Chapter 11
Two Forms of Opposition to the Myth of the Cave
More than three hundred and fifty years before Christ, Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE), in Book VII of The Republic, used the allegory of the cave to present the role of the philosopher in the realisation of an ideal city. Through the practice of thought, the philosopher would be able to emerge from the darkness in which humans find themselves to access the light that enables them to contemplate true reality, whereas those content to remain in the cave have only a fire that, ‘burning some way off, above and behind them’, casts shadows on its walls that can only be distorted images of the reality that lies outside above them. Knowledge, which can be likened to wisdom, obtained through a philosophical path, is thus presented as the path to forming the government of the ideal city; the king must become a philosopher, or the philosopher must accept the office of king.
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) and Hannah Arendt (1906–75), who both took an interest in the totalitarian phenomenon, albeit from different disciplines, had occasion in the course of their writings to express their disagreement with the so-called ‘myth of the cave’, which links power to knowledge. This article sets out to highlight the reasons for this disagreement, which are diametrically opposed and radically incompatible. Hayek graduated in law and political science from the University of Vienna, and soon turned his attention to economics, founding the Austrian Institute for Business Economics with Ludwig von Mises, which he headed until 1931. He then emigrated to Great Britain to teach at the London School of Economics, before moving to the United States in 1950 to teach at the University of Chicago. An opponent of the principle of planning, he never ceased to denounce human intervention based on an overestimation of the faculties of reason, instead promoting the ‘order’ that only the market is capable of establishing for beings with no faculty of judgment. Arendt, who had lived through anti-Semitism, left Germany for France in 1933, when Hitler was elected chancellor, and fled to the United States in 1940 to escape the Vichy regime. Trained as a philosopher, she was a pupil of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers, but warned against the ‘professional thinker’ who, like Plato, risked one day suffering from ‘a professional disease’ that would cause him to lose his faculty of judgment.
The first seeks to demonstrate that a return to the order of exchanges, eclipsed by interventionism, is the only remedy against totalitarian violence, while the second seeks to rehabilitate political freedom, which has been completely discredited by the emergence of totalitarian regimes. These are two opposing conceptions of what constitutes humanity, and another difference is that the Austrian author seeks to base his views on scientific evidence, while the political theorist draws on the testimonies and real-life experiences of her readers. This chapter first unpacks the sequence of Hayek’s arguments, condemning politics and proposing the restoration of a market economy, before going on to present the thinking of Arendt, who, on the contrary, seeks to rehabilitate politics, and condemns economics conceived as a science of society.
In one of his lectures, published in 1931 under the title Prices and Production, Hayek uses diagrams to illustrate the effects that can be expected from a policy of money creation that lowers the interest rate. Initially, investments multiply, and we must accept the reality of an expansionary effect on the economy as a result of this policy. However, a counter-blow is bound to occur as a result of a type of financing that corresponds to what he calls ‘forced savings’. The end result can only be the arrival of a crisis combining inflation and unemployment, since only voluntary savings by individuals restricting their consumption can be the source of healthy growth ensuring a harmonious relationship between the market for investment goods and that for consumer goods. This anti-Keynesian thesis was very popular in the 1970s. The economic recession that followed the long period of post-war growth known as the Post-War Settlement seemed to confirm Hayek’s prediction made some forty years earlier.
In 1975, for example, the preface to the French edition of Prices and Production, which endorsed the idea that recession ‘has its source in the boom that preceded it’, hoped that the crisis of the 1970s would ‘perhaps finally be a conjuncture that verifies some of the key ideas’ (Hayek, 1985, p. 9) of Hayek’s analysis. Before this decade of ‘sanctification’ – he was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1974 – Hayek, who had not yet won the support of a wide public, sought to provide an indisputable foundation for an explanation of the crisis that condemned all the stimulus policies promoted by John Maynard Keynes, particularly in the General Theory published in 1936. He reversed the rationale, arguing that the state intervention advocated by the Cambridge master was not a remedy for economic imbalances; on the contrary, it should be seen as the cause of them. As Margaret Thatcher, who became British prime minister in 1979 and endorsed the Hayekian logic, came to say, the state was not the solution, it was the problem. This inversion, which assumes that the economic ideal to which we should conform is known, leads Hayek to seek the cause of the dysfunctions of human societies in errors of conception in the political sphere, in particular those which have led to the state being seen as an agent at the service of individual well-being. His entire work consists in demonstrating that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). There is no other way to ensure human progress than for the state to impose the order of exchanges, an order that makes the market, establishes the prices of everyone’s products, and determines the relative positions of individuals with one another.
The totalitarianism that characterises societies in which the state has total control over individuals also corresponds to situations in which the violence of human dissension reaches its climax. According to Hayek, the road to this kind of society began when the state was transformed into a lawmaking body designed to improve the lot of the most disadvantaged, while the violence it unleashes is proof that human reason is incapable of devising laws to pacify human relations. In his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek sees the advent of the Nazi regime as the result of laws enacted in the nineteenth century under Otto von Bismarck, then known as Sozialpolitik, which transformed the law into a right of the individual to be protected from the vagaries of life, whereas its role should be to impose duties. By confirming that the law is a means of improving the lot of the poorest, social legislation sends them the message that they can count on something other than themselves to improve their situation. The consequence is that the demand for rights is presented as a rational practice by the underprivileged, who band together to create a balance of power. Collective political action thus takes precedence over the individual effort required by a competitive economic activity. Individuals would rather join a party than be free to go their own way.
