A Cynical Turn: Max Weber and Hannah Arendt on Value, Domination and

Political Economy

Steven Klein Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

Draft: Please do not cite or circulate without permission. Comments welcome at stevenklein@uchicago.edu.

Abstract: Max Weber and Hannah Arendt are usually read together as theorists of the political, attacking the modern assimilation of politics to economics. They are taken to differ only in how they conceive the political: Weber, as domination, and Arendt, as action. This paper argues that readers have missed relevant differences in their thought because they have not compared Weber’s neo-Kantian philosophy of value with Arendt’s phenomenological method. Through such a comparison, this paper advances two claims. First, it argues that Arendt, unlike Weber, is a theorist not of the political but rather of the possibility of non-subsumptive relationships between politics and the economic. Second, it argues that Arendt has a more nuanced view of domination than either her admirers or critics admit. Against Weber’s charismatic politics of the extraordinary, Arendt thus opens space for a radical democratic critique of political economy, even if she does not always pursue the implications of her insights.

Prepared for delivery at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29-September 1, 2013.

© Copyright by the American Political Science Association

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Introduction

Max Weber and Hannah Arendt are both often taken to argue for the distinctiveness of

the political as a domain of human activity, one that is threatened in modernity by the

encroachment of the economic. Against the liberal and Marxist reduction of politics to the laws

of political economy, Weber and Arendt thus open up an authentic theory of the political.

Typically, though, that is where the affinity between their thought is seen to end. While Weber

defines the political as essentially constituted by domination, Arendt’s theory of politics opposes

action in concert to the traditional reduction of politics to rule. Their reception in political theory

has been marked by attempts to bring their theories of the political into closer proximity. Surely,

Arendt’s readers note, Weber is correct that politics must involve some moment of domination

and violence.1 Similarly, even sympathetic commentators insist that Weber underestimates the

scope for Arendtian popular participation in political life.2 These critical responses, while

understandable, leave untouched the assumption that Arendt and Weber are unified by their

attempt to conceptualize the political as a self-contained sphere, and so that they share a similar

diagnosis of the modern subsumption of politics into economics.

But what if this original premise is flawed, distorting the relationship between Weber and

Arendt and of both to contemporary political concerns? This paper pursues such a line of

reasoning through an analysis of the divergent ways Weber and Arendt conceptualize the

1 For the classic expression of this criticism, see Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power," in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); for a more recent iteration, Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Chapter Two. For a defense of Arendt against such criticisms, one which presents her as an anti-teleological thinker, see Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 2 See, for instance, Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Tamsin Shaw, "Max Weber on Democracy: Can the People Have Political Power in Modern States?," Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008).

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economic, rather than through their different theories of the political. It is in their analyses of the

economic, further, that the contrasting influences of Weber’s neo-Kantian philosophy of value

and Arendt’s phenomenological method are most visible. I begin by situating Weber and

Arendt’s thought in early twentieth-century German debates about the status of the cultural

sciences, debates that form the backdrop for their respective thinking about the economic. Next, I

turn to Weber’s analysis of political economy. Reflecting the cynical turn of bourgeois

consciousness, Weber rejects any attempt to find immanent justifications for domination within

political economy—legitimating values are, rather, traced to the extraordinary domain of

charisma.3 As a result, his theory does indeed rest on a categorical division between the

economic, which Weber also calls the everyday (Alltäglichkeit), and the domain of value,

culture, and politics, which Weber collects underneath the notion of the extraordinary

(Außeralltäglichkeit). Yet, far from reducing the political to instrumental rationality, Weber

posits such stark conceptual divides precisely because, following his neo-Kantian influences, he

conceptualizes value only in terms of non-instrumentality.

Arendt challenges this premise through her phenomenological analysis of the economic

domain. By theorizing value as neither instrumentality nor non-instrumentality but as a manner

of appearance, Arendt shifts the terms of the debate: not how to protect the political, understood

as the domain of value, from the instrumentality of the economic, but how to organize the

economic such that it can sustain and enlarge individuals’ concern for how the world appears.

This means, finally, that Weber, despite his rhetoric to the contrary, tends to tie domination to the

economic and position both outside of the political, while Arendt fruitfully shows that

3 I draw the notion of bourgeois consciousness turning cynical from Habermas, for whom it marks the limit of Marxian ideology critique. Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Craig J. Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1992), 442.

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domination, properly understood, is what can sustain the openness of the political and the

economic to each other.

From the Philosophy of Value to Phenomenology

Among the most instructive but presently unexplored points of contact between Weber

and Arendt’s thought is their shared roots in the Southwestern neo-Kantianism of Wilhelm

Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. I begin with these debates about the status of the cultural

sciences, as they help to set the conceptual terms of Weber and Arendt’s analysis of modern

political economy and of the relationship between the political and the economic. For Weber, the

neo-Kantian philosophy of value was crucial in his attempt to establish the autonomy of

sociology as a cultural science, delineating sociology both from the Hegelian statism of the older

generation of historical economists as well as the economic reductionism of both Marxism and

the new marginalist economics. The Southwest neo-Kantian tradition, especially as represented

by Rickert, insisted on the autonomy of historical science as a form of knowledge focused on the

unique and particular historical individuals, the categories of which are transcendentally

grounded in value-relations [Wertbeziehung]. And while the focus of the neo-Kantians was

epistemological, Weber astutely develops the normative and existential implications of their

defense of the dignity of the cultural sciences.

Arendt’s relationship to Southwestern neo-Kantianism, while indirect, is no less

significant. Martin Heidegger wrote his dissertation with Rickert and his early philosophical

efforts were immersed in the neo-Kantian tradition.4 With Being and Time, however, Heidegger

broke with the core framework of his neo-Kantian upbringing while still retaining many of the

central concerns of that tradition. Most important for our purposes, Heidegger relentlessly attacks 3 Ingo Farin, "Early Heidegger's Concept of History in Light of the Neo-Kantians," Journal of the Philosophy of History 3, no. 4 (2009); Theodore J. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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the ontological incoherence and subjectivisim of the neo-Kantian concepts of value and value-

relation, a critique that Arendt appropriates. Although these philosophical debates about the

status of the cultural sciences appear distant from political economy, I argue, on the contrary,

that they form the crucial historical background for how Weber and Arendt position themselves

relative to the tradition of political economy. This is evinced by the centrality of the concept of

value—a concept with obvious importance for how we understand the economic domain and its

relationship to the political—to these disputes. Thus, tracking the movement of the concept of

value from Heidelberg neo-Kantianism through Heidegger’s phenomenological critique throws

into high relief the crucial differences between Weber and Arendt’s analyses of political

economy.

