The state and society reconfigured: Resolving Arendt's “social question” through Kojève's “right of equity”

The equivocation of modern civil society—its democratic potential and the actuality of economic inequality—has been accentuated by the political situations in the East and West during the 20th century. In the former, the democratic potential of civil society was stifled under state socialism, while in the latter, the welfarism of state capitalism kept the exploitative features of capitalist civil society intact. With the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in the East and the perceived intellectual demise of Marxism everywhere, the neoliberal era in the West was marked by optimism in automation and the promotion of "democracy and human rights" in the East and the Global South. However, as a result of the neoliberal reconfiguration of the state and civil society, human rights became associated almost solely with formal liberties at the expense of substantive social rights, so much so that, as Samuel Moyn (2018) argued, "human rights have become prisoners of the contemporary age of inequality" (p. 6). This article departs from the presumption that it is not enough to only criticize neoliberalism. Instead, it is necessary to think of an affirmative way to reconfigure the relationship between the state and society and reconstruct the normative foundations of social rights out of the modern intellectual tradition. The modern analysis of rights formalism can be seen as stemming from Hegel's critique that while Kant and Fichte's philosophies of right hinge on the primacy of subjective autonomy, the subject itself should be understood as historically and socially conditioned. Once formal rights are revealed as conditioned by historically identifiable social relations, the question of rights can be recast in terms of substantial inequality and its potential overcoming.1 This critique of right formalism was extended by Marx to the analysis of property relations under 19th-century capitalism. It is not that Marx rejected traditional formal rights and the liberal conception of justice, but offered an immanent critique of these rights in the conditions of substantial inequities determined by capitalist property ownership (Shoikhedbrod, 2019). However, 20th-century Continental political philosophy significantly deviated from the critique of rights formalism and the question of substantial (in)equality. Contemporary Continental thinkers disavow notions of juridical rights altogether (Agamben, 1998, 1999; Hardt & Negri, 2003), recast the question of human rights in terms of radical democracy (Lefort, 1988; Rancière, 2004), or discuss the question of law and right in neo-Kantian ethical terms (Derrida, 2006; Lévinas, 1998).2 Influenced by Arendt's thinking about the communicative aspect of political action, Habermas (2001) theorized economic welfare as a condition of deliberative democracy. However, his theory of justice advances socioeconomic rights without offering a critique of economic exploitation. Similarly, Honneth's (1996) elaboration of intersubjective recognition downplays the socioeconomic critique of rights formalism. These contributions signify not only a departure from the Hegelian–Marxian tradition toward a formalistic approach to rights but also an abandonment of the phenomenological approach to the social ontology of right. In this respect, it is particularly striking that the "capabilities approach," responding to Rawls's liberal and formalistic A Theory of Justice (1971) from the analytic philosophy tradition, provides a deeper understanding of social rights (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2005). To resuscitate the phenomenological way to expound rights that is simultaneously attentive to the historical reality, in particular the persistence of the modern contradiction between the institutions of the state and civil society, this paper will revisit Arendt's phenomenology of right and her critique of welfare rights by contrasting it to Kojève's phenomenological approach to substantial rights. The contemporary ontology of the "political" as it is understood in the Continental philosophy tradition is largely attributed to 20th-century phenomenology (Marchart, 2007; Mihai, McNay, Marchart, et al., 2017, White, 2000). Heidegger's early writings, notably Being and Time, stand out for their ontological exploration of Dasein's anxiety-toward-death—an awareness of finitude that shapes our temporal existence—and the interplay between lived experience so understood and historical hermeneutics. Yet, the revelations from the Black Notebooks caution that the political implications of Heidegger's phenomenology cannot be disentangled from his disgraceful Nazi affiliations (Wolin, 1993, 2023). This problem was perceptively recognized by his contemporaries such as Arendt and Kojève, who crafted explicitly political phenomenologies in response to Heidegger's apolitical or Nazi-leaning philosophical musings. In fact, the contemporary ontology of the "political" owes much to the phenomenological contributions of Arendt and Kojève (Marchart, 