He goes on to argue that by preventing them from facing up to the verdict of the market, social laws have given birth to dependent, demanding beings, as irresponsible and idealistic as children. These beings in need of guidance do not hesitate to place their fate in the hands of totalitarian dictators. The fact that Hitler came to power democratically seems to him to confirm his analysis. And, in his view, Nazi totalitarianism should be seen as having the same roots as Soviet totalitarianism, born of a generous idea of sharing and eliminating poverty: ‘Few recognize that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies’ (Hayek, 2005). We find the same submission to a leader, the same willingness to sacrifice one’s freedom to serve a collective project, the same enthusiasm for a common ideal. Nazi totalitarianism would simply repeat the socialist illusion that a society could be unified by a collective goal that would satisfy all individuals at once.
As a result, the violence in human relations that is unleashed under totalitarian regimes reveals, according to Hayek, the constitutive error of all collective projects. The problem stems from the desire to ‘artificially’ create unity, when human beings are so very different from one another that the unity sought could never be anything other than the dictatorship of a section of individuals bound together by a common interest over all the others. Considering that the Nazi and Soviet regimes are the logical outcome of the implementation of the idea that it is possible to found a society on the basis of shared values, Hayek believes he can conclude that these experiences, with their dramatic consequences, demonstrated the ineptitude of the initial hypothesis from which these regimes were derived. A lesson could be drawn from this: human beings cannot agree directly on shared values through collective deliberation without tearing each other apart; they need a medium for a human whole to exist. Hayek concludes that exchange relations have a spontaneous unifying function, which he describes as ‘catallactic’. A ‘catallaxy’, a word he constructs from the ancient Greek verb ‘to exchange’ (katallatein), would be the appropriate term to describe the pacified whole that emerges from the economic relations established by the exchange of their productions between individuals, a type of exchange which, unlike the exchange of ideas expressed by words, would have the particularity of being able to transform an enemy into a friend.
Hayek traces the origins of the misconceptions that led to totalitarianism in past writers, going back further and further in time. He denounces the rhetoric of nineteenth-century ‘social philosophers’, including Karl Marx, who had us believe that it was possible to invent an organisation of the economy capable of ensuring justice among men. They thus created ‘the mirage of social justice’ – the title of volume 2, published in 1976, of the trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty – and must be held responsible for the Soviet revolution of 1917, which implemented economic planning on the assumption that it was possible to estimate the needs of the population without resorting to the market. But Hayek is also highly critical of the economists who defend economic liberalism and, like Léon Walras, use arguments that are totally inappropriate to support a market economy. Walras sought to demonstrate that prices established under conditions of free competition corresponded to fair remuneration for the efforts made by agents. Hayek contested this approach, emphasising its unscientific nature. In his view, it is not possible to determine what constitutes a fair price, and it would be a disservice to the cause of liberalism to claim to be able to demonstrate this. In contrast to the so-called scientism position of the social sciences, with its excessive pretensions, he opposes an ancestral humility which, in retrospect, has proved to be entirely beneficial to human progress:
Indeed, these ancestors of ours thought and ‘acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind’, and, for instance, argued that the precise ‘mathematical price’ at which a commodity could be justly sold was only known to God, because it depended on more circumstances than any man could know, and that therefore the determination of the ‘just price’ must be left to the market. [Hayek, 2015a, p. 21]
By setting themselves the goal of demonstrating that prices are fair, liberal economists are deemed to have yielded to a pernicious logic that makes social justice an object of debate and legitimises the contestation of market systems that fail to meet this criterion. To silence the protest more radically, it has been necessary to abandon the utilitarian hypothesis, which presupposes beings whose conduct is rational because it is dictated, as Jeremy Bentham suggests, by the pursuit of happiness, which makes them beings capable of judging for themselves the validity of the outcome of exchanges. The satisfaction of the senses cannot be considered the source of rational behaviour without rationality being understood as an endowment with which all are naturally endowed. For Hayek, the opposite sequence would have to be accepted: on the contrary, it is the exchange relations that force individuals to be autonomous that have made them rational and increasingly efficient over time.
Both defenders and opponents of the market economy would be repeating an error that dates back to the eighteenth century, when thinkers began to believe they were endowed with a reason that enabled them to build new institutions. As such, Hayek condemns the philosophers of the Enlightenment, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who criticised the established order and encouraged the French Revolution by propagating dangerous ideas containing a ‘perversion of law’ and the notion that law itself could be manufactured – like any object of use – to satisfy human aspirations. The law, the real law, the one that is likely to advance humanity, could not be manufactured by any human mind, neither by social thinkers nor by the people constituted as a legislative power. Thinkers would be doubly deluded about the capacities of their brains if they assumed that they were an organ capable of discovering scientific truths, and able to identify the criterion of what is right and what is wrong.