Weber published “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy,”

his most explicit statement of his neo-Kantian philosophy of social science, in 1904.5 The essay

clearly reflects the influence of Windelband and Rickert. Following the general Kant revival of

the late eighteenth century, they both attempted to ground the legitimacy of the cultural or

historical sciences by deriving them from transcendental presuppositions of any attempt to gain

knowledge about reality. Formalizing Windelband’s distinction between the “nomothetic”

natural sciences and “idiographic” cultural sciences, Rickert held that there was a conceptual-

methodological difference between the natural sciences, which are governed by a cognitive

interest in formulating general laws, and the cultural sciences, which are concerned with

explaining historical particularities.6 Deploying Rickert’s neo-Kantian framework while altering

4 Max Weber, "The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy," in Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, ed. Hans Henrik Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster (New York: Routledge, 2012), 103. Hereafter cited in text as “O”. 6 For a fuller discussion, from which this brief summary draws, see Jay A. Ciaffa, Max Weber and the Problems of Value-Free Social Science: A Critical Examination of The "Werturteilsstreit" (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1998).

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it in important respects, Weber develops a transcendental justification for his critical

understanding of the social sciences. Humans, Weber writes, “are cultural beings, endowed with

the capacity and the will to adopt a deliberate position towards the world, and to bestow meaning

upon it,” and this is “the transcendental presupposition of every cultural science” (O 119,

emphasis in original). Social scientists cannot choose whether or not to rely on this capacity to

bestow meaning; it is unavoidably presupposed by how they go about doing research. Values

express the fact that humans can take a stance towards external reality and relate brute facts to

complexes of meaning and the realization of ends. Both positivists who argue for the possibility

of a law-like description of social reality and his contemporary anti-positivists who sought to

subordinate empirical research to objective principles like the actualization of the state deny this

specifically human capacity to consciously affirm values, and, as a result, misunderstand the

basis of their own research.

Weber further accentuates the subjective basis of all knowledge of cultural reality

through a critique of attempts to exceed the transcendental boundaries of such knowledge.

Against the view that the ultimate goal of the social sciences is a complete description of external

reality, Weber deploys a phenomenological argument for the constitutive role of subjectivity:

“…as soon as we seek to reflect upon the way in which we encounter life in its immediate

aspect, [we see that] it presents an absolute infinite multiplicity of events ‘within’ and ‘outside’

ourselves, [events that] emerge and fade away successively and concurrently” (O 114). Without

the constitutive role of human subjectivity, cultural reality is infinitely unknowable.

Consequently, Weber emphasizes that individuals only form the infinite manifold of sense-

perception into an object of study by selecting those aspects that “have significance and

importance [for us] today” (O 116, emphasis in original). He writes, “the concept of culture is a

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value-concept. Empirical reality becomes ‘culture’ to us because and insofar as we relate it to

value ideas. It includes those segments of reality which have become significant to us because of

this value-relevance” (O 76, emphasis in original). Crucially, this means that values constitute

the object of social scientific study rather than just leading the social scientists in the selection of

objects of study.7

In drawing out these points, Weber wants to force social-scientific researches to

acknowledge that they have chosen a certain value-position in pursuing their research. This is

especially clear in how Weber adapts Rickert’s central claim about the flux of immediate

experience. While in Rickert the phenomenological claim about the infinite multiplicity and

irrationality of concrete experience is subordinate to a transcendental claim about the

unknowability of the world-in-itself, Weber abjures from making the transcendental argument

and relies only on the phenomenological one.8 As a result, the formation of cultural knowledge is

dependent, in Weber’s view, on an act of will whereby subjective values are deployed to shape

the infinite concrete experience of external reality. Similarly, Weber alters Rickert’s initial

formulation of the role of value-relations in the constitution of social-scientific knowledge: while

Rickert argued that the values that guided social-scientific research into particularities ultimately

had an objective, transcendental foundation, Weber emphasized the subjective, and so selective,

nature of all value-stances. He therefore calls attention, in a way Rickert’s analysis does not, to

the constitutive relationship between social-scientific research and a particular vision of

autonomous personality.9 “[T]he dignity of a personality,” writes Weber, “is that it espouses

7 Jürgen Habermas, "Discussion on Value-Freedom and Objectivity," in Max Weber and Sociology Today, ed. Otto Stammer (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 61-62. 8 Ciaffa, Max Weber and the Problems of Value-Free Social Science, 40-49. 9 See Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, “Introduction,” in Max Weber, Collected Methodological Writings, xviii-xxiii. In his notes, Weber directly repudiates as metaphysics Rickert’s attempt to find objective norms for the selection of the values that guide social-scientific research. Max Weber,

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certain values to which it relates its life” (O 103). For Weber, the pursuit of a presuppositionless

description of the social world rests on an evasion of the individual responsibility to form a

personality by affirming and sustaining values. Objectivity and truth, then, become existential

values for the social-scientific researcher rather than a transcendentally grounded necessity of

cultural scientific knowledge. The overarching goal of the methodological writings is to critically

establish the boundaries of social scientific knowledge so that such knowledge can further, rather

than efface, this human capacity to autonomously determine the ultimate ends of social action.

And, as we will see in the next section, the particular way Weber attempts to refute

transcendence on a formal level ends up shaping, in problematic ways, the substantive terms of

his analysis of political economy.

While his public attitude towards neo-Kantianism was highly critical, Heidegger’s early

thought shares the same general problematic as Weber: the attempt to refute the domination of

natural-scientific categories and recover the lived basis of cultural science. In his first full lecture

course, Heidegger takes the neo-Kantian philosophy of value as his starting point for developing

his own approach to the question of cultural reality.10 As recorded in those lectures, which laid

the groundwork for Being and Time, Heidegger’s thought represents at once an attempt to

overcome the genuine philosophical aporias of the neo-Kantian approach to culture and an

ominous radicalization of the subterranean vitalism of that tradition. To achieve this overcoming,

Heidegger appropriates key concepts from neo-Kantianism (with the notable exception of

“value”, which he seems to view as irredeemably subjectivist) while subjecting them to a

phenomenological transformation. A full discussion of Heidegger’s relation to neo-Kantianism is

“Handwritten note from an envelope with the imprint ‘Schickert’s Parc-Hôtel, Nervi,’ marked ‘Rickerts ‘Werthe’’ (Rickert’s ‘values’),” in Max Weber, Collected Methodological Writings, 413. 10 Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000).

