery were so evidently present. Yet such pas-sions were and are "outdated" in the sense that they had ceasedto be applicable to any social group but rather only to individuals.What Marx understood was that labor itself had undergone adecisive change in the modern world: tbat it had not only becomethe source of all wealth, and consequently the origin of all social


values, but that all men, independent of class origin, were sooneror later destined to become laborers, and that those who couldnot be adjusted into this process of labor would be seen andjudged by society as mere parasites. To put it another way: whileothers were concerned with this or that right of the laboring class,Marx already foresaw the time when, not this class, but the con-sciousness that corresponded to it, and to its importance for soci-ety as a whole, would decree that no one would have any rights,not even the right to stay alive, who was not a laborer. The resultof this process of course has not been the elimination of all otheroccupations, but the reinterpretation of all human activities aslaboring activities.

Erom the viewpoint of the history of ideas, one might arguewith almost equal right that the thread of tradition was also bro-ken the moment that History not only entered human thoughtbut became its absolute. Indeed, this had happened not with Marxbut with Hegel, whose entire philosophy is a philosophy of his-tory, or rather, one tiaat dissolved all previous philosophic as wellas all other thought into history. After Hegel had historicizedeven logic, and after Darwin, through the idea of evolution, hadhistoricized even nature, there seemed nothing left that couldwithstand the mighty onslaught of historical categories. The con-clusion that Marx quite properly drew from this spiritual{geistliche) situation was his attempt to eliminate history alto-gether. For Hegel, thinking historically, the meaning of a storycan emerge only when it has come to an end. End and truth havebecome identical; truth appears when everything is at its end,which is to say when and only when the end is near can we learnthe truth. In other words, we pay for truth with the living impulsethat imbues an era, although of course not necessarily with ourown lives. The manifold modern versions of an antagonismbetween life and spirit, especially in their Nietzschean form, havetheir source in this historicization of all our spiritual categories,that is, in an antagonism between life and truth.

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Wbat Hegel states about philosophy in general, that "the owl ofMinerva spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk,"-holds only for a philosophy of history, that is, it is true of historyand corresponds to the view of historians. Hegel of course wasencouraged to take this view because he thought tbat pbilosophyhad really begun in Creece with Plato and Aristotle, who wrotewben the polis and the glory of Creek history were at their end.Today we know that Plato and Aristotle were the culminationrather than the beginning of Greek philosophic thought, whichhad begun its flight when Creece had reached or nearly reachedits climax. Wbat remains true, however, is that Plato as well as Aris-totle became the beginning of the occidental philosophic tradi-tion, and that this beginning, as distinguished from the beginningof Creek philosophic thought, occurred when Greek political lifewas indeed approaching its end. The problem then arose of bowman, if he is to live in a polis, can live outside of politics; this prob-lem, in what sometimes seems a strange resemblance to our owntimes, quickly became the question of how it is possible to livewithout belonging to any polity, that is, in the state of apolity, orwhat we today would call statelessness.

One could say that the problem of labor indicates the politicalside, and tbe problem of history the spiritual side, of the per-plexities that arose at the end of the eighteenth century andemerged fully in the middle of the nineteenth. Insofar as we stilllive with and in these perplexities, whicb meanwhile have becomemucb sharper in fact while much less articulate in theoretical for-mulation, we are still Marx's contemporaries. The enormousinfluence that Marx still exerts in almost all parts of the worldseems to confirm this. Yet this is true only to the extent that wechoose not to consider certain events of the twentieth century;tbat is, those events that ultimately led to the entirely novel formof government we know as totalitarian domination. The thread ofour tradition, in the sense of a continuous history, broke only withthe emergence of totalitarian institutions and policies that nolonger could be comprehended through the categories of tradi-


tional thought. These unprecedented institutions and policiesissued in crimes that cannot be judged by traditional moral stan-dards, or punished within the existing legal framework of a civi-lization whose juridical cornerstone had been the commandThou shall not kill.

The distinction between what can and what cannot be compre-hended in terms of the tradition may appear unduly academic.Among the conspicuous reflections of the crisis of the presentcentury—and one of the outstanding indications that it indeedinvolved nothing less than a breakdown of the tradition—hasbeen the learned attempts by many scholars to date the origin ofthe crisis. With almost equal plausibility that origin has been seenin historical moments ranging between the fourth century beforeand the nineteenth century after (-hrist. Against all such theories,I propose to accept the rise of totalitarianism as a demonstrablynew form of government, as an event that, at least politically, pal-pably concerns the lives of all of us, not only the thoughts of a rel-atively few individuals or the destinies of certain specific nationalor social groups. Only this event, with its concomitant change ofall political conditions and relationships that previously existedon the earth, rendered irreparable and unhealable the various"breaks" that have been seen retrospectively in its wake. Totalitar-ianism as an event has made the break in our tradition an accom-plished fact, and as an event it could never have been foreseen orforethought, much less predicted or "caused," by any single man.So far are we from being able to deduce what actually happenedfrom past spiritual or material "causes" that all such factorsappear to be causes only in the light cast by the event, illuminat-ing both itself and its past.

In this sense, then, we are no longer the contemporaries ofMarx. And it is from this viewpoint that Marx acquires a new sig-nificance for us. He is the one great man of the past who not onlywas already concemed with predicaments that are still with us, butwhose thought could also be used and misused by one of theforms of totalitarianism. Thus Marx seems to provide a reliable

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link for us back into tbe tradition, because be himself was morefirmly rooted in it (even when he thought he was rebelling againstit, turning it upside down, or escaping from the priority of theo-retical-interpretative analysis into historical-political action) thanwe can ever be again. Eor us totalitarianism necessarily hasbecome the central event of our times and, consequently, thebreak in tradition a fait accompli. Because Marx concerned him-self with the few new elementary facts for which the tradition itselfdid not provide a categorical framework, his success or failuretherefore enables us to judge the success or failure of the tradi-tion itself in regard to these facts, even before its moral, legal, the-oretical, and practical standards, together with its politicalinstitutions and forms of organization, broke down spectacularly.Tbat Marx still looms so large in our present world is indeed themeasure of his greatness. That he could prove of use to totalitari-anism (though certainly he can never be said to have been its"cause") is a sign of the actual relevance of his thought, eventhough at the same time it is also the measure of his ultimate fail-ure. Marx lived in a changing world and his greatness was the pre-cision with which he grasped the center of this change. We live ina world whose main feature is change, a world in wbich changeitself has become a matter of course to such an extent that we arein danger of forgetting that which has changed altogether.

The flrst great challenge to tradition came when Hegel inter-preted the world as subject to change in the sense of historicalmovement. Marx's own challenge to tradition—"The philoso-phers have only interpreted the world. . .the point, however, is tochange it'"^—^was one among many possible conclusions that mightbe derived from Hegel's system. To tis it sounds as though Marxwere saying: The world the philosophers of the past have inter-preted, and that the last of them understood in terms of a con-tinuous, self-developing history, is in fact changing beyondrecognition. Let us try to take control of this process and changethe world in accordance with our tradition. By "tradition" Marxalways understood the tradition of philosophy, to which the one


surviving class, representing humanity as a whole, would ulti-mately become the heir. Marx himself meant that the irresistiblemotion of history one day would stop, tbat further change wouldbe ruled out when the world had undergone its last and decisivechange. This side of Marx's teaching is usually dismissed as itsUtopian element: the end in view of a classless society when his-tory itself would come to a halt once its motor—class struggle—would have ceased. In fact it indicates that in some fundamentalaspects Marx was more closely bound to the tradition than Hegelwas. The revolutionaiy element in Marx's teachings, therefore, isonly superficially contained in his vision of an end brought aboutby actual revolution, the outcome of which, according to him,would have coincided rather curiously with the ideal of life asso-ciated with the Greek city-states. The really anti-traditional andunprecedented side of his thought is his glorification of labor,and his reinterpretation of the class—the working class—that phi-losophy since its beginning had always despised. Labor, thehuman activity of this class, was deemed so irrelevant that philos-ophy had not even bothered to interpret and understand it. Inorder to grasp the political importance of the emancipation oflabor, and Marx's corresponding dignification of labor as themost fundamental of all human activities, it may be well just tomention, at the beginning of these reflections, the distinctionbetween labor and work that, although largely unarticulated, hasbeen decisive for the whole tradition, and that, only recently, andpartly because of Marx's teachings, has become blurred.