In The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), with its evocative subtitle Studies on the Abuse of Reason, Hayek exposes the error of social thinkers who do not take into account the logic of scientific discovery, described in particular by Karl Popper in his 1935 work, and who imagine themselves capable of determining what a good society is by ignoring the variety of opinions that may exist on the question. Overconfidence in human reason could, in turn, be explained by reasoning from an even more distant past. Hayek targets René Descartes, whom he criticises for having inaugurated, with ‘his radical doubt’ (Hayek, 2015a, p. 10) about the capacity of the senses to perceive the truth, an approach which, a contrario, makes intellectual speculation the method for determining the truth, thus issuing a kind of licence to judge, authorising everyone to reject what doesn’t suit them. This tracking down of errors attributable to non-scientific conceptions of humankind leads him to the ancient Greek philosophers who introduced ‘a misleading distinction’ (Hayek, 2015a, p. 20) between the senses and reason. They inaugurated a ‘dichotomous vision’ opposing nature and culture, the innate and the acquired, or ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’ to use Hayek’s terms. This dichotomy is at the root of an opposition, found in Plato’s myth of the cave, between two types of beings: those who remain governed by their senses and have only a distorted vision of the truth, and those who emerge from the cave and gain access to the light of reason, characteristic of the philosopher’s presumption that Hayek wishes to denounce. The philosopher, no more than the ordinary man, does not have the intellectual faculties to consider that the ideas he puts forward constitute an assured truth. On the other hand, there are, he argues, authors whose ideas have been validated by history. Such is the case of Adam Smith.
In the last third of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), highlighted the fact that the division of labour between individuals, and its amplification over time as the size of populations increased, was the factor behind the growth in human productivity since the dawn of mankind. This division of labour, unlike the one deliberately set up in companies, is presented as the result of exchange relations that are not organised by any human mind. It is as if, according to the well-known metaphor, an invisible hand links the activities of individuals together to achieve a collective result beneficial to all. Hayek considers that Smith made a scientific discovery when he established that exchange relations were the vehicle of human evolution. However, the scientific nature of this discovery could only become fully apparent in the twentieth century, following the experiences of totalitarian regimes.
He proposes that the planning of the Soviet economy following the 1917 Revolution, which gave rise to the violence unleashed under Stalin, is a revealing sequence from which we must learn. This experience invalidated the hypothesis that presided over the establishment of this regime: human beings can deliberately organise their production activities, and thus abandon the order of exchange. Here, Hayek appeals to Popperian epistemology, according to which the scientific character of a discovery is assured as soon as experimentation has invalidated the hypothesis being tested. Thus, authentic knowledge can only be formulated in the form of negative propositions. Based on this model, Hayek considers that totalitarian experience would enable us to formulate a scientifically founded truth: human beings cannot do without the order of exchanges without sinking into dehumanisation.
Hayek goes on to explain how exchange relations could be a factor of humanisation, leading him to reverse the sequence of Smith’s reasoning. Whereas, for Smith, it was men with a propensity for exchange who created the division of labour that gave rise to economic development, for Hayek, it was exchange that produced an individual capable of economic performance. The exchange of things institutes a relationship between individuals, obliging them to follow rules of conduct in relation to each other that paves the way to a practice with a formative character for the human spirit. The exchange of things could thus be seen as the original founding relationship of humanity, corresponding, as it were, to the missing link between ape and man in the Darwinian conception of evolution. Hayek proposes a ‘conjectural history’ of the human spirit, which would have been inaugurated by the exchange born of an experimental act attempted by a character with the desire to emancipate himself from his original community by entering into contact with the outside world, an act which would have borne fruit and which would then have been perpetuated. He makes the following kind of assumption:
Perhaps one might even say that the development of universal rules of conduct did not begin within the organized community of the tribe but rather with the first instance of silent barter when a savage placed some offerings at the boundary of the territory of his tribe in the expectation that a return gift would be made in a similar manner, thus beginning a new custom. [Hayek, 2015a, p. 82]
The relationship mediated by the exchange of things, incidentally instituted, made it possible to transform enemies into friends by setting up a kind of peaceful competition between individuals, in which each sought to emerge victorious by being increasingly inventive. The relationship acted as a neuronal stimulant, which explains the technical inventions that follow, but also as a kind of hormonal calming agent that has reduced primitive man’s warlike impulses. The rational and reasonable human being was born of this mode of interindividual relationship that was not instituted but arose spontaneously, that did not need to be written down and proclaimed, but that did its work underground: in short, this mode of relationship drove the progress of civilisation achieved over time. In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Hayek, who was well versed in a scientific approach, maintained that: ‘Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so’ (Hayek, 1988, p. 21).
By coupling the thesis of Darwinian evolutionism with the Popperian logic of scientific discovery, Hayek embarks on an explanation of why trade drives human progress. The explanation involves abandoning the notion of price established by neoclassical economics, according to which the price of a good or service is determined by the equilibrium between supply and demand. For Hayek, the price set by exchanges becomes invaluable information for the producer, enabling him to assess whether his offer meets the needs of the multitude of consumers. If he becomes poorer, he will know that his offer is unsuitable and will seek to reconfigure it; if he becomes richer, this will be a confirmation that he has chosen the right niche, at least for the period in question. Any intervention in economic policy, in particular monetary creation that distorts relative prices as described in his 1931 lecture, constitutes a misinformation of producers, since the compass enabling them to rectify their position has become flawed; this explains the production disorders and market imbalances resulting from economic policy. By virtue of the information role that Hayek attributes to prices for producers, any attempt at intervention leads to the elimination of a selection process for the activities that are most useful to the community.