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beyond the scope of this paper; I focus only on his critique of their concept of value. However, as

Heidegger views phenomenological critique as “a positive sounding out of genuine motivations”

rather than mere logical contradiction, his critique of the transcendental philosophy of value

already indicates the avenues his thought will travel and that Arendt will follow.11

The central aporia of the neo-Kantian effort relates to the location of truth and objectivity

in their edifice. On the one hand, neo-Kantians like Rickert wanted to secure for the cultural

sciences the same theoretical authority as the natural sciences. On the other hand, they saw their

efforts as an attempt to protect “spirit” and the dignity of culture from the vulgar materialism and

mechanistic overtones of naturalism. As Weber’s reasoning reveals, these two tendencies pulled

in opposite directions, until finally objectivity was relativized as one value among others that the

social scientist affirms. The defense of culture on the terms set by theoretical science thus seems

to lead either to metaphysics (Rickert, from Weber’s perspective) or relativism (Weber, from

Rickert’s perspective).12 Heidegger seeks to dissolve this dilemma by recovering what he calls

the primordial world, a world that forms the pre-given horizon for any activity, including

theoretical abstraction. For our purposes, what is instructive about this effort is that it resituates

the concept of value, moving it from a subjective or objective end-in-itself that constitutes

cultural reality to the way the appearance of some object or activity discloses the totality of

involvement that constitute a shared situation of lived reality.

In his most important 1919 lecture, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of

Worldview,” Heidegger gives a pithy formulation of the core of his critique of transcendental

value-philosophy: “Living in an environment, it signifies to me everywhere and always,

everything has the character of world. It is everywhere the case that 'it worlds' [es weltet], which

11 Ibid., 107. 12 Heidegger formulates this dilemma clearly at Ibid., 147-48.

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is something different from 'it values' [es wertet].”13 As shown in Weber’s phenomenology, the

philosophy of value conceives of the phenomenal world as brute sensory data typical of scientific

observation (in Heidegger’s terminology, viewing it only as occurent [vorhanden]) which

subjectivity shapes into knowledge through value-relations.14 From the more primordial

perspective of the world, however, every object, insofar as it is encountered, “signifies to me

everywhere and always,” continuously disclosing the pre-given meaningfulness of my practical

activities (such entities are ontologically available [zuhanden]). What I find valuable, then, is not

(just) a set of concepts in my head but the totality of practical involvement pre-given in my day-

to-day activity. As Heidegger writes, when we interpret something (i.e., constitute it as culturally

significant) “we do not stick a value on it” but rather lay out the involvement “the thing in

question already had.”15

Heidegger’s categories in his analytic of the world, such as the distinction between the

available and the occurent, obviously echo the neo-Kantian distinction between the nomothetic

and ideographic scientific interests. On one reading, he simply changes emphasis, more strongly

privileging historical “lived” reality over abstracting scientific reflection.16 This interpretation, it

seems to me, misses the full implications of the change in perspective signaled by Heidegger’s

concepts of world and world-disclosure. Unlike values, both individual and collective, the world

is not something that we can speak about as though characteristically, or even possibly, owned or

possessed.17 Rather, it is something that appears, rather unexpectedly but as already there, when

the otherwise transparent totality of equipment in some way intrudes into everyday activity. This

13 Ibid., 73. 14 Cf. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1962), 111, 32-33. 15 Ibid., 190-91. 16 Farin, "Early Heidegger's Concept of History in Light of the Neo-Kantians," 379. 17 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 43ff.

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also means it is inappropriate to speak of the world as either objective or subjective, empirical or

normative. Concepts like objectivity are already theoretical concepts that abstract from the

immediately given experience of worldliness. When one takes such concepts as a starting point,

as do Rickert and Weber, one ends up “fascinated by the radical division between Being and

value” without noticing that one has “only theoretically broken the bridges between the two

spheres, and now stand[s] helpless on one of the banks.”18 As we shall see, this gulf between

being and value reappears in Weber’s theorization of the economic as the heterogeneity of the

material world of the everyday and the value-creating domain of the extraordinary.

Value, Domination, and the Extraordinary in Economy and Society

We saw that Weber’s neo-Kantianism leads him into a focus on the constitutive values

held by the social science researcher, the commitment to which also gives an autonomous

personality. As Heidegger forcefully argues, such a position opens a subjectivist gulf between

the values of the subject and the object of knowledge. The effect of these categories, however, is

not restricted to Weber’s methodological writings; rather, those writings simply set the

conceptual terms for Weber’s broader analysis of value and political economy. In this section, I

turn to Weber’s later work, especially the fragments collected as Economy and Society, to show

how his neo-Kantian understanding of autonomy and the constitutive role of values translates

into a social-theoretic system organized around a fundamental distinction between the ordinary

(Alltäglichkeit) and the extra-ordinary (Außeralltäglichkeit). For Weber, value is essentially non-

instrumental, a quality he associates most deeply with religious charisma and the satisfaction of

what he calls ideal needs—paradigmatically the need for salvation. Instrumentality and

domination are thus relegated to domains entirely determined by material needs, which Weber

links with traditional and legal-rational domination. Thus, Weber tends to map the division 18 Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 46.

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between the ordinary and the extraordinary onto that between autonomy and heteromony, where

autonomy is secured by orienting action towards the values revealed in extra-ordinary ruptures,

moments that are set over and against the heteronomous domain of everyday economic necessity.

The first goal of my interpretation, then, is to draw out Weber’s theory of autonomy in

relationship to his understanding of domination and the ordinary/extra-ordinary distinction. In

addition, my interpretive approach sheds light on one of the central interpretive puzzles within

Economy and Society: why Weber denies that value-rationality can ground stable social orders.19

While value-rationality is, in Weber’s initial sociological categories, one of the four possible

grounds for the belief in the validity of an order (in addition to affective, traditional, and legal-

rational), when it comes to his discussion of legitimate domination, only the latter three of the

categories are enumerated as a possible basis for legitimate orders (charismatic, traditional, and

rational, respectively). Why does value-rationality fall out? As we will see, it is because value-

rationality is actually charisma in its most ethically rigorous and so most extra-ordinary form,

whereby it fully answers the extraordinary need for meaning and salvation but is severely

opposed to the domain of everyday, material concerns. This becomes clear once we see the close

connection between charisma and value-rationality in Weber’s sociology of religion.20

Weber famously defines domination [Herrschaft] as “the situation in which the

manifested will (command) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or

more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to a

socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim

19 See the discussion in Martin Barker, "Kant as a Problem for Weber," The British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 2 (1980). 20 Surprisingly, Kalyvas does not discuss the relationship between charisma, value-rationality, and natural law in Weber’s theory. In his discussion of charisma and natural law Weber considers, contrary to Kalvyas’ assertion, the relationship between “the instituting power of charisma” and “collective self-determination, in the sense of a union of particular wills capable of issuing higher laws.” Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 69, cf. 65.