Marx is the only thinker ofthe nineteenth century who took itscentra! event, the emancipation of the working class, seriously inphilosophic terms. Marx's great influence today is still due to thisone fact, which also, to a large extent, explains how his thoughtcould become so useful for purposes of totalitarian domination.The Soviet Union, which from the moment of its foundationcalled itself a republic of workers and peasants, may havedeprived its workers of all the rights they enjoy in the free world.Yet its ideology is primarily an ideology designed for laborers, and

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labor, as distinguished from all other human activities, hasremained its highest "value," the only distinction it recognizes. Inthis respect it is, moreover, only the most radical version of ourown society, which more and more tends also to become a societyof laborers. On the other hand, the Soviet Union's means of dom-ination, unprecedented as they are in political history andunknown to political thought, have frequently (and not alto-gether wrongly) been called the means of a slave society.Although this term does not do justice to the non utilitarian char-acter of total domination, it does indicate the total character ofthe subjection itself. That such subjection is worsened when theutilitarian motive, which had been the chief guarantee of a slave'slife, no longer exists, is obvious. But then slavery, at least in West-ern society, never has been a form of government and thereforenever, strictly speaking, has belonged in the political realm. Onlythose who were not slaves were able to take part in political lifeunder normal, nontyrannical government. But even undertyranny the sphere of private life was left intact, which is to saythat there was left a sort of freedom that no slave might enjoy.

But whether Marx, whose influence on politics was tremen-dous, was ever genuinely interested in politics as such may justlybe doubted. The fact is that his interpretation, or rather, glorifl-cation of labor, while only following the course of events, in itselfcould not fail to introduce a complete reversal of all traditionalpolitical values. It was not tbe political emancipation of the work-ing class, the equality for all that for the flrst time in historyincluded menial workers, that was decisive, but rather the conse-quence that from now on labor as a human activity no longerbelonged to the strictly private realm of life: it became a publicpolitical fact of the flrst order. By this I do not refer to the eco-nomic sphere of life; this sphere as a whole always was a matter ofpublic concern. But this sphere is only to a very small extent thesphere of labor.

Labor is necessarily prior to any economy, which is to say thatthe organized attempt of men living together, handling and


securing both the needs and the luxuries of life, starts with andrequires labor even when its economy has been developed to thehighest degree. As the elementary activity necessary for the mereconservation of life, labor had always been thought of as a curse,in the sense that it made life hard, preventing it from ever becom-ing easy and thereby distinguisbing it from the lives of theOlympian gods.^ That human life is not easy is only another wayof saying that in its most elementary aspect it is subject to neces-sity, that it is not and never can become free from coercion, forcoercion is first felt in the peculiarly all-overwhelming urges ofour bodies. People who do nothing but cater to these elementarycoercive needs were traditionally deemed unfree by definition—that is, they were considered unready to exercise the functions offree citizens. Therefore those who did this work for others inorder to free them from fulfilling the necessities of life themselveswere known as slaves.

In every civilization labor is the activity that enables the publicrealm to put at our disposal what we consume. Labor as themetabolism with nature is not primarily productive but consump-tive, and its necessity would remain so even if no productivity, noaddition to the common world, were ever associated with it. It isbecause of the connection of all laboring activity to the strictlybiological needs of our bodies that it traditionally was deemed tobelong to the lower, almost animal-like functions of human life,and as such considered a strictly private matter. Public politicallife began where this realm of the private ended, or in otberwords whenever those needs could be transcended into a com-mon world, a world in-between men transcending the metabolismwitb nature of each of its individuals. Politics in the original Greeksense of the word began with the liberation from labor, and inspite of many variations remained tbe same in this respect fornearly 3,000 years; and this, as we know, was first made possiblethrough the institution of slavery. Slavery therefore was not a partof Greek political life but the condition of politeuein, of all thoseactivities that for tbe Greeks fulfilled the life of tbe citizen. As

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such it was based on rule over slaves, but was itself not divided intoruling and being ruled; for the early Greeks ruling over slaves wasa pre-political condition of politeuein, of being poHtical.

This original form of politics underwent a decisive change intbe period of decay of the Greek polis, a decay that coincided withthat culmination of Greek philosophy, which was to becomeauthoritative for all times up to our own. The suspicion and con-tempt of the philosophers concemed the activity of politeuein itselfbut not the basis on which it rested. In tbe stead of politeuein,which had been made possible by liberation from the necessitiesof biological life, came the ideal of philosophein, the activity of phi-losophizing. Erom then on tbe distinction between ruling andbeing ruled invaded the realm of politics direcdy; and the ruleover the necessities of life became the precondition, not of poli-dcs, but of philosophy, that is, ruling over whatever was materiallyneeded to enable man to lead the higher, philosophic life tookthe place of politeuein. In both cases the earlier experience of anactivity fulfllling the life of the citizen was all but lost to the ti"adi-tion. The emancipation of labor, both as the glorification ofthelaboring activity and as the political equality of tbe working class,would not have been possible if the original meaning of politics—in which a political realm centered around labor would have beena contradiction in terms—had not been lost.

When Marx made labor tbe most important activity of man,he was saying, in terms of the tradition, tbat not freedom butcompulsion is what makes man human. When be added thatnobody could be free who rules over others he was saying, againin terms ofthe tradition, what Hegel, in the famous master-ser-vant dialectic, had only less forcefully said before him: that noone can be free, neither those enslaved by necessity nor thoseenslaved by the necessity to rule. In this Marx not only appearedto contradict himself, insofar as he promised freedom for all atthe same moment he denied it to all, but to reverse the verymeaning of freedom, based as it had been on the freedom from


tbat compulsion we naturally and originally suffer under thehuman condition. ;

Equality for workers and tlie dignification of the laboring activ-ity were of such tremendous and revolutionary importancebecause the occidental attitude to labor had been so closely con-nected with its attitude to life in the purely biological sense. Andthis sense was stressed even more forcefully than before in Marx'sown definition of labor as man's metabolism with nature. Thelaborers were not only those wbo were ruled by the free in ordernot to be enslaved to the sheer necessities of life; they were, psy-chologically speaking, also those who stood accused of philopsy-chia, of love of life for life's own sake. Philopsychia in fact is whatdistinguished the slave from the free man. In ancient times thefree man found his hero in Achilles, who exchanged a short lifefor the eternal fame of greatness; after tbe fourth century beforeChrist the free man became the philosopher who devoted his lifeto theordn, to the "contemplation" of eternal truths, or, in theMiddle Ages, to the salvation of his eternal soul. Insofar as thepolitical realm was constituted by free men, labor was eliminatedfrom it; and in all these instances, even those in which tbe valueof political action was most limited, labor was viewed as an activ-ity without any dignity in itself whatsoever.

The Modem Challenge to Tradition(excerpts)

At the other end of this position and, as it must appear at firstglance, in the most extreme opposition to it, stand three proposi-tions that are the pillars on whicb Marx's whole theory and phi-losophy rest: first, Labor is the Creator of Man; second. Violence is themidwife of History (and, since history for Marx is past politicalaction, this means that violence makes action eificient);^ andthird, seemingly in contradiction to tbe other two, Nobody can befree who enslaves others. Each of these propositions expresses in

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quintessential form one ofthe decisive events with which our ownera began. There is first, as a result of the Industrial Revolution,the full political emancipation of the working class, regardless ofproperty and skill qualifications. Never before had any politicalorganism sought to encompass all those who actually lived in it. Ifwe were to translate this event into the language of the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, we would have to say that m a n -even in the state of nature and endowed with nothing but hisworking or laboring capacity—was accepted as a full citizen.

It is true that in European nation-states this all-encompassingprinciple was significantly qualified: only people born in anation's territory or descended from its nationals were recog-nized as citizens. But this qualification had nothing to do with thenew revolutionary principle itself and was not, for instance,applicable in the United States, the only country where the Indus-trial Revolution was not hampered by the transformation of feu-dal states into classes and therefore where the emancipation ofthe working class could at once achieve its true character. Theclass system, so greatly overrated by Marx, who knew the Indus-trial Revolution only in its European version, is actually a feudalremnant whose curious transformations are swifdy liquidatedwherever that revolution is permitted to run its full course. Thepolitical consequences of the emancipation of labor in Americacome very close to a realization of the social contract between allmen that the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies still thought to be either a prehistoric fact at the begin-ning of civilized society or a scientific figment necessary for thelegitimacy of political authority.

The Industrial Revolution, with its unlimited demand for sheerlabor force, resulted in the unheard of reinterpretation of laboras the most important quality of man. The emancipation of labor,in the double sense of emancipating the working class and digni-fying the activity of laboring, indeed implied a new "social con-tract," that is, a new fundamental relationship between men basedon what the tradition would have despised as their lowest com-


mon denominator: ownership of labor force. Marx drew thesequences of this emancipation when he said that labor, thespecifically human metabolism with nature, was the most ele-mentary human distinction, that which intrinsically distinguishedhuman from animal life.