2005, 2007). In reflecting on the political, both Arendt and Kojève devised phenomenologies of right. While Kojève concurs with Heidegger's emphasis on human finitude, his phenomenology leans more toward a Hegelian–Marxian approach, articulating the phenomenon of right through different historical aspects of the struggle for recognition. Conversely, Arendt introduces the phenomenological concept of natality, underscoring the innate human capacity to create anew politically. In Arendt's perspective, political rights emerge in the realm of public deliberation that constitutes the collective. Regardless of their differences, both Kojève and Arendt took seriously the Marxian critique of rights formalism in relation to the economy and imperialism. However, Arendt's phenomenology is often at odds with her otherwise historically grounded critique. For example, she deploys a Marxian historical critique of bourgeois civil society in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but subsequently rejects it in what can be seen as her polemics against Marx's theory of labor in The Human Condition. In recent literature, Arendt is increasingly presented as the phenomenologist of human rights (Bell, 2018; Birmingham, 2006; Parekh, 2008). At the same time, despite his immense influence on 20th-century phenomenology and Continental philosophy,3 Kojève's Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, written in 1943, published in 1982, and translated into English in 2000, has received only introductory treatment (Frost, 1999; Frost & Howse, 2000; Roth, 1983b). Because Kojève's Outline of a Phenomenology of Right was not published during his lifetime, Arendt could not have possibly offered a direct response to his theory of right, for example, in her critique of socioeconomic rights. However, her theory can be seen as a response to his Heideggerian phenomenological recasting of Hegel and Marx, with which she was definitely familiar. This paper will reconstruct Kojève and Arendt's respective political phenomenologies in light of their implications for political economy and the "social question." While Arendt's articulation of deliberative action presents a counterpoint to Kojève's political existentialism, her phenomenology of the "social" dismisses the political and conflictual dimension of the economy advanced by Kojève, thus precluding a reconfiguration of modern institutions. Against the backdrop of these phenomenological theories, the paper then scrutinizes Arendt and Kojève's philosophical interpretations of the French Revolution and the events post-1848 apropos their contrasting viewpoints on the institutions of socioeconomic rights. Despite her initial critique of rights formalism and political economy, Arendt's phenomenology of the "social" compels her to reject the French Revolution's vindication of economic rights; meanwhile, she only appreciates the political events post-1848 to the extent that they diverge from the principles of the French Revolution. In stark contrast, Kojève perceives the French Revolution as providing both the foundation for formal equality and the potential for substantive equality post-1848. Despite these differences, I argue that Kojève responds to Arendt's "social question" by way of a double gesture. Firstly, Kojève offers a phenomenological account of the illusion of "natural" existence that conceals the French Revolution's legacy of right formalism. Secondly, his concept of the "right of equity" permits an egalitarian reconfiguration of the state and civil society post-1848, which tackles the problem of right formalism immanently, while preemptively considering Arendt's warning against conflating the state and economic society. The article suggests that this reconfiguration of the state and civil society, conceptualized as the phenomenological "right of equity" and socialist property relations, makes it possible to rethink the contemporary predicament of socioeconomic rights. While Arendt's "right to have rights" presents a significant contribution to democratic theory, the status of economic conditions behind this notion is less clear and debated. On the one hand, Parekh (2008), Suuronen (2018), and Klein (2014) argue that Arendt acknowledges the strong role of socioeconomic rights as a precondition of political life. On the other hand, Bernstein (1986), van der Walt (2012), and Emden (2019) contend that Arendt sees the "social question" as detrimental to the public realm. The following paper is not a contribution to the debate, but an attempt to show how Kojève's theory can be seen as an answer to Arendt's "social question." A short excursus into Arendt's theory of right and "the social" is thus required. Arendt's notion of the "right to have rights" from The Origins of Totalitarianism is said to receive its full meaning in her later political phenomenology of The Human Condition (Birmingham, 2006; Parekh, 2008). There, Arendt draws on Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of being in the world to expound an account of active human life, or vita activa, conditioned by the fundamental phenomena of action, work, and