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of their conduct for its very own sake [um seiner selbst willen].”21 Domination is an instrumental

relationship between two wills, a relationship where one will adopts the content of the other, that

is maintained by a norm whereby the will of the ruler is taken to be intrinsically valid. This

definition already starts to indicate why value-rationality vanishes from Weber’s inventory of

domination. In his first discussion of how actors may “ascribe legitimacy to a social order”,

Weber includes “value-rational belief: valid is that which has been deduced as an absolute” (ES

36). The purest type of legitimacy grounded through this belief is, Weber says, “natural law”

(ES 37). Yet, in an order grounded in natural law, there would be no rulers and no ruled, as the

source of all commands would be the “immanent and teleological qualities” of the meaningful

universe rather than a particular will (ES 867). In other words, legitimate domination and value-

rational legitimacy operate as something like polar opposites in Weber’s thought—the belief in

the latter entails the denial of the presence of the former (domination/instrumentality) in a given

social situation.

This, however, only points in the direction of an answer to the question of why Weber

excludes value-rationality from the legitimating grounds for domination. Indeed, the question

then becomes why Weber denies it is historically and empirically possible to ground a social

order in natural law and thus render domination value-rational. To put the same question more

broadly: what entitles him to the claim that domination is ineradicable feature of social

existence? In order to get clearer on these questions, we must turn to the three forms of

legitimate domination and how Weber conceptualizes the relationship among them. At the center

of his sociology of domination, Weber places three types of social orders and three distinct

21 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 946. Hereafter cited in text as “ES”. I check this translation against Max Weber, Wirtschaft Und Gesellschaft: Grundriss Der Verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1980), and modify where necessary.

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“claims to legitimacy” (ES 215): traditional domination legitimates itself on the basis of “the

sanctity of immemorial traditions” (ES 215), legal-rational on the basis of a system of formal

rules that empowers office holders, and charisma on the basis of the extra-ordinary personal

qualities of the ruler. Unlike the possible subject orientations by which actors “ascribe”

legitimacy to an order—traditional, affectual, legal, and value-rational—Weber develops these

three forms of domination from an external perspective that considers the necessary objective

conditions of their existence. In other words, Weber folds into his definitions the problem of how

sustained relationships of domination confront the need to materially reproduce society.

Thus, despite their differences, bureaucracy (legal-rational domination) and

patriachralism (traditional domination) are both “structures of everyday life

[Alltagsgebilde]…concerned with the satisfaction of recurring, normal everyday needs

[Alltagsbedarfs]” (ES 1111). In contrast, charisma is the mode of domination characteristic of

the satisfaction of “extraordinary needs, i.e., those which go beyond the sphere of everyday

economic routines [ökonomischen Alltags]” (ES 1111, emphasis in original) and so is a form of

domination in constant tension with the ongoing demand for material reproduction. Charisma

satisfies a different category of needs from traditional and bureaucratic domination: the need for

meaning and ultimately for salvation, an answer to the problems posed by theodicy. The logic of

the relationship between the forms of domination is thus organized around this distinction

between everyday and extraordinary needs. On the one side is legal-rational and patriarchial

domination; on the other, charisma and (while empirically non-existent) value-rational

domination (Figure 1). And, as we will see, charisma, and, by extension, value-rationality, have a

privileged location in Weber’s account: as that which breaks with the ordinary, it is “the

specifically creative revolutionary force of history”, the only form of domination which, rather

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than being subject to necessity, “seeks to make material and social conditions according to its

revolutionary will” (ES 1116-1117). And charisma, according to Weber, can only take on such

revolutionary force because it answers needs strong enough to compel individuals to subordinate

everyday needs to value-rational action, which Weber defines as action “determined by a

conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some [action]…independently of its prospects of

success” (ES 24-25). In Weber’s theory, value-rational action finds its historical basis insofar as

charismatic movements provide solutions to the problems posed by the extraordinary need for

meaning in a universe experienced as full of suffering and evil.

Everyday/Ordinary Needs Extra-Ordinary Needs

Naturalistic Patriarchal Charismatic

Rationalized Bureaucratic (Legal-Rational) Value-Rational

Figure 1. Forms of Domination in Weber’s Sociology

In his ideal-typical description of them, Weber repeatedly emphasizes how patriarchal

and bureaucratic domination are based on specific modes of economic accumulation. The basic

opposition between the two is that patriarchy rests on an economic system that is fixed within the

limits set by natural needs, while bureaucratic domination is tied to the self-aggrandizing

dynamic of capitalist accumulation.22 Based on “personal relations that are perceived as natural”

(ES 1007), patrimonial domination is the form of domination that is least perceived as the

product of conscious human effort or will. At the center of Weber’s description of it is his

account of the static material needs that undergird the patrimonial order. Patrimonial domination

“is not direct toward monetary acquisition but toward the satisfaction of the master’s wants” (ES

1010, cf. ES 1014). Because the master’s wants are only “quantitatively different from that of his 22 While for Weber there are partial forms of bureaucracy that exist without capitalism, as in China, his full ideal-typical model is only possible in a capitalist society. Thanks to Daniel Luban for raising this concern to me.

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subjects,” the patrimonial ruler can use surplus production to reduce the exploitation of his

subjects, a possibility that is absent where there is “a qualitative expansion of needs which is in

principle limitless (ES 1011). In sum, patrimonial domination is, in Weber’s description, a mode

of satisfying ordinary needs that is in principle fixed by the actual or real biological needs of

individuals.

Bureaucracy, the institutional form legitimated through legal-rational means, is in every

respect save one the opposite of patrimonial domination. Where patrimonial domination is

personal, bureaucratic domination is impersonal; where the origins of the traditional norms

constraining patrimonial domination are shrouded in mystery, the entire validity of the norms

governing bureaucracy consists in the nature of their enactment; where the will of the

patrimonial ruler is free unless constrained by tradition, the bureaucrat can only issue a command

if it is in conformity with a rational system of norms and thus, in a strict sense, is as much

dominated by the abstract order as are the subordinates. At the same time, though, both

bureaucracy and patrimonial domination are instrumentally oriented towards satisfying everyday,

material needs, albeit with one crucial difference: while patrimonial domination rests concretely

on the fixed needs of the patrimonial ruler and his subordinates, bureaucratic domination is tied

abstractly to the unlimited drive for capitalist accumulation. “The development of the money

economy is the presupposition of a modern bureaucracy,” writes Weber (ES 963, emphasis in

original; cf. ES 968). The crucial point is that the market economy is characterized precisely by

the fact that economic actors do not orient themselves towards “the satisfaction of wants” but

towards “estimated profitability by means of calculation” (ES 91, 101). Thus, bureaucracy too

rests on a peculiar means of satisfying material, everyday needs. Only now, the material

demands of society are satisfied through the rational accumulation of capital, a form of need

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satisfaction that produces a self-aggrandizing functional logic of profit-seeking that demands a

system of domination “whose functioning can be rationally predicted, at least in principle, by

virtue of its fixed general norms, just like the expected performance of a machine” (ES 1394).