Second, there was the tremendous fact of the French andAmerican Revolutions. In these events violence had broughtabout not some haphazard slaughter whose meaning reveals itselfonly to later generations, or is comprehensible only from theviewpoint of the interested parties, but an entirely new bodypolitic. In its outlines, and in the case of the United States inmany details, this body politic had been drawn up by the eigh-teenth-century philosophes and ideologues, that is, by those whoperceived an idea that needed nothing but the helping hand ofviolence to be realized.

Third, the most challenging consequence of the French andAmerican Revolutions was the idea of equality: the idea of a soci-ety in which nobody should be a master and nobody a sei vant. Allthe modern and not so modern objections—that equality andfreedom are mutually exclusive, that they cannot exist side byside, that freedom presupposes rule over others, and that equal-ity of all is nothing but the well-known condition of tyranny orleads to it—neglect the great pathos of the eighteenth-centuryrevolutions and tbeir challenge to all previously held conceptionsof freedom. When Marx said tbat nobody can be free who rulesover others, he summed up in one great proposition what beforehim Hegel, as previously indicated, had been intent on proving inthe famous dialectic of master and servant: that each master is theslave of his servant, and that each servant eventually becomes hismaster's master.

The basic selfk:ontradiction in which Marx's whole work, fromthe early writings to the third volume of Capital, is caught (andwhich can be expressed in various ways, such as that he neededviolence to abolish violence, that the goal of history is to end his-tory, that labor is the only productive activity of man but that the

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development of man's productive forces will eventually lead tothe abolition of labor, etc.) arises from this insistence on freedom.For when Marx stated that labor is the most important activity ofman, he was saying in terms of the tradition that not freedom butnecessity is what makes man human. And he followed this line ofthought throughout his philosophy of history, according to whichthe development of mankind is ruled by, and the meaning of his-tory contained in, the law of historical movement, the politicalmotor of which is class struggle and whose natural irresistible dri-ving force is the development of man's laboring capacity. Whenunder the infiuence of the Erench Revolution he added to thisthat violence is the midwife of History, he denied in terms of thetradition the very substantial content of freedom contained in thehuman capacity of speech. And he followed this line of thoughtto its ultimate consequences in his theory of ideologies, accordingto which all activities of man that express themselves in the spo-ken word, from legal and political institutions to poetry and phi-losophy, were mere and perhaps unconscious pretexts for, orJustifications of, violent deeds. (An ideology, according to Marx,articulates what somebody pretends to be for the sake of his activerole in the world; all past laws, religions, and philosophies aresuch ideologies.)

From this it follows—and this was already clear in Marx's ownhistorical writings and has become even more manifest in allstrictly Marxist historiography—that history, which is the recordof past political action, shows its true, undistorted face only inwars and revolutions; and that political activity, if it is not direct,violent action, must be understood as either the preparation offuture violence or the consequence of past violence. The devel-opment of capitalism is essentially the consequence of the vio-lence of original accumulation, just as the development of theworking class is essentially the preparation for the day of revolu-tion. (When Lenin added that the twentieth century was all toolikely to become a century of wars and revolutions, he likewisemeant that it will be the century in which history comes to a head


and shows its true face.) Here again Marx turned at least onestrand of our tradition upside down. Since Plato it had becomeaxiomatic that "it lies in the nature of praxis to partake less oftruth than speech." According to Marx, it is not only praxis per sethat shows more truth than speech, but the one kind of praxis thathas severed all bonds with speech. For violence, in distinction toall other kinds of human action, is mute by definition. Speech onthe other hand is not only deemed to partake less of truth thanaction, but is now conceived to be mere "ideological" talk whosechief function is to conceal the truth.

Marx's conviction concerning violence is not less heretical interms of the tradition than his conviction concerning labor, andboth are closely interrelated. The statement labor created man, con-sciously formulated against the tradidonal dogma God created man,has its correlation in the affirmation that violence reveals, whichstands against the traditional notion that the word of God is reve-lation. This Jewish-Christian understanding of the word of God,the logos theou, was never incompatible with the Greek conceptionof logos and has made it possible, throughout our tradition, forhuman speech to retain its revelatory capacity, so that it could betrusted as an instrument for communication between men as wellas an instrument of "radonal," that is, truth-seeking thought. Thebasic mistrust of speech, as represented in Marx's theory of ide-ologies—preceded by Descartes' terrible suspicion that an evilspirit may conceal the truth from man—has proved itself to be afundamental and efficient onslaught on religion preciselybecause it is an onslaught on philosophy as well.

As a matter of course Marx takes this position to be the foun-dation of modern science; science, according to him, "would besuperfluous if the appearance and essence of things coincided."That appearance as such was no longer thought capable of reveal-ing essence or (and this is essentially the same) that appearanceitself had become mute and no longer spoke to men who mis-trusted their senses and all sense perception, is closely connectedwith the glorification of mute violence. Like the glorification of

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labor, politically this was an onslaught on freedom, because itimplied the glorification of compulsion and natural necessity. Butto conclude from this that Marx's longing for the "realm of free-dom" was sheer hypocrisy, or that his statement that nobody canbe free who rules over others is merely inconsistent, means notonly to underrate the relevance of Marx's work, but also to under-estimate the objective difficulties and obstacles to all so-called tra-ditional values in the modern world.

Marx's self-contradiction is most striking in the few paragraphsthat oudine the ideal future society and that are frequenUy dis-missed as Utopian. They cannot be dismissed because they consti-tute the center of Marx's work and express most clearly itsoriginal impulses. Moreover, if Utopia means that this society hasno topos, no geographical and historical place on earth, it is cer-tainly not Utopian: its geographical topos is Athens and its place inhistory is the fifth century before Christ. In Marx's future societythe state has withered away; there is no longer any distinctionbetween rulers and ruled and rulership no longer exists. This cor-responds to life in the ancient Greek city-state, which, although itwas based on rulership over slaves as its pre-political condition,had excluded rulership from the intercourse of its free citizens. InHerodotus' great definition (to which Marx's statement conformsalmost textually), that man is free who wants "neither to rule norto be ruled." Along with the state, violence in all its forms is gone,and administration has taken the place of police and army; thepolice are superfluous, because the legislator has become a "nat-ural scientist who does not make or invent laws, but only formu-lates them" so that man has only to live in conformity with his ownnature to remain within the realm of the law. The expectationthat it will be easy for men to follow the few elementary rules ofbehavior discovered and laid down thousands of years ago (asLenin once strikingly expressed it) " in a society without propertyconflicts is "utopian" only if one assumes that human nature iscorrupt or that human laws are not derived from natural law. Buthere again there is a striking resemblance to a city state in which


the citizens themselves were supposed to execute death sentencespronounced against them in accordance with the laws, so thatthey are not killed by special forces trained in the use of themeans of violence, but rather helped by guardians to commit sui-cide. The superfluousness of an army, moreover, follows logicallyas soon as we assume with Marx that this life of the Athenian city-state has ceased to be confined to the polis and now encompassesthe whole world.

Most striking of all is of course Marx's insistence that he doesnot want to "liberate labor," which already is free in all civilizedcountries, but to "abolish labor altogether." And by labor Marxhere does not mean only that necessary "metabolism withnature," which is the natural condition of man, but the wholerealm of work, of craftsmanship and art, that requires specializedtraining. This realm never fell under the general contempt forthe drudgery of labor that is characteristic of our whole traditionand whose degradation specifically characterizes Athenian life inthe fifth century. Only tbere do we find an almost completeleisure society in which the time and energy required for makinga living were, so to speak, squeezed in between the much moreimportant activities of agorein, walking and talking in the market-place, of going to the gymnasium, of attending meetings or thetheater, or of judging conflicts between citizens. Hardly anythingcould be more revealing of Marx's original impulses than the factthat he banishes from his future society not only the labor thatwas executed by slaves in antiquity, but also the activities of thebanausoi, the craftsmen and artists: "In a communist society thereare no painters, only men who, among others things, paint." Thearistocratic standards of Athenian life bad indeed denied free-dom to those whose work still required the exertion of effort.(That effort, and not specialization, was the chief criterion can beseen from the fact that sculptors and peasants, unlike paintersand shepherds, were deemed unfree.) In other words, if we insiston examining Marx's thought in the light of the tradition thatbegan in Greece, and of a political philosophy that, either in

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agreement or opposition, sprang from and formulated the prin-cipal experiences of Athenian polis life, we are clearly followingthe central indications of Marx's work itself.