Finally, by analogy with a scientist’s approach, Hayek considers that the producer who transforms the product of his mental activity into a good or service that he agrees to present on a market is carrying out an experiment that will enable him to discover the value of his ideas compared with those proposed by others. Hayek can therefore assert: ‘Competition is thus, like experimentation in science, first and foremost a discovery procedure’ (Hayek, 2015c, p. 68). Through this process, and unlike a character who enunciates ideas by speaking out, the producer discovers what not to do. Drawing on this knowledge, he will try out a new idea until he has found the one that allows him to earn a living. Apart from this process, the intellectual faculties are, by themselves, powerless to produce knowledge that is scientific, innovative and useful to the community.
Human qualities are not innate. ‘Man’, according to Hayek, is a being who needs to follow ‘rules of right conduct’ in order to perfect ‘himself’ and become ‘wise, rational and good’, but who is unable to invent them. Exchange relations – in other words, being forced to sell one’s products in order to live and exist – meet both these criteria. Having arisen by chance in the course of history, they were not invented by human reason, and yet, de facto, being subject to them is tantamount to adopting rules of fair conduct. The progress of human productivity throughout history, as well as the intellectual and moral perfection of human beings, can be explained by this submission to the discipline of exchange. It was this progress and these notable improvements that led eighteenth-century philosophers to believe that it was now possible to deliberately institute new rules to govern relations between individuals. But the horrors committed in the twentieth century under totalitarian regimes have made it clear that it was impossible to do without them. In other words, every being that comes into the world must, today as in the past, be subjected once again to the discipline of exchange that shapes its spirit and lifts it out of its primitive, infantile state.
If, for Hayek, human qualities are not innate, neither are they capable of being acquired by education and transmitted by the spoken word. What is needed is training in a kind of experimental physical practice, involving trial and error analogous to a solitary apprenticeship in the field, from which each individual draws personal lessons that cannot really be communicated to others in words. The result is a high-performance mind capable of adapting to any new situation. Hayek extends this model of experimental learning to a theory of evolution that assumes that it is action, or rather the activity of the body, that has forged humankind’s intellectual faculties. He thus asserts: ‘Man acted before he thought, and did not understand before he acted’ (Hayek, 2015a, p. 18). In other words, it is not the brain that commands the action of the limbs; it is the body’s movements that have developed the brain’s faculties.
It follows that, for Hayek, it is the production of goods and services for sale that, by involving a process of constant innovation, has had an educational and formative effect on the minds of individuals that is entirely beneficial to the progress of mankind. The logical counterpart to this celebration of the role of commercial exchanges is a total disregard for non-refutable ideas and the means by which they are expressed, i.e. language. Debates about ideas can only be considered as confrontations between necessarily biased value judgments that can only lead to inextricable conflicts. Human speech, what people have to say, is totally discredited, no complaint can be heard, no contestation can be credible, the only acceptable thing left is the submission of one’s activity to the order of exchanges. Arendt’s thought, on the other hand, requires us to emphasise the importance of the institution of ‘speaking together’, which makes it possible to rehabilitate political freedom.
Arendt’s first work was The Origins of Totalitarianism, a collection of three books published in 1951: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and The Totalitarian System, which examined historical facts and concluded that the state had changed its function. The last volume highlights the similarity between Stalinism and Nazism in terms of the violence of a state driven to massacre its own population, while the second volume relates the period of economic imperialism in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, during which European capital established itself in hitherto unexploited lands, particularly on the African continent. She sees this period as a moment of ‘an almost complete break in the uninterrupted flow of Western history which man had experienced for more than two thousand years’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 3). In her view, this purely economic phenomenon, which transforms the state into a protector of its citizens’ affairs in foreign lands, cannot be considered representative of what politics is, and even less of what political freedom is.
Instead of drawing lessons from the totalitarian phenomenon, as Hayek does, by blaming the excesses of politics and advocating an economic order capable of reducing a state’s power of constraint to a minimum, Arendt seeks to rehabilitate politics and human freedom to change the course of history. This means rowing against the tide of preconceived notions that have been firmly entrenched ever since economic theory took off, in particular with Adam Smith, who reduced the state to a servant of economic development. Arendt speaks as a theorist of a political domain that has its own raison d’être, which can be demonstrated by going back to the time of Athenian democracy in Ancient Greece, a time that corresponds to the birth of the idea of humanity and at the same time sees the emergence of philosophy. The concern to rehabilitate politics implies a break with ‘the modern concept of history’ (Arendt, 1963, p. 51) introduced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who, by seeing the Terror that followed the French Revolution as the inevitable result of collective action that should never have been undertaken, suggests a condemnation of political freedom.