The fact that patrimonial and bureaucratic domination are both instrumentally oriented

towards the satisfaction of everyday needs reveals a further similarity: they are both, in Weber’s

account, forms of heteronomy. Again, however, they represent two opposite ends of what it

means to live in a heteronomous order. At one end, heteronomy consists of direct subjection to

the will of another in a context where norms of action are experienced as natural and given. In

many ways, patrimonial domination, as a form of master-slave relationship, is the paradigmatic

case of heteronomy, where the ruler expects the unquestioned obedience of those subject to his

direct command. At the other end, heteronomy consists indirect subjection to an impersonal

system of rules that, while experienced as enacted, are ultimately followed simply because they

are rules rather than because they are experienced as objectively meaningful. Here, heteronomy

is at the same time obscured and intensified, as now even “the typical person in authority…[is]

subject to an impersonal order by orienting his actions to it in his own dispositions and

commands” (ES 217). However, individuals within a bureaucratic order (ideal-typically) do not

view themselves as obeying the concrete will of another or working to secure their master and

their own happiness. Rather, they obey the command as an end-in-itself, out of a disposition of

duty that disregards “personal considerations”, as they owe their obedience to an “impersonal

order” (ES 218, 225 cf. ES 959). That is, in a bureaucratic order individuals recognize

themselves as having the capacity to act autonomously, in the Kantian sense—out of duty rather

than inclination and universalizing the content of their will into a system of abstract rules. Yet, in

acting out of a sense of pure duty, Weber’s bureaucrats turn themselves into means without ends

17

and are subjected to whatever subjective will that can impose values on the bureaucratic

structure.

The question, then, is where autonomy can be located in Weber’s social theory; to find it,

we must turn to his theory of charisma. Charisma, it turns out, functions as a paradoxical form of

domination—while it often can and does legitimate rule, in it’s extreme manifestations it

constitutes an orientation towards ultimate values that is strictly the opposite of domination. This

aspect of Weber’s theory of charisma is most clearly brought out in his “Sociology of Religion”.

Initially bound up with “everyday purposive conduct” (ES 400), as in the use of magic for

immediate ends, charisma develops into religious systems through the removal of these

charismatic experiences from the realm of the everyday—for instance, through the development

of orgiastic cults—and the rationalization of initially undifferentiated charismatic experiences of

spiritual forces into relatively systemic theological worldviews. The most important transition

comes with the moralization of these charismatic experiences. At times of collective existential

crisis—Weber’s primary example is the Israelites—charisma acquires a prophetic moralism

which interprets a people’s entire fate “as constituting a pattern of ‘world history’” determined

[in the Israelite’s case] by their failures to meet “the ineluctable obligation resulting from

Yahweh’s promises” (ES 418). Insofar as Weber thinks this represents the most rigorous form of

charisma, the prophet constitutes the most important charismatic figure in Weber’s sociology,

and by examining the prophet we can start to see clearly the relationship between charisma,

value-rationality, and natural law.

The prophet, more than any figure in Weber’s theory, is the autonomous creator of

values. The prophet is distinct from the priest because he is answering to “the personal call

[Berufung]” rather than subordinating his will to “a sacred tradition” (or, for that matter, the

18

calling prescribed by a bureaucratic order), and the prophet differs from the magician because he

proclaims “divine revelations” through “doctrines or commandment” (ES 440). The charismatic

qualities of the prophet demonstrate that the prophet is providing an authentic path to salvation.

Through their charisma, the prophet provides both a model for overcoming the existential

quandaries of suffering as well as a doctrine that can guide their followers to salvation. In short,

the prophet marks the moment when the extraordinary nature of charisma moves from a largely

affective experience of ecstatic states to the foundation of systematic value-systems. They

provide to their followers “a unified view of the world derived from a consciously meaningful

attitude toward life,” one that can provide a “systematic and coherent meaning, to which man’s

conduct must be oriented if it is to bring salvation, and after which it must be patterned in an

integrally meaningful manner” (ES 450). What the prophet reveals, then, is natural law—an

immanent order to the universe that can guide action.23

The prophet reveals both a meaningful universe and a possible set of value-rational

orientations towards that universe that can satisfy the most extraordinary possible need, the need

for salvation. To follow the prophet means to orient one’s action in a value-rational manner by

pursuing “a systematization of practical conduct resulting from an orientation to certain unified

values” (ES 528).24 These pathways to salvation, Weber writes, are always in tension with the

demands of everyday life (ES 537-541). Weber’s most famous example is the Puritan who

pursues their calling as “an end-in-itself [Selbztzweck],” something “wholly

23 A full discussion of Weber’s account of natural law is beyond the scope of this paper. In his “Sociology of Law”, Weber brilliantly details how natural law doctrines transform into positivistic doctrines under pressure from working-class claims. Cf. ES 867ff. 24 Weber defines value action as action “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some [action]…independently of its prospects of success” (ES 24-25).

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transcendent…beyond the ‘happiness’ or the ‘benefit’ of singular individuals.”25 Thus, charisma,

initially an affective experience closely tied the instrumental pursuit of everyday goals, is into an

extraordinary force that interprets existential and political crises such as to disclose the ultimate

meaning of the universe and the form of intrinsically meaningful conduct that can ensure

salvation. And once charisma takes on this extraordinary force, it is in inherent tension with

everyday concerns and needs, which pale next to the need for salvation.

The powers of charismatic leaders, while initially tapping into affective experiences of

the extraordinary, eventually becomes a coherent vision of the possible satisfaction of rationally-

interpreted extraordinary needs. The conduct prescribed by such extraordinary needs is in

opposition for all traditional forms of instituted domination, which must then respond to the

ethical vision revealed by the prophet and absorb the charismatic vision back into their

legitimating foundations. The charismatic prophet and his followers, in short, are figures of

autonomy in Weber’s theory. In subordinating their conduct to absolute values, followers of

prophetic religious release themselves “from dependency on the world and nature” and subject

the self “to the supremacy of the purposeful will.”26 In so doing, they become “a ‘personality’,”

one who “‘creates’ his salvation himself.”27 By relating their value-rational conduct to revealed

meaningful values, they overcome the heteronomous demands of established orders and

subordinate of their everyday needs—indeed, of all lived manifestations of biological

necessity—to a methodical and thereby autonomous life conduct.

