ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com © Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material Chapter 10 The Politics of Need Andrew Schaap …in labour and consumption man is utterly thrown back on himself…on the biological, and on himself. And there you have the connection with loneliness. A peculiar loneliness arises in the process of labor. I cannot go into that right now, because it would lead us too far aield. But this loneliness consists in being thrown back upon oneself; a state of affairs in which, so to speak, consumption takes the place of all the truly relating activities. (EU, 21) In this chapter I examine why Hannah Arendt views the satisfaction of human needs as, at best a pre-political concern and, at worst, the basis of an anti-political politics. This requires unpacking how Arendt develops her concept of the political in terms of her critique of Marx’s valorization of labor. I argue that Arendt’s rejection of the satisfaction of human needs as a properly political concern is premised on a reductive ontological conception of needs, which neglects their historical dimension. I agree with Arendt that the end of politics is the enjoyment of freedom in a community of equals. Against Arendt, however, I take it that politics often begins with the articulation of injustice, arising from the experience of unmet need. From this perspective, Arendt’s conception of the political has the perverse consequence of potentially depoliticizing injustice. Yet Arendt’s understanding of the political in terms of praxis might nonetheless enable a distinction to be drawn between an authentic (political) form of the politics of need and an inauthentic (anti- or a-political) politics. In this context, both Marx’s concept of ‘radical need’ (as discussed by Agnes Heller) and the work of Jacques Rancière suggest the possibility of a politics of need that might have the world-disclosing potential that is, for Arendt, the deining feature of the political. The Anti-political Politics of Need In The Human Condition, Arendt provides a phenomenology of action through which she attempts to understand politics on its own terms (as praxis) rather than from the perspective of transcendent reason. As such, she delineates a ‘speciic political mode of rationality’ in terms of the concept of the political (Vollrath 1987, 18). The concept of the political refers both to the proper domain of politics and the speciic quality in terms of which we might judge phenomena (events, actions, institutions, etc.) to be political or not. It is in this sense that Arendt attempts to ‘look at politics…with eyes unclouded by philosophy’, as she puts it in her interview with Gaus (EU, 2). 017 Chapter 10 Schaap.indd 157 18/03/2010 08:55:15