Instead of seeking to explain the emergence of totalitarian regimes by a causal chain that condemns human initiative, we must, on the contrary, admit that the catastrophe might not have occurred, and consider that nothing is written in advance, and that it is always possible to halt an evil process by mobilising the power of intervention available to a human collectivity as long as it is made up of thinking beings using their faculty of judgment. The disappearance of the activity of thought thus presents itself, not as an explanation for the advent of totalitarian regimes – for there is no direct link between this lack and the rise of an ideology – but as a circumstance in which, with the safeguards gone, we find ourselves at the mercy of the arrival in power of any conceptual invention providing ready-made answers to existential questions that have none. Believing that there is an answer, regardless of its content, is a mindset that fails to grasp the importance of political life, which is founded precisely on non-knowledge – or, more precisely, on awareness that the absence of an answer cannot be overcome.
Arendt sets out to grasp ‘the nature of totalitarianism’, using the categories established by Charles de Montesquieu author of The Spirit of Laws (1747). She presents him as the last thinker still reasoning in terms of the ancient Greek opposition between the individual, who is subject to needs satisfied within a domestic economy, and the citizen, speaking and acting with others within a political community. Montesquieu preserves this dichotomy, considering that ‘the life of peoples […] is ruled by laws and customs […] laws govern the actions of the citizen, customs govern the actions of man’ (Arendt, 1994a, p. 315). He develops a typology of governments by referring to the principle of action that drives them, which is in tune with an era’s conception of the human condition. In a monarchy founded on distinctions due to birth, the principle of action is ‘honor’, a kind of passion to distinguish oneself from others. The republic, on the other hand, which declares that humans are born equal, has made ‘virtue’ its principle of action. Regimes are stable as long as these principles govern the actions of the rulers as well as those of the ruled.
Arendt notes that Montesquieu thus abandons a common division between rulers and ruled, which can be likened to an opposition between command and obedience, in favour of an approach that considers that real authentic power, the power to act, is founded on a modality of living together shared by the entire population, and that the authority of the law would not exist without this cohesion. She refers to this approach to highlight the unprecedented character of the totalitarian regimes that emerged in the twentieth century, which make use of ‘terror’ as a ‘permanent institution’ of which everyone can expect to be a victim without knowing what fault they may have committed, apart from the fact of being there and occupying a space on earth. The institution of terror indicates that the law is not authoritative, that force must be used to impose it, the reason being that the principle that makes a totalitarian government act is not an idea, a reflection of an era’s conception of humanity, but an ideology, an idea that does not conceive itself as such but which gives itself as the statement of a truth founded on a science of humanity or society. It is not the will of a tyrant or the interests of a clique that determine the actions of a totalitarian government, but the binding logic of a ‘truth’ to which both rulers and ruled must submit. Thus, the ‘totalitarian dictator’, unlike the tyrant, does not see himself as a free agent with the power to implement his will and arbitrary whims, but as the executor of certain laws that are superior to him.
With this characterisation, Arendt establishes that ‘Soviet Russia embarked upon the road to totalitarianism only around 1930, and Germany only after 1938. Up to those points, both countries, though already containing a great number of totalitarian elements, could still be regarded as one-party dictatorships’ (Arendt, 1994b, p. 348). At this stage, opposition was still possible before terror took hold. Thus, Lenin cannot be held responsible for the Stalinist regime, for there remains a big difference between the violence justified by this kind of formula, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, which is linked to an objective to be achieved designed by humans, and the ‘institution of terror’, which makes violence a commandment in itself, amounting to considering that ‘when you break eggs, you make an omelette’. We are dealing here with an ideology, the logic derived from an idea whose raison d’être has been lost, a logic that enjoins the petrification of all human initiative.
The nature of a totalitarian regime, according to Arendt, does not lie in the content of the ideology it conveys, and ‘it does not matter whether this ideology is as stupid and barren of authentic spiritual content as racism, or whether it is saturated with the best of our tradition as socialism’ (Arendt, 1994b, p. 349). It stems from the implementation of a logic of action aimed at conforming reality to a model of human being or a fantasised model of society derived from an ideology. Terror is the essence of a regime that makes the negation of human freedom of action its principle of government. For Arendt, what Nazism and Stalinism have in common is the annihilation of political life, and nothing else. The executive body does not enforce a law that would be the expression of a right derived from a legislative body; its aim is to enforce the law of a process that is conceived as natural, in the case of Nazism, and as historical, in the case of Stalinism, ‘a process that is thought to be in the process of accomplishment, or to whose accomplishment one must necessarily contribute’ (Abensour, 2001, pp. 761–62, my translation). The idea that there can be a law of process is linked to economic discipline.
Impressed by the extraordinary growth of the thirteen English colonies on the American continent, Smith proposed an explanation for economic development that suggested a future in which poverty would have disappeared – a new source of hope announcing the possible arrival of a paradise on earth. His explanation is inspired by the efficient organisation of a pin factory, whose production is divided into a series of successive operations carried out by workers, each with a defined and limited task to perform. By drawing an analogy between this division of labour within a company and the specialisation of individuals who, in a relationship of exchange, buy and sell each other’s products, Smith revealed a third type of human collectivity in which the private interest of each individual is inseparable from ‘joint production’ that nevertheless takes place without any deliberate organisation to achieve this result.