This "Utopian" side of Marx's teachings constitutes a basic self-contradiction, and like all such flagrant inconsistencies in thework of great writers indicates and illuminates the center of itsauthor's thought. In Marx's case the basic inconsistency was noteven his own but already existed in clear oudine in the three cen-tral events that overshadowed the entire nineteenth century: thepolitical revolutions in France and America, the Industrial Revo-lution in the Western world, and the demand for freedom for allthat was inherent in both. These three events, rather tban thework of Marx, were no longer in accord with our tradition ofpolitical thought, and it is only after them that, in its brute factu-ality, our world has changed beyond recognition when comparedwith any previous era. Even before Marx had begun to write, vio-lence had become the midwife of history, labor had become thecentral activity of society, and universal equality was on its way tobecoming an accomplished fact. Neither Marx nor the spiritualchanges that accompanied these revolutionary events, however,can be comprebended apart from the tradition they challenged.Even today our thought still moves within the framework of famil-iar concepts and "ideals," which are much less Utopian than mostbelieve and usually bave a very definite place in history, no matterhow violently tbey may clash v dth the reality in which we live andthat they are supposed to grasp.

Marx was not and, as we shall see, could not have been awarethat his glorification of violence and labor challenged the tradi-tional connection between freedom and speech. He was aware,however, of the incompatibility of freedom with the necessity thatis expressed by labor, and also witb the compulsion that isexpressed by violence. As he put it, "The realm of freedom in factbegins only where labor, conditioned by need and exterior use-fulness, ends." According to the dialectics of history, necessity andcompulsion could very well bring forth freedom, except that this


solution does not really work if one, following Marx, defines thenature of man—and not tnerely the way in which things humanhappen—in terms of necessity. For the free, laborless man who issupposed to emerge after the end of history would simply havelost his most essentially human capacity, just as the actions ofmen, once they have lost the element of violence, would have losttheir specifically human efficiency.

Marx had a right not to be aware of the intimate relationshipbetween speech and freedom as we know it from the two-sidedstatement of Aristotle; that a free man is a member of a polis andthat the members of a polis are distinguished from the barbariansthrough the faculty of speech. These two connected statementshad already been torn asunder by a tradition that translated theone by declaring that man is a social being, a banality for whichone would not have needed Aristotle, and the other by definingman as the animak rationale, the reasoning animal. In bothinstances, the political point of Aristotle's insight as well as hisconcept of freedom, which corresponded with the experience ofthe Greek polites, was lost.

The word politikon no longer meant a unique, outstanding wayof life, of being-together, in which the truly human capacities ofman, as distinguished from his mere animal characteristics, couldshow and prove themselves. It had come to signify an all-embrac-ing quality that men share with many animal species, which per-haps was best expressed in the Stoic concept of mankind as onegigantic herd under one superbviman shepherd. The word logos,which in classical Greek usage equivocally meant both word andreason, and thereby preserved a unity between the capacity ofspeech and the capacity of thought, became ratio. The chief polit-ical difference between ratio and logos is that the former primarilyresides in, and relates to, a reasoning individual in his singularity,who then uses words in order to express his thoughts to others,while logos is essentially related to others and therefore by its verynature political. What Aristotle had seen as one and the samehuman quality, to live together with others in the modus of speak-

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ing, now became two distinct characteristics, to have reason andto be social. And these two characteristics, almost from the begin-ning, were not thought merely to be distinct, but antagonistic toeach other: the conflict between man's rationality and his socia-bility can be seen throughout our tradition of political thought.

This loss of the originally political experiences in the traditionof political thought had already been foreshadowed in the begin-ning of this tradition itself, which almost but not quite begins withAristotle; where political thought is concerned it actually startswith Plato. Indeed, in this respect, that is, in affirming in his polit-ical philosophy the experience of the polis, Aristotle seems inopen conflict with Plato (his political writings are full of polemi-cal remarks against him), whereas the tradition that reinterpretedAristotle's definition of man eliminated from it all those insightsinto the nature of politics and man's political freedom that wereinconsistent with Platonism.

The chief difference between Plato and Aristotle in their polit-ical philosophies is that Plato, writing consciously in opposition totbe political life of the decaying Greek city-state, no longerbelieved in the validity of the kind of speech that accompanied—in the sense of being the other side of—political action. To him,such speech was mere opinion, and as such opposed to the per-ception of truth, unfit either to adhere to or express truth. Per-suasion, pdthein, the form in which the citizens managed theirpublic affairs among themselves, was to Plato an unfortunate sub-stitute for the kind of unshakable conviction that could springonly from the direct perception of truth, a perception to whichthe method of dialegein, talking a matter through between "two,"autos auto, "one" talking with one "other," could lead. The philo-sophical point is that for Plato the perception of truth was essen-tially speechless and could only be furthered, not attained, bydialegein. It is essential in our context that Plato, probably fromthe impression that the fate of Socrates and the limitations of per-suasion so glaringly exposed at his trial made on him, was nolonger concerned with freedom at all. Persuasion had become to


him a form, not of freedom, but of arbitrary compulsion throughwords, and in his political philosophy he proposed to substitutefor this arbitrary compulsion the coercion of truth. Insofar as thistruth was essentially speechless and could be perceived only in thesolitude of contemplation, Platonic man was already not a "speak-ing" but a rational animal, that is, a being whose chief concernand enlightenment lay in himself, in his own reason, and not inthe faculty of speech, which by definition presupposed his livingamong and managing his life together with his equals. When Ai is-tode connected speech and freedom, he was on the firm groundof a then still existing tradition rooted in experience. Yet in theend Plato remained victorious because of the fact that the Greekcity-state was decaying beyond remedy—something that Platowho, as a full-fledged Athenian citizen, unlike Aristotle, knew andwhose infiuence be suffered severely—and whose ultimate ruinhe feared and tiied to prevent.

In the entire tradition of philosophical, and particularly ofpolitical thought, there has perhaps been no single factor of suchoverwhelming importance and influence on everything that wasto follow than the fact that Plato and Aristode wrote in the fourthcentury, under the full impact of a politically decaying society,and under conditions where philosophy quite consciously eitherdeserted the political realm altogether or claimed to rule it like atyrant. This fact had first of all the most serious consequences forphilosophy itself, which hardly needed Hegel to come to believethat not only philosophical thought, but nearly all thought in gen-eral, was the indication of the end of a civilization. Even moreserious was the abyss that immediately opened between thoughtand action, and which never since has been closed. All thinkingactivity that is not simply the calculation of means to obtain anintended or willed end but is concerned with meaning in themost general sense came to play the role of an "afterthought,"that is, after action had decided and determined reality. Action,on the other hand, became meaningless, the realm of the acci-dental and haphazard upon which no great deeds any longer

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shed their immortal light. The gi eat and conflicting Roman expe-rience remained in this respect without lasting influence, hecauseits Christian heir followed Greek philosophy in its spiritual devel-opment and Roman practice only in its legal and institutional his-tory. Roman experience, moreover, never brought forth aphilosophical conception of its own, but from the beginninginterpreted itself in the Greek categories of the fourth century.When action eventually became meaningful again it was becausethe remembered story of man's actions was felt to be "in essenceincoherent and immoral" (John Adams), so that history's trostlosesUngefdhr (Kant's "melancholy haphazardness") needed a "ruse ofnature" or some other force working behind the back of actingmen to achieve any dignity worthy of philosophical thought. Theworst consequence, however, was that freedom became a "prob-lem," perhaps the most perplexing one for philosophy, and cer-tainly the most insoluble for political philosophy. Aristotle is thelast for whom freedom is not yet "problematic" but inherent inthe faculty of speech; in other words, Aristotle still knew that men,as long as they talk with each other and act together in the modusof speech, are free.

We have already indicated one of the reasons why Marx's con-cept of freedom, and his insistence on it as the ultimate goal of allpolitics, resulted in the basic inconsistency of his teaching. Thatreason was the early loss of interest in freedom in general as wellas the early oblivion of the fundamental connection betweenspeech and freedom, both of which are almost as old as our tra-dition of political thought. To this, however, must be added onealtogether different difficulty, which arises less from the conceptof freedom as such tban from the change this concept necessarilysuffers under conditions of universal equality.