25 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and The "Spirit" Of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. Peter R Baehr and Gordon C Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 12. 26 Ibid., 81. 27 Ibid., 81, 79.

20

Means and Ends: Arendt on Work, World, and Value

While ostensibly grounding a resolute defense of the importance of instrumentality and

domination in politics, the underlying logic of Weber’s sociology surprisingly positions non-

instrumentality as the source of value and meaning. Furthermore, Weber maps instrumentality

onto the everyday domain of economic necessity—the domain that determines the counters of

patriarchal and bureaucratic domination—and identifies non-instrumental value with the

systematic subordination of these needs to extraordinary charisma. This reading of Weber would

seem to bring him into close proximity to Arendt, especially the Arendt of The Human

Condition. There, she is typically taken to elevate an anti-teleological model of political action as

intrinsically valuable over the instrumentality of work and labor and to fear the release of

unending biological necessity from its shadowy existence within the household.28

While there are undeniable strains of these Weberian concerns in The Human Condition,

especially in Arendt’s critique of public housekeeping early in the text, reading her as

exclusively concerned with defending the political from the encroachment of economic necessity

ends up obscuring some of her most fruitful insights into the relationship between both. As

Patchen Markell notes, the exclusive focus on Arendt’s account of action at the expense of labor

and work tends to miss her attempt to recover a “rich, non-reductive understanding of work and

its objects,” a recovery that reveals just how far Weber’s apparatus is entangled in traditional

understandings of the relationship between instrumentality and value.29 Perhaps more

importantly, Arendt’s non-reductive account of work allows her to articulate how domination,

28 For these concerns about Arendt’s stance in The Human Condition, see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); for the classic critique of Arendt’s account of the rise of the social, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 29 Patchen Markell, "Arendt's Work: On the Architecture of the Human Condition," College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 19.

21

properly understood, creates and sustains a worldly space of appearances within the everyday

world of economic necessity.

Arendt criticizes both the reduction of the economic to instrumentality and of value to

non-instrumentality because, as two sides of the same subjectivist coin, both miss the

phenomenon of world. For Arendt, it is characteristic of the traditional understanding of homo

faber that it starts with the subjective attitude of the producer, much as the neo-Kantian

philosophy of value began with the subjective value-predicates of the researcher or community

of research. Just as Heidegger mobilizes the world, understood as the totality of pre-reflective

commitments disclosed in all activity, against the neo-Kantian attempt to subjectivize meaning,

Arendt relies on the concept of the world to show how instrumentality, insofar as it transforms

the abundance of the earth into meaningful objects, is not intelligible just in terms of the

subjective intensions of the producer.30 Heidegger’s critique of neo-Kantianism, then, paves the

way for Arendt’s analysis of the worldly dimensions of the economic, dimensions that are

completely passed over in Weber’s sociology.

Arendt’s own analysis echoes Weber most strongly in the opening chapters of The

Human Condition. There, she details how the reversal of the ancient distinction between the

public and the private—the emergence of the concerns related to biological necessity from the

household and into the public—leads to the rise of self-aggrandizing economic processes

described by the discourse of political economy and criticized by Weber (HC 28-29).31 The

channeling of economic forces into the public realm transforms the state into bureaucracy, “a

kind of no-man rule” (HC 40). Furthermore, the rise of public housekeeper means the 30 Arendt nonetheless differs markedly from Heidegger in emphasizing human plurality, rather than the thing, as the basis of world. See Rodrigo Chacón, "Arendt's Denktagebuch, 1950–1973: An Unwritten Ethics for the Human Condition?," History of European Ideas 39, no. 4 (2013): 576. 31 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 28-29. Hereafter cited in text as “HC”.

22

ascendance of predictable (because determined by economic necessity) “everyday behavior”

over the extraordinary “rare deeds” that “illuminate historical time” (HC 42-43). At this early

moment in the text, then, Arendt does indeed worry, along with Weber, about the subsumption of

the extraordinary—whether understood as charismatic value-creation or rare deeds and events—

into the everyday domain of economic necessity. And, again like Weber, Arendt apparently

responds to these worries by upholding the distinctiveness of forms of action that are not

determined by the forces of economic necessity.

However, this is far from Arendt’s last word on these matters. Her most Weberian

analysis occurs before she has worked through the “distinctions and articulations within the vita

activa” that take up the bulk of the book (HC 17).32 The ancient Greek understanding of the

public and the private, which the modern discourse inverts, sets the terms of Arendt’s early

discussion of political economy. And, as Roy Tsao argues, one of Arendt’s central claims as her

argument proceeds is that the ancient Greeks had a constrained understanding of the vita activa

because they lacked an appreciation of the category of work.33 Indeed, from Arendt’s discussion

of work we can reconstruct a sustained critique of Weber’s conceptual apparatus. Not only does

Arendt there examine instrumentality and the means-end schema—the most obvious points of

contact with Weber’s thought—but importantly, albeit almost in passing, the “confusion arising

from the use of the term ‘value’ in philosophy” (HC 165). Thus, despite the fact that Arendt

never devotes the sort of attention to Weber that she does to Marx or Plato, his presence is

32 I am indebted to Patchen Markell for this observation. 33 Roy T. Tsao, "Arendt against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition," Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002).

23

tangible in The Human Condition and especially in her discussion of instrumentality and value in

relation to work.34

Following her discussion of the rise of the social, Arendt begins her analysis of the three

dimensions of the vita activa—labor, work, and action—in each case moving between traditional

interpretations of those activities and phenomenological analyses of the pre-theoretical terms in

which such activities make sense.35 Arendt transitions to work after discovering that, on its own

terms, labor is incoherent. Labor, as the activity corresponding to the “vital necessities” of “life

itself” (HC 7), at first appears entirely trapped by the cycles of necessity. But Arendt observes

that without a fixed objective context outside of nature, life cannot take on its cyclical rhythm:

“[it] is only within the human world that nature’s cyclical movement manifests itself as growth

and decay” (HC 97). In other words, for biological necessity to manifest as the sort of force

Weber fears it to be—as the everyday needs that completely determine instrumental action—we

need the contrasting structure of the world of objects as points of reference. As a result, labor,

while distinct from work, nonetheless relies on work’s capacity to build a durable context for the

appearance of necessity.