labor. Arendt understood that, despite Heidegger's attempt to overcome abstract subjectivity, his notion of Dasein remains politically solipsistic (Benhabib, 2003, pp. 51–56). In contrast to the centrality of existential finitude in Heidegger, Arendt offers a political notion of "natality" that indicates that humans are born in the condition of plurality and with the political ability to create anew.4 This means that our political existence is not defined by the individualizing death of Dasein but rather by the singularity of birth that takes place in the "human togetherness" and "the web of relations" out of which human action springs forth (Arendt, 1998, pp. 180, 183–184). Influenced by Aristotle's definition of the human as a speaking animal, Arendt further conceives action primarily in terms of the nonviolent power of speech.5 Humans can act in the full sense of the word because they are capable of acknowledging the presence of the plurality of others and "acting in concert," exercising nonviolent discursive power that gives rise to the "political" public sphere. In this way, the political "right to have rights" designates the fundamental right to belong to a discursive political community, on the basis of which a normative understanding of other rights can develop. The foundational to the "right to have right" political phenomenon of action is distinguished from the pre-political phenomena of work and labor. For Arendt, work signifies the human ability to create objects that form a temporally stable and durable "human artifice." The activity of work, and its correlated figure Homo Faber, is not properly political and embodies what can be understood as fabricating or instrumental rationality. Arendt further distinguishes work and Homo Faber from labor and the phenomenological type that it represents: the animal laborans. The stakes of these novel demarcations are high, for in responding to theorists of labor, from Locke to Smith and Marx, Arendt aims to establish a phenomenological description of the economy as such. "Unlike the productivity of work," she writes, "the productivity of labor power produces objects only incidentally and is primarily concerned with the means of its own reproduction…it never 'produces' anything but life" (p. 88). This process of life's reproduction through labor is relegated by Arendt to the "social" sphere of the economy. Insofar as the repetitive processes of the laboring activity stem from "natural necessity"—and this is crucial for Arendt—they do not imply any meaningful participation of others in the public realm, or the human artifice that would sustain the public realm. In the absence of political participation, the "social" economy becomes a paradoxically asocial private sphere. Based on this phenomenology of labor, Arendt goes as far as to say that "political economy" is a contradiction in terms. Kojève was likewise influenced by Heidegger,6 but his political recasting of existential phenomenology is in line with his famous anthropological reading of Hegel and Marx in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Kojève, 1980). According to Kojève's central phenomenological structure, which he elaborates in more practical terms in Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (2000), two original consciousnesses are awakened by the desire for a nonnatural end, that is, for the other's desire. This desire for the "pure prestige" of recognition by the other yields the capacity to risk their lives in a mortal struggle. The result of this struggle is initially marked by power asymmetry: having voluntarily renounced the struggle for recognition out of fear of death, the vanquished consciousness becomes enslaved to the victorious other, the future master. The slave then labors for the enjoyment of the master in exchange for security, for example, by preparing food for the other's consumption. In contrast to Arendt's debasement of labor to a prepolitical category, Kojève sees labor for the other as the first political characteristic of the laboring consciousness. Having not recognized the slave, however, the master consciousness is not satisfied with the recognition it fought to attain. As a result, the master consciousness finds itself in an existential impasse, while the slave consciousness embraces its mastery of the natural world through transformative work on which the master depends. The second political aspect of Kojève's phenomenology is this transformative and educative capacity of work. Under the master's coercion, the working consciousness's potential is gradually realized as labor becomes work that humanizes and educates. Kojève (2000) describes the essence of work as a process of abstraction from the natural "here and now," wherein the working consciousness transforms the spatiotemporal material into lasting cultural and technological artifacts. This transformative work develops the human capacity to think and speak, insofar as "to preserve objective reality while abstracting from the natural hic et nunc…is to violate the essence of existence; it is to conceive reality in and by a concept (Logos)" (p. 