In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith gives a new content to the term ‘society’, as Arendt presents it in The Human Condition (1958), a term which until then, and since the Romans, had had a primarily political content. We find ourselves faced with a ‘curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call “society”’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 36), to such an extent that the ‘public’, identified with the sum of ‘private interests’, no longer has any real existence of its own. Economic activities take on greater importance as the unifying principle of humankind, while the political realm is reduced to a state that must assume the role of facilitator of a productive process that is supposed to bring benefits to all humankind, at least if nothing stands in the way of the expansion of exchanges. Likened to an involuntary production unit that increases its performance as newcomers are integrated into the whole, this ‘society’ is destined to reach a state of maximum abundance when humans from the entire planet are incorporated into it, rendering the presence of states unnecessary. Using Gunnar Myrdal’s term (1953, pp. 54–55), Arendt calls the kind of society imagined by Smith a ‘communist fiction’, with the implication that ‘it was not Karl Marx but the liberal economists themselves who had to introduce the “communist fiction,” that is, to assume that there is one interest of society as a whole which with “an invisible hand” guides the behavior of men and produces the harmony of their conflicting interests’ (Arendt, 1998, pp. 42–43).
Marx changed the explanation of the progress of human productivity by introducing the exploitation of wage labour within companies, a characteristic of capitalist society, but the socialism he proposed nonetheless amounted to ‘establishing in reality the “communist fiction” underlying all economic theories’, in which any political dimension could disappear. The uncritical adoption of the Smithian social fiction turns out to be a source of overestimation of economic activities as a factor of unity, and at the same time of underestimation of the importance of politics and language in the formation of a human community.
Arendt’s condemnation of this social fiction is unequivocal. During an adversarial debate in 1975, when discussing the ‘invisible hand’ and the Smithian vision of society, she clearly expressed her rejection: ‘I consider this theory to be one of the most harmful, evil and erroneous theories’ (Arendt, 2007, pp. 75–76, my translation). In what amounts to a critique, Arendt argues that ‘the conception of political economy as primarily a “science” dates only from Adam Smith’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 41). His theory of development, combined with the invention of a third type of community combining economics and politics, transformed economics from a ‘rather secondary chapter of morality and politics’ into a decisive object of study of the human condition, open, moreover, to research of a scientific nature. Smith ushered in the era of economic thinking conceived as a science whose aim was to discover the universal laws governing the functioning of a ‘society’, when in fact, if we follow Arendt, this society is no more than a fictitious whole with no real existence, the mere product of intellectual speculation.
Economic thinking, then, escapes from the human world into science fiction, which may be interesting as a premonition of the future, but which is highly problematic when conceived as an actual science capable of discovering what is going to happen or explaining the course of history from its origins. Adopted without reflection, social fiction surreptitiously introduces confusions from which it is difficult to escape. For example, by postulating the unification of human beings through economic activities, this vision assumes that the division of labour, in which each individual is at one with the whole in the achievement of a common goal, can be equated with ‘cooperation’, which in turn presupposes consultation between individuals who do not necessarily share the same opinion on the goal to be achieved, and which implies the use of language.
In her 1958 book, Arendt thus endeavours to re-establish distinctions abandoned by economic thought when it assimilated itself to a science of society seeking to discover its law of evolution. Moreover, under Smith’s auspices, research could also be directed towards the reconstitution of history from its origins, giving a more substantial content to the image of the ‘invisible hand’; this corresponds, all in all, to Hayek’s attempt at elucidation. On the contrary, we must admit that this image is a means of explaining the inexplicable. Recalling that it had already been used by Plato, Arendt emphasises that the invisible hand is ‘an invention arising from a mental perplexity but corresponding to no real experience’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 184). It is the recourse of a theorist who, in Smith’s case, having observed economic progress, makes it the result of the activities of individuals, to whom he is then forced to attribute behaviour.
This approach denies the fact of the plurality of human beings, whose motives for action are very varied and whose experiences are very diverse, just as, consequently, it refuses to consider that the result of multiple wills acting in different directions is entirely unpredictable. Ignoring these facts, economic science sets out to determine the theory of the human being that best suits what it aims to explain. Abandoning Montesquieu’s opposition between private and public being, which corresponded to two types of activity performed by the same person in distinct places and at specific times, it presents a one-dimensional social being with predictable behaviour. From then on, the theorist knows better than the individual himself why he acts, so that listening to the individual becomes entirely superfluous. Economic thinking conceived as a science of progress or decline, as the case may be, thus eliminates any possibility of understanding the importance of political life, which is linked to the need to create a space for listening to each other, a need that can only be felt when the plurality of human beings is recognised as a fact.
The idea that knowledge can guide the actions of those who govern, however, goes back much further than the appearance of economic science. Arendt notes that it was Plato who, with the myth of the cave, inaugurated ‘the commonplace’ we have inherited, according to which a political community is founded on an opposition between ‘those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 222). He thus invented a ‘concept of government’ for which the governors are distinguished from the governed, so that they cannot be considered as beings with the same faculties. This was a departure from Athenian democracy, where citizens obeyed laws they themselves had created after much discussion.