Never before our own times has equality meant in terms ofpolitical reality that literally everyone is everyone else's equal—which, of course, does not imply that everybody is the same aseverybody else, although the leveling tendencies of our modernsociety can hardly be denied. Prior to tbe modern age, equalitywas understood politically as a matter of equal rights for peopleof equal status. In other words, it meant that those who wereequal should be treated equally, but never that everyone wasequal. The Christian notion ofthe equality of all men before God,so frequendy cited as the origin of modern political equality,never intended to make men equal on earth, but on the contraryinsisted that only as citizens of a civitas Dei could they be consid-ered equal. The shift of emphasis from civitas terrena to civitas Deias the ultimate destiny of man did nothing to change the basicinequalities of man's political status on earth, in the framework ofwhich political equality and equity were supposed to operate. TheChristian way of life—to live in the world without being of theworld—could deny the relevance of earthly distinctions betweenmen in order to affirm the ultimate equality of destiny. But "ulti-mate" meant beyond this world, leaving earthly distinctions com-pletely intact, and "destiny" referred to a beginning and end,neither of which was rooted in the earth. Because Christian equal-ity before God did not even demand political equality of all Chris-tians, let alone of all men, there is as littlejustification for praisingChristianity for the modem concept of equality as there is forblaming the Church for the equanimity with which it toleratedslavery and serfdom throughout the centuries. Insofar as states-men were Christians, and not merely statesmen who happened tobe of the Christian denomination, they had nothing to do witheither.

Originally equals were only those who belonged to the samegroup, and to extend this term to all men would have been torender it meaningless. The chief privilege inherent in this origi-nal meaning was that one's equals, and only they, had a right tojudge one's own actions. It is in this sense that Cato in his last trial

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complained that none of bis judges were entitled to judge him,because none of them belonged to his own generation; they werenot his equals, even though they were all free Roman citizens.How deeply this distinction between equals and all other men wasfelt, and how litde our own circumstances have prepared us tounderstand it, can be seen clearly if we once again recall Aristo-de's definition of man, zoon logon echon, which as a matter ofcourse he meant only for the inhabitants of a polis, for those whowere equals, and which we immediately misunderstand as a gen-eral statement applicable to all human beings. The reason hedefined the specific condition of life in a polis as the content ofhuman as distingi_iished from animal life was not because hethought it applicable everywhere, but because he had decidedthat it was the best possible human life.

A more universal definition and concept of man appeared onlyin the following centuries, during the rise in late antiquity of thecondition of a-polity tbat so curiously resembles the rise of state-lessness in the modern world. Only when the philosophers haddefinitely (and not only theoretically, as with Plato) broken withthe polis, and when political homelessness had become the statusof a great many people in tbe world, did they conceive of man inan entirely unpolitical way, that is, independent from the way inwhich he lived together with his equals. The late Stoic concept ofhuman equality, however, was as negative as the condition fromwhich it arose. It has as much or as little to do with universalequality in the positive sense in which we live today as the Stoicconcept of ataraxia, freedom as unmoveability, has to do with anypositive notion of freedom. In other words, our use today of uni-versal concepts and our tendency to universalize rules until theycome to comprehend every possible individual occurrence have alot to do with the conditions of universal equality under which weactually live, think, and act.

To what extent Marx was aware of and even obsessed by thisnew universal equality can be seen from his concept of the futureas a classless and nationless society, that is, a society where uni-


versal equality will have razed all political boundaries betweenmen. What he did not see, and what is so very manifest in Hobbes'magnificent definition of human equality as the equal ability tokill, is that like all frontiers these boundaries give protectiontogether with limitation, and not only separate but also bind mentogether. Marx's greatness, and the reason for his enormous influ-ence on modern political thought and movements, was that hediscovered the positive character of this equality in the nature ofman himself, that is, in his conception of man as labor force. Heknew very well that this new definition of man was possible onlybecause "the concept of human equality possesses already thesolidity of a popular prejudice." Marx's definition of man as ani-mal laborans stood in conscious opposition to and challenged thetraditional definition of man as animal rationale.

Animal rationale, allegedly the translation of zoon logon echon, stillshared with Aristotle's definition the lack of equal applicability toall men, for not all men are equally "rational," equally capable oftheoretical thought. It was the capacity to give and to listen to the-oretical reasons, rather than the practical intelligence of men, thatthe adjective rationale primarily aimed at. The later interpretationofthe rational part of man as "common sense," despite or perhapsbecause of its eminently political indications, was never used todefine the essence of human nature, even though this commonsense was supposed to be equally strong and came to the same con-clusions in every single individual. Before Marx only Hobbes—who with Montesquieu was the greatest though not the mostinfluential political thinker of the new era that was beginning—had felt the necessity of finding a new definition of man under theassumption of universal equality. According to Hobbes, this equal-ity was inherent in the original state of nature and "the equality ofthe ability to kill" defmed the most general, common denomina-tor of man. From this basic assumption he deduced tlie founda-tions of human political organisms with no less stringent logicalitythan Marx was to develop, from the assumption of the productiveforce of labor, the foundations of human society.

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Marx's demand that nobody should be called free who rulesover others is in complete agreement with the fact of universalequality, a condition in which by definition no one has a right torule. Yet the elimination of rule, of the age-old distinctionbetween those who rule and those who are ruled, is so far frombeing the only and sufficient condition of freedom that our tra-dition even deemed freedom impossible without rulership. Thosewho were not ruled were deemed free, and this freedom couldrealize itself solely among equals, indeed only where, just as Marxdemanded, the distinction between rulers and subjects did notexist. Yet this freedom based on rule over slaves was a freedomthat apart from such basic rulership was inconceivable, not simplybecause it implied the rule over other human beings but becauseit entailed control over those basic necessities of life that, if leftuncontrolled through emancipation from the labor they require,would render all freedom illusory. Freedom in this original sensewas a state of being rather than a faculty; and politics, in any strictsense of the word, was thought to begin when that state had beenrealized. Political life rested on rulership, but to rule and to beruled was not its content. Where this was the case, as in the Ori-ental despotisms, the peoples concerned were seen by the Greeksas living under conditions of servitude, that is, as living under pre-political conditions. Freedom therefore was not one of the politi-cal "goods," such as honor or justice or wealth or any other good,and it never was enumerated as belonging to man's eudaimonia,his essential well-being or happiness. Freedom was the pre-politi-cal condition of political activities and therefore of all the goodsthat men can enjoy through their living together. As such, free-dom was taken for granted and did not need to be defined. Whenhe stated that the political life of a free citizen was characterizedby logon echon, by being conducted in the manner of speech, Aris-totle defined the essence of free men and their behavior, not theessence of freedom as a human good.

Universal equality cannot coexist with freedom as the pre-polit-ical condition of political life and with the absolute rule over


laborers; it is the latter that makes it possible for free citizens toescape the coercive necessities of biological life, at least to tbeextent that such necessities demand of man specific activities.Marx's own formulation that freedom is incompatible with ruleover others only enhances this difficulty. If it were true, a Greekmight have answered him by saying that then freedom is impossi-ble: all men would be slaves of necessity—the necessity to eat andto live, to preserve and regenerate life. Not only are slaves nothuman, but no man is fully human under these conditions. Nordoes the later development of the concept of freedom, whichmade it one of the most cherished goods within the politicalrealm, change anything in this basic traditional incompatibilitybetween freedom and universal equality. The most important andfar-reaching change is already clearly visible in Aristotle, whosedefinitions of governments are not consistent with his definitionof man as citizen. It is as though he himself had already forgottenwhat the whole tradition after him was bound to let sink intooblivion, namely, the intimate connection between freedom andspeech on the one hand, and between rule and necessity on theother. What happened was tbat rule over others, which originallyhad been experienced as rule over slaves and therefore as a pre-pohtical condition for tbe life of the polis, entered the politicalrealm itself and, by dividing men who lived together into thosewho ruled and those who were ruled, even became its dominatingfactor. From then on, that is, almost immediately after Aristotle,the problem of power became the decisive political problem, sothat this whole realm of human life could be defined, not as therealm of living together, but as the realm of power struggles inwhich nothing is so much at stake as the question of who rulesover whom.

Rule over others very early ceased to be a merely pre-politicalcondition of all political life, for no sooner had it entered thepolitical realm proper than it became at once its very center. Thischange can best be observed in the definitions of the forms ofgovernment, which no longer were understood as various ways of

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living together but as various forms of rulership among citizens.Kingship and aristocracy, which Plato still defined as resting ondistinction (their only minor difference being that the formerrests on the disdnction of one among the ruling citizens, whereasin the latter several are distinguished), now became monarchyand oligarchy. In monarchy one man, and in oligarchy severalmen hold power over all others. Plato still thought that theseforms of government were plainly perversions, no true politeiaibut born from some violent upheaval and dependent on violence{bia). The use of violence disqualifies all forms of governmentbecause, according to the older conception, violence beginswherever the polis, the political realm proper, ends. It ends eitherin the rule over slaves, which makes this realm possible in tbe firstplace, or in the defense of the walls of the city, or in the trans-gression ofthe boundary ofthe laws to which all citizens have sub-mitted themselves voluntarily.

