Vita Activa; Hannah Arendt
This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in
society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as
the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different
from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek citystates.
To belong to the few "equals" (homoioi) meant to be permitted
to live among one's peers; but the public realm itself, the
polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody
had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show
through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all
{aim aristeuein). 34 The public realm, in other words, was reserved
for individuality; it was the only place where men could show
who they really and inexchangeably were.
34. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochm emmenai allon ("always to
be the best and to rise above others") is the central concern of
Homer's heroes (Iliad vi. 208), and Homer was "the educator of Hellas."
The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities,
problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior
of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not
only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it
has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the
two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and
the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a
life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world
of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to
whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of
the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose
beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though
hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar
manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period
prior to the modern age.
This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient
feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself,
was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of
something, and even of the highest and most human of man's
capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the
slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian
had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully
human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we
use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous
enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.
However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is
at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the
ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to
the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is
that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the
intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere
but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically
intimacy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, characteristically
enough, is the only great author still frequently cited by his first
name alone. He arrived at his discovery through a rebellion not
against the oppression of the state but against society's unbearable
perversion of the human heart, its intrusion upon an innermost
region in man which until then had needed no special protection.
The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no
objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against
which it protests and asserts itself be localized with the same certainty
as the public space. To Rousseau, both the intimate and the
social were, rather, subjective modes of human existence, and in
his case, it was as though Jean-Jacques rebelled against a man
called Rousseau. The modern individual and his endless conflicts,
his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it
altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism
of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart. The
authenticity of Rousseau's discovery is beyond doubt, no matter
how doubtful the authenticity of the individual who was Rousseau.
The astonishing flowering of poetry and music from the middle
of the eighteenth century until almost the last third of the nineteenth,
accompanied by the rise of the novel, the only entirely
social art form, coinciding with a no less striking decline of all
the more public arts, especially architecture, is sufficient testimony
to a close relationship between the social and the intimate.
The rebellious reaction against society during which Rousseau
and the Romanticists discovered intimacy was directed first of all
against the leveling demands of the social, against what we would
call today the conformism inherent in every society. It is important
to remember that this rebellion took place before the principle
of equality, upon which we have blamed conformism since
Tocqueville, had had the time to assert itself in either the social
or the political realm. Whether a nation consists of equals or
non-equals is of no great importance in this respect, for society
always demands that its members act as though they were members
of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one
interest. Before the modern disintegration of the family, this common
interest and single opinion was represented by the household
head who ruled in accordance with it and prevented possible dis-
unity among the family members. The striking coincidence of
the rise of society with the decline of the family indicates clearly
that what actually took place was the absorption of the family
unit into corresponding social groups. The equality of the members
of these groups, far from being an equality among peers, resembles
nothing so much as the equality of household members
before the despotic power of the household head, except that in
society, where the natural strength of one common interest and
one unanimous opinion is tremendously enforced by sheer number,
actual rule exerted by one man, representing the common
interest and the right opinion, could eventually be dispensed with.
The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage
of this modern development.
It is true that one-man, monarchical rule, which the ancients
stated to be the organizational device of the household, is transformed
in society—as we know it today, when the peak of the
social order is no longer formed by the royal household of an absolute
ruler—into a kind of no-man rule. But this nobody, the
assumed one interest of society as a whole in economics as well
as the assumed one opinion of polite society in the salon, does not
cease to rule for having lost its personality. As we know from the
most social form of government, that is, from bureaucracy (the
last stage of government in the nation-state just as one-man rule
in benevolent despotism and absolutism was its first), the rule by
nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain
circumstances, even turn out to be one of its crudest and most
tyrannical versions.
The rise of mass society, on the contrary,
only indicates that the various social groups have suffered
the same absorption into one society that the family units had
suffered earlier; with the emergence of mass society, the realm of
the social has finally, after several centuries of development,
reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of
a given community equally and with equal strength. But society
equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in
the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the
fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction
and difference have become private matters of the individual.