Arendt notes that this invention takes place in The Republic, that is, in writings subsequent to the arrest of Socrates, that unwritten figure in Athenian life who thought about everything and talked to everyone, and whose teachings Plato retransmitted in the Dialogues, notably in the one opposing him to Gorgias. The unjust arrest and subsequent suicide of Socrates, accused of perverting youth by speaking out in the public square, leads Plato to a kind of disenchantment with human beings who appear to lack the ability to recognise the good. As Arendt points out, Plato considers ‘that the actions of men appear like the gestures of puppets led by an invisible hand behind the scenes, so that man seems to be a kind of plaything of a god’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 184). And it is this disillusionment that leads Plato to ‘design a blueprint for the making of political bodies’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 226), assuming that the philosopher alone would possess the knowledge that would enable him to conceive the laws of an ideal city, while the ordinary human would have to be content with obeying laws that would enable him to conform to rules of right conduct that he is unable to find within himself.
This concept stems from a profound misunderstanding of the nature of political power, coupled with the illusion that politics can be a means of getting a multitude of people to act in order to achieve a specific goal. As Arendt explains, Plato transposed the master-slave relationship that characterises the organisation of a household to the political domain organising the city, with a view to achieving the living conditions of its members. He believes that, just like the fulfilment of a domestic task, a moral attitude can be achieved through obedience to rules. He imagined that ‘the fear of hell’ could be a means of persuading all citizens to act in concert. What is more, this notion prevents understanding that authentic political power consists in the human freedom to start something new, and as such can only come from the ‘consent’ of the greatest number, ‘for no man, however strong, can ever do anything, good or bad, without the help of others’ (Arendt, 2003, p. 47). This notion suggests that the consent between equals is equivalent to the obedience demanded of a slave or a child: ‘By sheer force of conceptualization and philosophical clarification, the Platonic identification of knowledge with command and rulership and of action with obedience and execution overruled all earlier experiences and articulations in the political realm’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 224).
Plato’s invention obscures all the experience of citizens’ assemblies, which, talking together about things that concerned them all, made it clear that we all had something in common despite everything that differentiated us. This observation of similarity gave rise to the idea of human unity, translated into the word ‘humanity’, which would also designate an admirable quality of human beings. This is linked to the intense political life of Ancient Greece, which called on the citizen’s faculty of judgment to designate beautiful things and beautiful deeds likely to be immortalised. The ‘concept of government’ not only assumes that only the philosopher possesses a faculty of judgment, but also changes its object: judgment no longer concerns what is beautiful or what is good, but what is good for maintaining the peace and prosperity of an already-established community.
Through his invention, Plato is led to go beyond the philosopher’s reflective activity to transform himself into a producer of knowledge, claiming to have answers to questions that everyone is asking. In this respect, Arendt evokes the professional thinkers’ occupational disease, which leads them to transform an idea into a concept. The word ‘humanity’, an idea born of the collective experience of citizens’ assemblies, is transformed into a concept as soon as the philosopher undertakes to give it a specific content. Other words, such as ‘courage’ and ‘justice’ remain ideas as long as they are associated with an experience we can witness, but when their meaning is fixed in a theorist’s response, they become concepts whose validity cannot be assured by ordinary mortals. They become a matter for specialists, whose criteria for validity are quite different from those of human testimony. From then on, human judgments are reduced to worthless opinions. Arendt seeks, on the contrary, to restore the validity of human testimony and the importance of opinion, against a philosopher who, afflicted by the professional illness of the professional thinker, ceases to engage in the authentic activity of thinking that presupposes the questioning of the other, starting with the other within oneself.
In early 1930s Germany, Arendt was troubled by the behaviour, not of her enemies, but of her friends ‘who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it’ (Arendt, 2003, p. 53). The case of Heidegger’s failure to oppose the ban on Jews at university, despite the fact that he was an extremely brilliant philosopher from whom she had learned a great deal, is a fact, like a hammer blow to the head, leading her to link ‘the fall of personal judgment’ to the professional illness of the professional thinker.
As in the case of Plato, the professional thinker always runs the risk of abandoning what characterises authentic thinking, as practised by Socrates in ancient Greece. Socratic activity consists in seeking to act wisely, which is not to say that the activity makes one wise; on the contrary, this is the position of the professional thinker who, believing himself to have attained wisdom, uses his intellect to establish laws obliging ordinary humans to behave wisely. Genuine thinking remains an attitude of questioning that refers to nothing more than ‘the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 5). It consists in questioning oneself about the value of one’s own actions and those of others, on the occasion of events that cross one’s existence: ‘We must be able to “demand” its exercice in every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, how intelligent or stupid he may prove to be’ (Arendt, 1971, p. 422). ‘The essence of thought discovered by Socrates is what Plato translated into conceptual language as the soundless dialogue […] between me and myself’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 185).
This inner dialogue implies a two-dimensional being, or a ‘two-in-one’ in search of a cohabitation that satisfies both parties. Contrary to Heidegger’s view, with which Arendt expresses her disagreement, the goal of thought cannot be the reunification of the self, which would mean seeking to put an end to this inner dialogue and then abandoning the activity of thinking in order to consider oneself the holder of knowledge about the individual of the human species. Abandoning the irreducible nature of this double dimension is precisely the disease that threatens the professional thinker, and which Arendt calls ‘loneliness’, which can be summed up, briefly, as being alone in one’s head.