Aristode, who still uses the older concepts of kingship, aristoc-racy, and polity to indicate the "good" forms of governments,already actually thinks that the question of who rules over whom,or of how many hold power, is the decisive criterion that distin-guishes them from each other. In other words, he always describesmonarchy as the rule of one, oligarchy as tbe rule ofthe few, anddemocracy as the rule of the majority. However, since the elementof violence present in ruling as such would also for him have dis-qualified these forms of government, he had to introduce the lawin an altogether different meaning. The law was now no longerthe boundary (which the citizens ought to defend like the walls ofthe city, because it had the same function for the citizen's politi-cal life as the city's wall had for their physical existence and dis-tinctness, as Heraclitus had said), but became a yardstick by whichrule could be measured. Rule now either conformed to or over-ruled the law, and in the latter case the rule was called tyranni-cal—usually, although not necessarily, exerted by one man—andtherefore a kind of perverted monarchy. From then on, law andpower became the two conceptual pillars of all definitions of gov-


ernment, and these definitions hardly changed during the morethan 2,000 years that separate Aristotle from Montesquieu. Sinceviolence in its arbitrary form remained a disqualifying factor, themain question now became whether or not the rule over othersconformed to the existing laws, whereas the question of howmany actually were in possession of power became less and lessrelevant. Kant only drew the last consequence from this traditionof political thought when he reduced the number of forms of gov-ernment to two: to rule over others according to law, which hecalled republican, and its opposite, rule by lawless, arbitrarypower, which be called tyrannical.

In a sense this development is a complete reversal of tbe earlierGreek political experience, in which an all important qualifica-tion for political life was the pre-political rule over slaves, that is,when only those who held power over others were consideredfree and fit to participate in politics at all. This early experience,however, was never altogether lost. Politics somehow, though in avery changed way, was still connected with freedom, freedomremained connected with exerting rule, and only rulers weredeemed free. This is the context in which freedom could becomea "good," something to be enjoyed, closely connected with thepower of doing as one pleases, either within or beyond the limitsof the law. Freedom remained with the "ruling class," and contin-ued to presuppose others being ruled, even though it was nolonger the condition but had become the very content of politi-cal life. Thus when universal equality appeared as an unavoidabledemand forjustice for everyone, for a social and political body inwhich all were free and no one was ruled, it had all the earmarksof a contradiction in terms: within tbe tradition of politicalthought the concept of universal equality could only mean thatnobody could be free.

With the anticipated disappearance of rule and domination inMarx's stateless society, freedom indeed becomes a meaninglessword unless it is conceived in an altogether different sense. SinceMarx here as elsewhere did not bother to redefine his terms but

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remained in the conceptual framework of the tradition, Leninwas not so wrong when he concluded that if nobody can be freewho rules over others, then freedom is only a prejudice or an ide-ology—although he thereby robbed Marx's work of one of itsmost important impulses. His adherence to tradition is also thereason for the even more fateful error of Marx as well as Leninthat mere administiation, in contrast to government, is the ade-quate form of men living together under the condition of radicaland universal equality. Administration was supposed to be norule, but it can actually be only rule by nobody, that is, bureau-cracy, a form of government without responsibility. Bureaucracy isthe form of government in which the personal element of ruler-ship has disappeared, and it is of course true that such a govern-ment may even rule in tbe interest of no class. But thisno-man-ruie, the fact that in an authentic bureaucracy nobodyoccupies the empty chair of the ruler, does not mean that the con-ditions of rule have disappeared. Tbis nobody rules very effec-tively when looked upon from the side of the ruled, and, what isworse, as a form of government it has one important trait in com-mon with tyranny. Tyrannical power is defined by the tradition asarbitrary power, and this originally signified a rule for which noaccount need be given, a rule that owes no one any responsibility.The same is true for the bureaucratic rule by nobody, though foran altogether different reason. There are many people in abureaucracy who may demand an account, but nobody to give itbecause nobody cannot be held responsible. In the stead of thetyrant's arbitrary decisions we find the haphazard setdements ofuniversal procedures, settlements that are without malice andarbitrariness because there is no will behind them, but to whichthere is also no appeal. As far as the ruled are concerned, the netof the patterns in which they are caught is by far more dangerousand more deadly than mere arbitrary tyranny. But bureaucracyshould not be mistaken for totalitarian domination. If the Octo-ber Revolution had been permitted to follow the lines prescribedby Marx and Lenin, which was not the case, it would probably


have resulted in bureaucratic rule. The rule of nobody, not anar-chy, or disappearance of rule, or oppression, is the ever-presentdanger of any society based on universal equality.

Labor, violence, and freedom indicate the central challenges toour tradition that appeared in the three great events of the mod-ern era, and which Marx attempted to formulate and thinkthrough. Compared with them, the one reversal of traditional"values" of which Marx himself was aware, the turning away from"idealism" to "materialism"—by which he believed he had turnedHegel upside down, and for which he has so frequently beenpraised or blamed—is of minor importance. Such turning opera-tions, however, were characteristic of the new age's consciousrebellion against, and unconscious bondage to, tradition. We arereminded of Kierkegaard's turning the relationship between phi-losophy and religion upside down; and of Nietzsche's invertedPlatonism that, while assuming with Plato that eternal essenceand perishable mortal life are contradictions, arrived at the anti-Platonic conclusion that man, insofar as he is a living being, canonly be hindered in his being alive through the so<alled essen-tial. This last instance is particularly instructive, since Plato him-self already thought he had achieved such a turning operation inhis teaching that it is not the merely living and hence mortal bodybut the soul, precisely because it is intangible, that could attainimmortality by partaking in true reality, the reality not of theobjects of the senses but of the ideas that are seen and graspedonly with the eyes of the soul. The periagbge, he demanded, was aturning around by which everything commonly believed inGreece in accordance with the Homeric religion was stood on itshead. At least this is quite obviously what Plato himself believed.One may think that Nietzsche, when he reversed Plato, was onlyreturning to a pre-Platonic philosophy; but of course that is notthe case, for Nietzsche, like Marx, remained in the framework ofthe tradition despite all turnings around. To exalt the sensual, asNietzsche did, one needs the reality of the spiritual, just as Platoneeded the brute factuality of the sensual as the given back-

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ground against which the soul could perform its periagbge, itsturning toward the realm of ideas. Plato, whose work is filled withdirect and indirect polemical replies to Homer, did not turnHomer downside up, but he did lay the groundwork of a philoso-phy in which such turning operations were indeed not only a far-fetched possibility, but almost a conclusive necessity. The wholedevelopment of philosophy in late antiquity, with its innumerableschools all fighting each other with a fanaticism unparalleled inthe pre-Christian world, largely consists of turning operations thatwere made possible by Plato's periagoge, and for which the Pla-tonic separation of a world of mere shadowy appearances from aworld of eternally true ideas had erected the framework.

When in a last gigantic effort Hegel gathered together the var-ious strands of traditional philosophy as they had developed fromPlato's original conception, fitting them into one consistentwhole, a similar splitting up into two conflicting schools ofthought ensued, though on a much lower level: for a short whilephilosophic thought was dominated by right-wing and left-wingHegelians. But the three great reversals that eventually were toconclude, at least up to our time, the great uninterrupted tradi-tion of philosophy—Kierkegaard's leap from doubt into belief,Nietzsche's reversed Platonism, and Marx's leap from theory intopraxis—(though none of them would have been possible withoutHegel and his concept of history and in this one all importantrespect all tbree were and remained followers of Hegel), alsopoint to a much more radical break with the tradition than anymere upside-down operation requires. Of these breaks Marx'shad the most immediate consequences, simply because it hadtouched our tradition of political thought and therefore couldbecome directly influential on political developments.

Marx's break certainly did not consist in his "materialism" or inhis turning Hegel upside down. Lenin was altogether right whenhe remarked that no one could understand Das Kapital who hadnot mastered Hegel's Logik. In Marx's own opinion, what madesocialism scientific and distinguished it from that of his predeces-


sors, the "utopian socialists," was not an economic theory with itsscientific insights as well as its errors, but the discovery of a law ofmovement that ruled matter and, at the same time, showed itselfin the reasoning capacity of man as "consciousness," either of theself or of a class. The tremendous practical advantage of Marx's"scientific" over Utopian socialism was, and still is, that it liberatedthe socialist movement from its worn-out moralizing attitudes,and recognized that the class questions in modern society couldno longer be solved by a "passion for justice" or on the basis of aslightly modified Christian charity. If labor is the central activity ofmodern society, it is absurd to think of members of the workingclass as underprivileged, no matter how oppressed or exploitedthey may happen to be at any particular moment. The introduc-tion of a dialectical historical movement, according to which thelast will be first, at least offered an account of the tremendouspower potential of this class, a potential tbat came to light onlyseveral decades after Marx's death.