Having shown that biological necessity can only appear as a phenomenon in contrast to

the objectivity of objects that outlast their use, Arendt proceeds to examine work as the activity

that constructs such a world. She quickly finds, however, that the internal logic of homo faber

undermines the very goal of erecting a stable world that led her to turn to work. Centrally, and in

34 Further evidence that Weber is, to some extent, in the background is the fact that Arendt uses Herrschaft to translate “rule” in the German edition of The Human Condition. Patchen Markell, "The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy," American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006): 4. She also mentions the Puritan understanding of “work for its own sake” in notes for a lecture which she gave while working on The Human Condition. Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of Man as Laborer,” Speeches and Writings File, 1923-1975, n.d., Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 35 Cf. Chacón, "Arendt's Denktagebuch, 1950–1973: An Unwritten Ethics for the Human Condition?," 564ff.

24

contrast to the repetitive cycle of laboring, the creation of objects is intelligible only in terms of

means and ends. “Here it is true that the end justifies the means,” writes Arendt, “it does more, it

produces and organizes them” (HC 153). The standards of homo faber are instrumental,

determined by the end product to be produced through the work activity. More fundamentally,

the objects produced by work are themselves only intelligible to homo faber in terms of means

and ends. Though the object “is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced…it

never becomes…an end in itself, at least not as long as it remains an object for use” (HC 153).

Yet, on these terms, Arendt finds that the world of objects can no longer fulfill its role as

providing a stable context that mediates between subjectivity and nature. When objects are

understood only as means, they inevitably get sucked back into the domain of necessity: “the life

process takes hold of things and uses them for its purposes”, giving rise to a “process of growing

meaninglessness where every end is transformed into a means” (HC 157). While work was

meant to build a context in which the human relationship to nature could be meaningful, now

“utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness” (HC 154).

At this point in Arendt’s argument, then, work fails to cut against Weber’s own analysis

of the relationship between value and the everyday. Insofar as the everyday world is a world of

tools and instruments, the everyday is indeed overwhelmed by biological necessity as Weber

perceived. However, far from following Weber and looking to the concepts of value-rationality

and personality as alternatives to this instrumentalization, Arendt launches into a trenchant

critique of precisely that move. Aware that the force of necessity risks instrumentalizing the

world and thus robbing work of its purpose, homo faber turns to the notion of an end-in-itself.

Against the world of everyday instrumentality, homo faber picks out some end and declares it

beyond instrumentality. In other words, it declares that end a value that transcends the domain of

25

everyday use. For homo faber, “meaning itself can appear only as an end” (HC 154). This is, of

course, precisely the concept of value and meaning that undergirds Weber’s distinction between

the everyday and the extraordinary. For Weber, as we saw, value is characteristically constituted

by an extraordinary rupture with the domain of everyday instrumentality, and his paradigmatic

model of personality is constituted through the subordination of everyday concerns to methodical

activity conceived as and end-in-itself. From Arendt’s perspective, such a theoretical response is

all but inevitable once the world of mundane objects is understood only in terms of the

relationship between means and ends.

Against homo faber’s attempt to stop the meaninglessness of pure instrumentality by

declaring some end an end-in-itself, Arendt registers two complaints. These objections are not

only telling with regards to the coherence of Weber’s categories, but they also foreshadow

Arendt’s own, alternative solution to the conundrums she finds in homo faber’s attempt to erect a

world. First, the erection of an end-in-itself, she says, causes homo faber “to turn away from the

objective world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself” (HC 155). Unable

to grasp the meaningfulness of the world, homo faber comes to understand all meaning as

derived from the subjective value-stances that give objects their purpose. Echoing Heidegger’s

concerns about the subjectivist impluse of modern technology, Arendt most directly repudiates

this move because it installs humans as the complete master over nature and the world, “robbing

both of their independent dignity (HC 156). This leads Arendt to her second complaint against

the erection of the end-in-itself: that it misunderstands the nature of meaning. “Meaning,” Arendt

writes, ”must be permanent and lose nothing of its character, whether it is achieved or, rather,

found by man or fails man and is missed by him” (HC 155). The “for the sake of” which gives

the world meaning fails to do its appropriate work if it is seen as something internal to, and so

26

chosen by, the subjectivity of individuals. As Arendt observes, the very dignity of an

instrumental activity depends on the ends of that activity being viewed as independent, an

independence that cannot be manufactured by arbitrarily declaring something an end-in-itself.36

Such concerns led Plato to react to Protagoras’ belief that man is the measure of all use-

things and declare that the god, not man, is the measure even of use objects (HC 158-159). But

this retreat into metaphysics is precisely what Arendt, like Weber, thinks is no longer possible.

Having identified homo faber’s need for a given source of meaning that transcends the domain of

use, how does Arendt avoid the path taken by Plato? A first clue is to be found in Arendt’s

careful choice of words in her observation about meaning. While, according to Arendt, Plato

searches for transcendental or objective to govern the domain of use, she writes only that

meaning must be “permanent” for it to be missable and so constitute the meaningfulness of the

world. And, in the final two sections of her chapter on work—“The Exchange Market” and “The

Permanence of the World and the Work of Art”—Arendt gives a detailed phenomenological

account of how the significance of objects can be permanent without transcendental grounds

such that it can constitute the meaningfulness of the world. By attending to how objects form a

space within which they and others appear, Arendt finds a source of meaningfulness that can

ensure the world fulfills its purpose of providing a stable context for our relationship to the earth

and to the force of biological necessity.

The first change in the significance of objects occurs, Arendt argues, when we move from

the privacy of production and use to the publicity of the exchange market. Once production is

oriented towards exchange, “the finished end product changes its quality somewhat but not

36 Indeed, Weber notes, without detailed discussion and despite his repudiation of Rickert’s attempt to find an objective ground for values, that “we regard as objectively valuable…those highest and most ultimate-value-judgments which determine our conduct and give meaning and significance to our life” (O 103).