The double dimension is unsurpassable, and stems from an awareness of the indeterminacy of the human being, corresponding to the admission that there is no answer to the question ‘What am I?’. If, faced with another person in the public domain, there is the possibility of being someone – the other person reflecting back to me an image of who I am – the fact remains that, once back home and in solitude, this someone is no longer the person who spoke to others and could say ‘I’, but a stranger to himself, able to pass judgment on the public persona he was for others. Knowing that he will be confronted by this judge of the peace, he will avoid making an enemy of him.
Following Socrates’s observation, Arendt here highlights a kind of need that has nothing to do with an economic need to be satisfied in order to achieve material comfort. It is the need to be at one with oneself, which stems from a concern for good mental health, leading to two precepts of conduct formulated by Socrates; ‘It is better to be treated unjustly than to commit a wrong’, which means the same thing as: ‘It would be better […] that multitudes of men should disagree with me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me’ (Arendt, 1971, p. 436, my emphasis). Internal dialogue, as distinct from intellectual reflection aimed at achieving knowledge, is completely unproductive and serves no purpose from the point of view of the material conditions of existence, but it does have the immense advantage, on the one hand, of leading to respect for others and, on the other, of generating a search for impartiality of judgment.
Consequently, the moral attitude of doing no harm to others is not obtained by the threat of sanction from a state authority, nor does it correspond to obedience to rules of conduct drawn from a moral code of civic or religious education. It stems from a human need to live with a person they respect, to avoid making them commit actions they disapprove of. It is a question of ‘thinking for oneself’, which also implies ‘thinking by oneself’. Arendt points out that the habit of questioning one’s own actions is extremely valuable, as it generates the faculty of judgment, that is, ‘the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’ (Arendt, 1971, p. 446) when necessary. And she adds that this is what ‘can be called the most political of man’s mental abilities’. This activity, specific to a person situated in time and faced with current events, involves questioning the general opinions accepted in the past in the light of new experiences in the present. It is a dangerous activity for the established order and for all beliefs:
It is in its nature to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought-words (concepts, sentences, definition, doctrines) […]. The consequence of this peculiarity is that thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values and measurements for good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics. [Arendt, 1971, pp. 433–34]
Thus, ‘thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds and’, by itself, ‘does not bring forth any new creed’ (Arendt, 1971, p. 435). Authentic interrogative activity has no end; it does not lead to the elaboration of other values that can replace the old ones, as professional thinkers propose. It does not produce knowledge that can be transmitted from one generation to the next. Every human being must laboriously rediscover the activity of thinking, which has the great advantage of keeping the mind awake.
Arendt glorifies the activity of thinking as exercised by Socrates, a figure of the ordinary human, ‘who cannot have believed that only the few are capable of thought’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 180). However, it is not a natural activity, just as the faculty of judgment is not a characteristic human endowment. The activity is conditioned by the political context, which gives crucial importance to speaking out in a public space where it is possible to appear to others and be someone who can be admired for his virtues. The need to be at one with oneself is born of this situation. Socrates is the figure of the ordinary human being, who may exist when the political sphere is built on mutual listening based on trust in the other’s ability to judge. This gives rise to genuine cooperation between a plurality of human beings with different qualities and experiences, in pursuit of a common goal that no one can define in advance.
Hayek’s teaching leads us not to listen to the complaints or demands of a group of protesters that are critical of a government in office, since humans have no faculty of judgment. A political institution whose function is reduced to a power of coercion of both the rulers and the ruled has no role other than to oblige individuals to be free, in the sense of not being dependent on others and being responsible for themselves. This means having a remunerative activity that will be submitted to the judgment of the market which, if it is not distorted by human intervention, will correctly assess its contribution to humanity as a whole.
Arendt, on the other hand, values popular uprisings and civil disobedience as manifestations of a need to be at one with oneself. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is a typical example of a ‘sudden uprising of an oppressed people, for the sake of freedom and hardly anything else’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 8). It had no leaders; it was not organised; it was not directed by a central body. One might have expected mob rule, but revolutionary councils sprang up everywhere. The same kind of political organisation, pursuing its own objectives, appeared in France and Germany in 1848, in Paris in 1871, and in Russia in 1905 and 1917. The forces that compel action always come from below. The resistance to oppression, the opposition to dictatorships, the struggle for political freedom, all of which are exemplified in history, are events that reveal that miracles interrupting an ongoing process are always possible, and that hope is not futile.
Marlyse Pouchol
Keywords: Arendt, Hayek, political thought, economic theories
With the allegory of the cave, Plato aims to associate power with knowledge. He contrasts those who remain in the darkness, perceiving only distorted images of the truth, with those, such as the philosophers, who manage to find the path to knowledge by extricating themselves from this lightless place, and who alone are in a position to govern. Friedrich Hayek denounces this myth: he blames philosophers who, believing themselves capable of proposing a new organisation of society, lead us ‘down the road of servitude’ that leads to totalitarianism. For him, we would have to admit that thinkers are in the same state of ignorance as the ordinary individual, and that only market mechanisms are capable of guiding everyone’s activities towards prosperity, while power has the task of ensuring that everyone is subject to them. For the opposite reason, Hannah Arendt also denounces this myth, which misrepresents politics in terms of a distinction between those who govern and those who are governed, modelled on the opposition between conception and execution in the economic sphere. In her opinion, authentic politics, which corresponds to the freedom to start something new, requires the expression of the plurality of human beings, all endowed with a faculty of judgment.