Tbe dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—which becomes infmite as each synthesis at once establishes itselfas a new thesis from which a new antithesis and a new synthesisfiow—holds man and matter in its grip and mixes them with eachother, then separates them from each other, antithetically, so thatthey may appear distinct as matter and spirit, only to reunite themsynthetically. The foundation of experience on which Hegel's aswell as Marx's dialectic rests is the all-encompassing eternalprocess of nature's metabolism, of which man's metabolism withnature is only an infinitesimally small part, on the one hand, andthe fact of human history on the other. The logic of dialectalmovement enables Marx to combine nature with history, or mat-ter with man; man becomes the author of a meaningful, compre-hensible histoiy because his metabolism with nature, unlike ananimal's, is not merely consumptive but requires an activity,namely, labor. For Marx labor is the uniting link between matterand man, between nature and history. He is a "materialist" insofaras the specifically human form of consuming matter is to him the

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beginning of everything; and he is an "idealist" insofar as nothingever comes from matter by itself without tbe consuming activitythat lies in the nature of man, which is labor. In other words"materialism" and "idealism" have lost tbeir meaning, althoughMarx himself seems not to have been aware of this. The greatnessof Hegel's system, and the reason why it was so extremely difficultto escape its influence if one wanted to remain within the scopeof traditional philosophy at all, lies in his incorporation of the two"worlds" of Plato into one moving whole. The traditional turningfrom the world of appearance to the world of ideas or, conversely,the turning from the world of ideas back to the world of appear-ance, takes place in the historical motion itself and becomes theform—although not the content, which is the realization of theAbsolute—of the dialectical movement.

Each of the three statements by Marx—Labor is the Creator ofMan, Violence is the midwife of History, and No one can be free whoenslaves others—is revolutionary in the sense that it follows andbrings into articulate thought the three revolutionary events thatushered in the modem world. None, however, is revolutionary inthe sense that with it or through it a revolution came to pass. Andonly the flrst is revolutionary in the sense that it is in flagrant con-flict with the whole of our tradition of political thought. This firststatement is also, characteristically enough, the one least sus-pected of "revolutionary tendencies" in the subversive meaning ofthe term, and therefore more difficult to understand than theothers. The one decisive difference of our own world from all pre-vious ages, tbe digniflcation of labor, has already acquired thedoubtful status of a commonplace, and this in little more than acentury. Marx's prophecies may have been wrong in almost allrespects, although he certainly did not err more than is the com-mon lot of social scientists. But in this one respect—in bis con-viction that the future belongs to man as a laboring animal, tothose, that is, who have nothing but their laboring capacity, whomhe called the proletariat—he was so right that we, even today, arehardly aware of it. Tbe point is not whether the classical econo-


mists, whom Marx in his economic theories followed closelydespite all of his criticisms, were right in maintaining that labor isthe source of all wealth, but rather that we live in a society oflaborers. That is, we live in a society in which men consider alltheir activities primarily as laboring activities, in the sense thattheir end is "tbe preservation of individual life," and themselvesprimarily as owners of labor force. It is in this sense that those whomanifesdy do not labor, who do not earn their living throughlabor, are in a society of laborers judged to be parasites.

Because labor has lost one of its chief characteristics, apparentnot only in all traditional definitions ofthe word but also in its ety-mological origin in nearly every language, this basic condition ofmodern life is frequently neglected. Labor has indeed becomeeffordess, just as childbirth tends to become less and less painful.The effort of labor and the pain of birth, both mentioned as thepunishment for man's sin in the third chapter of the first book ofthe Bible, belonged together because both expressed the fact thatman was subject to the compulsion of necessity for his very life.Labor and its effort were required for maintaining and preservingindividual life, just as birth and its pain were unavoidable for thereproduction of the species. Effort and pain were not just thesymptoms, but the modi in which the basic necessity inherent inthe human condition made itself felt and revealed itself. Labor,namely that activity that is both required for, and inherent in,being alive, does not lose its character of compulsion because ithas become easier, although it is true that it is more difficult toperceive coercive necessity in the guise of ease than in the harshbrutality of pain and effort.

What Marx foresaw was that the Industrial Revolution wasbound to "enlarge the realm of natural necessity," that is, therealm of labor, despite all technical developments that tend tomake labor effortless. This enlargement is closely bound to thegigantic multiplication of needs, the fulfillment of which is felt tobelong to the necessities of life, and the most immediate and tan-gible result of which has been that the "figure ofthe laborer" has

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indeed become the central figure of our society. In this society theold verse "Who does not labor shall not eat" has assumed a directrelevance that stands in opposition to all other periods of humanhistory. The social revolution of our time is contained in the sim-ple fact that until not mucb more than 100 years ago, mere labor-ers had been denied political rights, whereas today we accept as amatter of course the opinion that a nonlaborer may not even havethe right to stay alive.

Marx's own hope, nourished by his belief in the dialecticalstructure of everything that happens, was that somehow thisabsolute rule of necessity would result in, or resolve itself into, anequally absolute rule of freedom. That is the only strictly Utopianelement in his thought. But it is also the only and perhaps des-perate conclusion to be drawn from a tradition that holds, inMarx's own words, that tbe "realm of freedom begins wherelaboring ends." According to Marx it is foolish to think it possibleto liberate and emancipate laborers, that is, those whose veryactivity subjects them to necessity. When all men have becomelaborers, the realm of freedom will indeed have vanished. Theonly thing that then remains is to emancipate man from labor,something tbat in all probability is just as impossible as the earlyhope of the philosophers to free man's soul from his body.

Unavoidably, first and foremost the tradition of politicalthought contains the philosophers' traditional attitude towardpolitics. Political thought itself is older than our tradition of phi-losophy, which begins with Plato and Aristotle, just as philosophyitself is older and contains more than the Western tradition even-tually accepted and developed. At the beginning, therefore, notof our political or philosophical history, but of our tradition ofpolitical philosophy, stands Plato's contempt for politics, his con-viction that "the affairs and actions of men (ta ton anthropon prag-


mata) are not worthy of great seriousness" and that the only rea-son why the philosopher needs to concern himself with them isthe unfortunate fact that philosophy—or, as Aristotle somewhatlater would say, a life devoted to it, the bios thebretikos—is materi-ally impossible without a halfway reasonable arrangement of allaffairs that concern men insofar as they live together. At thebeginning of the tradition politics exists because men are aliveand mortal, while philosophy concerns those matters that areeternal, like the universe. Insofar as the philosopher is also a mor-tal man he, too, is concerned with politics. But this concern hasonly a negative relationship to his being a philosopher: he isafraid, as Plato so abundantly made clear, that through bad man-agement of political affairs he will not be able to pursue philoso-phy. Schole, like the Latin otium, is not leisure as such but onlyleisure from political duty, nonparticipation in politics, and there-fore the freedom of the mind for its concern with the eternal (theaei on), which is possible only if the needs and necessities of mor-tal life have been taken care of. Politics, therefore, seen from thespecifically philosophical viewpoint, begins already in Plato tocomprehend more than politeuesthai, more than those activitiesthat are characteristic of tlie ancient Greek polis, for which themere fulfillment of the needs and necessities of life were a pre-political condition. Politics begins, as it were, to expand its realmdownward to the necessities of life themselves, so that to thephilosophers' scorn for the perishable affairs of mortals wasadded the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is nec-essary for mere life and survival. As Cicero, in his futile attempt todisavow Greek philosophy on this one point—its attitude to poli-tics—succinctly pointed out, if only "all that is essential to ourwants and comforts were supplied by some magic wand, as in thelegends, then every man of first-rate ability could drop all otherresponsibility and devote himself exclusively to knowledge andscience." In brief, when the philosophers began to concern them-selves with politics in a systematic way, politics at once became forthem a necessary evil.

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Thus our tradition of political philosophy, unhappily and fate-fully, and from its very beginning, has deprived political affairs,that is, those activities concerning the common public realm thatcome into being wherever men live together, of all dignity of tbeirown. In Aristotelian terms, politics is a means to an end; it has noend in and by itself. More than that, the proper end of politics isin a way its opposite, namely, non participation in political affairs,schole, the condition of philosophy, or rather the condition of alife devoted to it. In other words, no other activity appears asantiphilosophical, as hostile to philosophy, as political activity ingeneral and action in particular, with the exception, of course, ofwhat was never deemed to be strictly human activity at all, such asmere laboring. Spinoza polishing lenses eventually could becomethe symbolic figure of tbe philosopher, just as innumerable exam-ples taken from the experiences of work, craftsmanship, and theliberal arts since the time of Plato could serve to lead by analogyto the higher knowledge of philosophic truths. But since Socratesno man of action, that is, no one whose original experience waspolitical, as for instance Cicero's was, could ever hope to be takenseriously by the philosophers; and no speciflcally political deeds,or human greatness as expressed in action, could ever hope toserve as examples in philosophy, in spite of the never forgottenglory of Homer's praise of the hero. Philosophy is fartherremoved from praxis even than it is from poiesis.