27

altogether” (HC 163). When objects emerges from the privacy of production and of use and enter

into the “public realm” of the market, their durability changes from durability in use to durability

in exchange (HC 163). Objects, here, acquire a limited permanence that outlasts their immediate

instrumentalization for private purposes. And this limited permanence is, for Arendt, the actual

source of value. “Value is the quality a thing can never posses in privacy but acquires

automatically the moment it appears in public,” writes Arendt (HC 164). This value is not

formed by either relating objects to some transcendental source of meaning or to a constitutive

subjectivity but by the fact that objects “[appear] to be esteemed, demanded, or neglected” (HC

164). Thus, in the marketplace, objects acquire a new meaning and significance as they are

subjected to the judgments of a public. Such judgments are, of course, limited, insofar as the

criteria of the exchange market remains usefulness and, indeed, usefulness relative to other

objects. Once they enter into the nexus of relative values on the market, use objects are drawn

into the whirlwind of exchange, a process that is overwhelmed once again by biological

necessity. While opening up Arendt’s alternative account of how we can talk about the meaning

or significance of objects, of their ability to form a stable context for human action, the exchange

market fails to sustain the permanence of the world. The moment that the appearance in the

public of the market gives objects a new durability and imbues them with value, the market

reabsorbs them into the relativity of exchange and, by extension, the flux of means and ends

Arendt has already diagnosed.

Despite this failure of the exchange market to ground the permanence of meaning,

Arendt’s investigation of it has shifted where such permanence could be found. Rather than

something intrinsic to the object, emanating from a transcendental source, or given by

subjectivity, the exchange market reveals that value, properly understood, comes from the

28

esteeming of a discerning public. One could say that, despite not ultimately stopping the

instrumentalization of the everyday, the exchange market slows down the rhythm of that process,

opening up a time and a space for appearance and for evaluative judgment within the economic,

a space that is not immediately overwhelmed by necessity. This space, one opened by Arendt’s

insight into the connection between value and appearance, is missing from Weber’s theoretical

edifice. Yet, as quickly as Arendt opens it, it closes under the force of necessity-driven exchange.

Finally, however, Arendt turns to a class of objects whose distinctive nature is to hold open this

space for as long as they exist: the work of art.37

Works of art are objects “which are strictly without any utility whatsoever and which,

moreover, because they are unique, are not exchangeable and therefore defy equalization through

a common denominator such as money” (HC 167). The work of art, because it is beyond use,

“can attain permanence throughout the ages” (HC 167); it is actualized only when it is preserved

so as “to shine and to be seen” (HC 168). Simply put, the work of art’s purpose is to hold open a

space of appearance in which it is talked about, evaluated, and passed on. And it is this space that

halts the decaying forces of necessity and exchange and ensures that in the work of art “the very

stability of the human artifice…achieves a representation of its own” (HC 167-168). However,

understood only in this manner, the work of art, as something extraordinary that is removed from

the domain of everyday use objects, only further highlights the instrumentality of the everyday.

Indeed, for Weber the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct sphere of evaluation is a hallmark of

modernization, where art “becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped

independent values which exist in their own right.”38

37 For an extended discussion of Arendt’s account of art, see Markell, "Arendt's Work: On the Architecture of the Human Condition," 31-34. 38 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 342.

29

Yet art, for Arendt, is not a matter of independent aesthetic values; on the contrary, she

points to how such value is primordially constituted by the appearance of objects to judging

spectators. The value of the work of art does not, for her, exist independently of that space of

appearances. And this phenomenological ground she gives for the nature of the work of art leads

her to her final insight, one that finally undermines any reduction of the everyday to

instrumentality. She writes, “[e]verything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a

shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its

functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publically

and being seen” (HC 172). This quality of every object indicates how meaningfulness can have a

permanence that transcends use: the significance of every object is to some extent determined by

its public appreciation, an appreciation that indeed can be missed, in both meanings of the word,

by whoever creates the object. Because the product of all instrumental action—its end—appears

to others, some element of all instrumentality transcends mere use. Such transcendence,

however, is not constituted by some realm of values held over-and-against the domain of

biological necessity, instrumentality, and domination. Rather, it comes about within the

everyday, as every object, no matter how ordinary and utilitarian, is “judged not only according

to the subjective needs of men but by the objective [i.e., lasting, permanent – SK] standards of

the world where they will find their place, to last, to be seen, and to be used” (HC 173).

Conclusion: Domination and Political Economy

What light, finally, does Arendt’s critique of Weber shed on the relationship between

domination and political economy? In the first place, my analysis reinforces the point that

Arendt’s concern is not with “instrumentality, the use of means to achieve an end, as such” but

only its generalization into the sole standard by which activity is judged, an elevation which

30

renders instrumentality itself unintelligible (HC 157). Analogously, then, her concern is not with

domination as such but with the reduction of politics to domination, a reduction that does as

much of an injustice to the phenomenon of domination as it does to the domains of freedom that

are thereby obliterated. As Weber renders clear, analyzing domination only in terms of means

and ends reduces it the meaningless force of everyday necessity, which produces the temptation

to turn towards value and the extraordinary as the source of meaning. Meaningfulness is then

identified with non-instrumentality, and all domination is rendered meaningless unless it is

guided by such values. For Arendt, in contrast, domination, as the attempt to direct others for

instrumental purposes, produces ends—goods, tools, institutions, laws—that are inevitably

objects of public esteem. Arendt’s analysis leads her to identify this aspect of domination—its

capacity to produce something that outlasts the deed—as valuable, but it only exists because

such products, like all objects, can constitute a space of appearances within which people discuss

and judge. Without that space, domination becomes a means without ends, propelled by the

necessities of the everyday. Fortunately, the everyday is never constituted just by necessity and

instrumentality; so long as objects and tools, institutions and laws, appear to humans, we will

judge some aspect of them as fitting in a way that transcends the immediate ends for which they

were created.

Finally, and while her later work fails to pursue her own insights, Arendt’s analysis opens

up unexplored questions about the relationship between radical democracy and political

economy. In contrast to the wordlessness of Weber’s charismatic politics of the extraordinary,

Arendt’s phenomenology of the world draws attention to the reciprocal importance of the

economic and the political. Instrumental action, as the activity that creates of such objects,

constructs the physical spaces that mediate between the necessity of the economic and the

31

freedom of political action. And these spaces can fulfill this purpose only insofar as they become

sites of public discussion and criticism. Arendt’s analysis implies that the critique of

contemporary capitalism in terms of either instrumental reason or the failure to achieve

normative standards both unwittingly reinforce capitalism’s tendency to eliminate the

meaningfulness of the world by reducing the everyday to mere necessity. Struggles for

redistribution and economic security are never just goal-oriented struggles for economic ends—

they also create lasting objects whose appearance cannot be grasped in terms of instrumentality.

The radical democratic question, then, is not how to protect the momentary emergence of the

political from the depoliticizing impulses of the economic; rather, it is how to ensure that

economic institutions and processes are structured such that they can most open the space in

which objects appear, augmenting people’s capacity to collectively judge and evaluate those

objects, and thereby supporting their involvement with the world.