Abstract
Would sociological theory benefit from a serious engagement with Hannah Arendt’s work? In his concise, intelligent, and useful book, Philip Walsh answers Yes. That’s hardly the obvious response to the question. Arendt frequently expressed her disdain for sociology as a discipline, and “society” (as contrasted to politics and the public sphere) encapsulated much of what she hated about modernity. What Arendt meant by “society” is hardly clear. Walsh offers a plausible interpretation that rests upon a major claim in his book: namely, that the labor, work, action trichotomy in Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) must be understood as “ontological,” which means these three activities will be present in all human societies and that what distinguishes each one should not be blurred. Furthermore, there exists a specific social space for each: the household for labor, the marketplace for work, and the political realm for action. In modern societies, according to Arendt, labor, which focuses on supplying the necessities of life, has swamped the other two activities. Politics and the marketplace both have become almost exclusively focused on providing the means to life, thus shrinking the effort exerted in creating lasting artifacts (work) and meaningful action (the freedom Arendt associates with politics).
Walsh is agnostic about Arendt’s diagnosis of the ills of modernity but is adamant that her foundational ontology identifies features of social life that sociologists would be well-advised to take into account. In particular, Walsh thinks the Arendtian understanding of action (of which he provides a superb account) usefully augments more standard theories of human activities. Arendtian action “takes place only between human beings” (p. 34) (Walsh offers “friendship, teaching, and child-rearing” as examples [p. 30]), generates nothing tangible beyond the relations it creates and the space it performatively carves out for its enactment, and is unpredictable both in its emergence and in its effects. Arendt’s hostility to sociology rests in large part upon her insistence that action is incalculable. To the extent that sociology thinks it can provide explanations of action’s genesis or predictions about its outcomes, Arendt not only thinks it deluded but also sees it as partaking in the modern reduction (confusion) of action to labor/work. A worker has a set procedure to follow and can reasonably expect that following the procedure will produce particular results. But action, precisely because it involves interaction with other people, is more improvisatory.
The bulk of Walsh’s book (once he has provided his lucid interpretation of the labor, work, action triad) is devoted to considering how an engagement with Arendt’s thought might contribute to sociological theory. Walsh places Arendt in dialogue with a wide range of theorists—Marx, Weber, Mannheim, Mead, Giddens, Archer, Beck, Habermas, Bell, and Bourdieu, among others. His sharp accounts of central issues in sociological theory are always illuminating and his deployment of Arendt almost always helpful. I can hardly cover all the ground Walsh does in a short review, so I will confine myself to the ways he thinks Arendt can intervene in discussions of action and modernity spurred by the work of Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Margaret Archer.
Both Beck and Giddens claim that modernity entails an increasing reflexivity. But the causes for this increase and the nature of this mental capacity remain opaque in their work. Why should moderns be more attentive to feedback, more likely to analyze and reform their practices (habits) than pre-moderns? For Walsh, what Giddens and Beck lack is a plausible historical account of this transformation. Arendt can help here—and her work also allows Walsh to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Archer’s ongoing work in action theory.
Specifically, Arendt provides two important pieces to the puzzle. First, she distinguishes between knowing, which involves the gathering of information that is true, from thinking, which “yields no results” but is oriented “towards meaning” (p. 75). The capacity to think, then, is a mental activity disconnected from fabrication (work), but intimately connected to action. Thinking is not about doing or making something (work), but about being someone (identity). Crucially, however, thinking is “world-derivative.” “Thinking is a learned ability to conduct an internal conversation that derives from the sociability of the human condition” (p. 76). (Walsh sees Arendt as close to George Herbert Mead in this regard.)
This emphasis on thinking as a social practice leads to the second point: different historical conditions will foster different kinds of thinking. Walsh reads Arendt’s Life of the Mind as an attempt to provide a historical account of the emergence of modern reflexivity. She interprets the Christian emphasis on “will” as the response of the unfree in the Roman Empire to their oppression. The “will” enables (invents? discovers?) a human capacity to examine one’s desires and to deliberate about acting upon them. Once identified and put into practice, the will then undergoes its own historical development, moving from its original role of claiming some individual control over one’s actions to the site of moral judgments. Walsh is well aware that the unfinished Life of the Mind hardly solves all of the problems of agency and reflexivity. But he does think it provides a corrective to other theorists who fail to distinguish clearly enough among activities aimed toward different ends (knowledge versus meaning) and who only make vague gestures toward the concrete historical and social conditions from which capacities such as reflexivity emerge.
I hope this one example gives my reader a taste for the quality of Walsh’s engagements with sociological theory and the ways in which he brings Arendt’s work to bear. He covers an enormous amount of ground in this short work, but his renderings of the work of multiple theorists always struck me as fair, and he has an enviable talent for going right for the key issue. I think readers are likely to be more resistant to his argument that Arendt’s ontological triad is fundamentally right and that an attention to its consequences would benefit sociological theory. But buying that argument seems to me rather beside the point. Every reader will learn a tremendous amount about Arendt’s work and about the main issues in sociological theory from reading this terrific book.