Of perhaps even greater consequence for the degradation ofpolitics is that in the light of philosophy—for which the originand principle, the arche, are one and tbe same—politics does noteven have an origin of its own: it came into being only because ofthe elementary and pre-political fact of biological necessity, whichmakes men need each other in the arduous task of staying alive.Politics, in other words, is derivative in a twofold sense: it bas itsorigin in the pre-political data of biological life, and it has its endin the postpolitical, highest possibility of human destiny. Andsince it is the curse, as we have seen, of pre-political necessities torequire laboring, we may now say that politics is limited by labor


from below and by philosophy from above. Both are excludedfrom politics strictly speaking, the one as its lowly origin and theother as its exalted aim and end. Very much like the activity of theclass of guardians in Plato's Republic, politics is supposed to watchand manage the livelihood and the base necessities of labor onthe one hand, and to take its orders from the apolitical thebria ofphilosophy on the other. Plato's demand for a philosopher-kingdoes not mean tbat philosophy itself should, or ever even couldbe realized in an ideal polity, but rather that rulers who value phi-losophy more than any other activity should be permitted to rulein such a way that there may be philosophy, that philosophers willhave schole, and be undisturbed by those matters that arise fromour living together and that, in turn, have their ultimate origin inthe imperfections of human life.

Political philosophy never recovered from this blow dealt byphilosophy to politics at the very beginning of our tradition. Thecontempt for politics, the conviction that political activity is anecessary evil, due partly to the necessities of life that force mento live as laborers or rule over slaves who provide for them, andpartly to the evils that come from living together itself, that is, tothe fact that the multitude, whom the Greeks called hoi polloi,threatens the existence of every single person, runs like a redthread throughout the centuries that separate Plato from themodern age. In this context it is irrelevant whether this attitudeexpresses itself in secular terms, as in Plato and Aristotle, or if itdoes so in the terms of Christianity. It was Tertullian who firstheld that, insofar as we are Christians, nulla res nobis magis alienaquam respublica ("to us nothing is more alien than public affairs")and nevertheless still insisted on the necessity of the civitas ter-rena, of secular government, because of man's sinfulness andbecause, as Luther was to pul it much later, true Christianswohnenfern voneinander, that is, dwell far from each other and areas forlorn among the multitude as were the ancient philoso-phers. What is important is that the same notion was taken up,again in secular terms, by post-Christian philosophy, as it were

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surviving all other changes and radical turnings about, express-ing itself now in the melancholy reflection of Madison, that gov-ernment surely is nothing but a reflection on human nature,which would not be necessary if men were angels, now in theangry words of Nietzsche, that no government can be good aboutwhich the subjects have to worry at all. With respect to the evalu-ation of politics, though in no other, it is irrelevant whether thecivitas Dei gives meaning and order to the civitas terrrena, orwhether the bios thebretikos prescribes its rules and is the ultimateend of the bios politikos.

What matters, in addition to the inherent degradation of thiswhole realm of life through philosophy, is the radical separationof those matters that men can reach and attain only through liv-ing and acting together from those that are perceived and caredabout by man in his singularity and solitude. And here again, itdoes not matter if man in his solitude searches for truth, finallyattaining it in the speechless contemplation of the idea of ideas,or whether he cares for the salvation of his soul. What matters isthe unbridgeable abyss that opened and bas never been closed,not between the so-called individual and the so-called commu-nity (which is the latest and most phony way of stating theauthentic and old problem), but between being in solitude andliving together. Compared to this perplexity, the equally old andvexing problem of the relationship, or rather nonrelationship,between action and tbought, is secondary in importance. Nei-ther the radical separation between politics and contemplation,between living together and living in solitude as two distinctmodes of life, nor their hierarchical structure, was ever doubtedafter Plato had established both. Here again the only exceptionis Cicero who, out of his great Roman political experience,doubted the validity of the superiority of the bios thebretikos overthe bios politikos, the validity of solitude over the communitas.Rightly but futilely Cicero objected that he who was devoted to"knowledge and science" would flee his "solitude and ask for acompanion in his study, be it in order to teach or to learn, to Us-


ten or to speak." Here as elsewhere the Romans paid a steepprice for their contempt of philosophy, which they held to be"impractical." The end result was the undisputed victory ofGreek philosophy and the loss of Roman experience for occi-dental political thought. Cicero, because he was not a philoso-pher, was unable to challenge philosophy.

The question whether Marx, who at the end of the traditionchallenged its formidable unanimity about the proper relation-ship between philosophy and politics, was a philosopher in thetraditional sense or even in any authentic sense, need not bedecided. The two decisive statements that sum up abruptly and, asit were, inarticulately his thought on the matter—"The philoso-phers have only interpreted the world. . .the point, however, is tochange it," and "You cannot supersede {auflieben in the Hegeliantriple sense of conserve, raise to a higher level, and abolish) phi-losophy without realizing it"—are so intimately phrased inHegel's terminology and thought along his lines that, taken bythemselves, their explosive content notwithstanding, they canalmost be regarded as an informal and natural continuation ofHegel's philosophy. For nobody could have thought before Hegelthat philosophy is interpretation (of the world or anything else)or that philosophy could be realized except in the bios theoretikos,the life of the philosopher himself. What is to be realized, more-over, is not any specific or new philosophy, not the philosophy, forinstance, of Marx himself, but the highest destiny of man as tra-ditional philosophy, culminating in Hegel, defined it.

Marx does not challenge philosophy, he challenges the allegedimpracticality of philosophy. He challenges the philosophers' res-ignation to do no more than find a place for themselves in theworld, instead of changing the world and making it "philosophi-cal." And this is not only more than but also decisively differentfrom Plato's ideal of philosophers who should rule as kings,because it implies not the rule of philosophy over men but that allmen, as it were, become philosophers. The consequence thatMarx drew from Hegel's philosophy of history (and Hegel's

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entire philosophical work, including the Logik, has only this onetopic: history) was that action, contrary to the philosophical tradi-tion, was so far from being the opposite of thought that it was itstrue, namely real vehicle, and that politics, far from being infi-nitely beneath the dignity of philosophy, was the only activity thatwas inherently philosophical.

Notes

^Arendt refers to Plato's legendary voyages to Syracuse, as reflected inthe perhaps authentic Seventh and Eighth Epistles. Ed.

'^Politics 1279b] l-1280a3. Ed.Hx. is worth quoting in full the sentence from Hegel's "Preface" to his

Philosophy of Right in which this famous image appears: "Wenn diePhilosophic ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens altgeworden, und mit Grau in Grau lasst sie sich nicht verjiingen, sondernnur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechen-den Dammerung ihren Flug." Ed.

^Theses on Feuerbach, XI. Ed.•'In Arendt's Denktagebuch (forthcoming from Piper Verlag) of 1953

there occurs the following entry: "Burckhardt {Grieschische Kul-turgeschichte I, 355-56), macht aufmerksam, dass die griechischen Gotterkeiner Dienerschaft bedurften: nur die Menschen brauchen Sklaven;die Gotter waren frei von irdischer Notduift, wenn auch dem Schicksalunterworfen. Diese Freiheit hangt mit ihrer Unsterblichkeit zusammen?Jedenfalls sind die griechischen Gotter gekennzeichnet durch das'leichte' leben, ihr Dasein ist miihelos" This train of thought recurs inone of the epigraphs that Arendt selected in 1975 for her book on fudg-ing, which she did not live to write. Late in the second part of EaustGoethe wrote that if one could give up magic and stand before natureonly as a man, then the pain, toil, and labor of being human would beworthwhile; "Da war's der Mi'ihe wert ein Mensch zu sein." Ed.

^Elsewhere in these manuscripts Arendt makes the point that Marxwas the first to view political history as "made by men as laboring ani-mals. . , . Then it must be possible to make history in the process oflabor, of productivity, to make history as we make things. . . . Marx's the-ory of history sees its decisive movement in the development of theforces of production, and the forces of production are ultimately basedon labor as a force." Ed.


' In State and Revolution, Lenin wrote that "people will graduallybecome accustomed to the observance of the elementary rules of sociallife that have been repeated for thousands of years" {quoted by Arendtin the first edition of The Origins of Totaliiarianism). Ed.

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Arendt, Hannah. Marx y la tradicón del pensamiento occidental

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