432). If producing for the other can be understood as a political variant of Arendtian "labor," then the educative and transformative aspect of production clearly overlaps with "work." To be sure, Kojève does not separate labor from work, but rather accounts for the dialectical aspects of the multifaceted laboring-working consciousness that unfolds historically; he shows how labor for the other is intertwined with the fabrication of human artifice, and, finally, how the formative work yields the slave's capacity to overcome the fear of death and the master through revolutionary action, which actualizes the repressed existential desire for recognition in the working consciousness. Revolutionary action is the third and most political aspect of labor–work, which allows for the incorporation of both mastery and slavery into the figure of the "citizen" who is recognized for their individual work. While Arendt's references to Kojève in her published works are scarce (Arendt, 1977, pp. 40, 47; 1992, p. 57), she was familiar with his influential seminars on Hegel7 and his overall theoretical project.8 Her phenomenology of the political can be seen as a response to Kojève that (1) replaces the violent revolutionary action with a theory of action expounded in terms of speech; (2) decouples laboring activity and fabricating rationality from their politically formative role, instead making them "pre-political" conditions for political communicative action; (3) further distinguishes between work and labor by linking the latter to the so-called life-process. Arendt would be doubtlessly correct to point out that Kojève's existential struggle for recognition lacks the deliberative aspect of the public sphere; and because Kojève believes human reason is engendered by the transformation of nature into technological and cultural artifice, it remains at the level of fabricating, or instrumental, rationality of Homo Faber. Furthermore, if it is the slave who develops Logos through the work for the other, the master can be only "speechless," which goes against Kojève's own identification of the Ancient Greek aristocratic political ethos with the Logos of Greek philosophers (1980, pp. 100–30; 2000, p. 224). At the same time, if Arendt's distinction between work and labor adds nuance that is only implied by Kojève, her evacuation of the political aspect from both of these phenomena makes them impervious to political transformation through modern institutions. Crucially, Arendt can be herself criticized for introducing the problematic notion of life-process, which is the basis of the elimination of political struggle from the realm of economy. To this end, Arendt's phenomenology of labor and the "social" economy has been criticized even by the most serious Arendt scholars. Arendt's description of the "social," as Hanna Pitkin (1998) argues, relies on the imagery of the "Blob….a monstrous, jellylike substance…, which has a predilection for coating and then consuming human beings and grows with each meal" (p. 4). While Arendt herself cautioned against these types of mystifications, observes Pitkin, in her polemics against Marxian thinkers, she nonetheless resorts to an image of an "abstract, personified agency beyond human influence" by articulating the economy in terms of natural biological necessity expressed in the irresistible force of the vitalistic and pernicious "blob" (pp. 6, 11). Arendt posits the rise of this transhistorical and debased "social," Gillian Rose (1992) explains, as a result of her confusing natural differences with "socially developed and recognized differences: the equality and inequality which are historical constructions, and which 'political' institutions may equally reinforce as seek to abolish" (p. 226). In contrast, Kojève unequivocally views labor as not merely a natural phenomenon but a humanizing one. This anthropogenic character of labor is premised on the slave's original desire for a nonnatural end, not mere survival or procreation. The slave renunciation of the struggle out of the fear of death is moreover based not on the fear of natural death, such as from disease or old age, but from the fear of the master, who "goes to the very end of the Struggle to the death of Recognition" (Kojève, 2000, p. 431). This does not demean the working consciousness to an animal laborans, but instead illuminates the connection between its biological life and potential human recognition.9 He states, "to work for the Master, to work for another, to exert effort without profiting from the results, is to act against animal nature, against his biological interests: it is to negate his innate animal nature, and consequently to negate Nature in general, the natural given" (pp. 431–432). Far from an animal laborans, Kojève posits the working consciousness as a "human in potentiality." Further, the specific human character of the economy lies in the phenomenon of exchange: "Exchange of the products of Work realizes and reveals the specifically human character of these products and of Work itself: for there is only exchange when there is genuine Work, and this is why there is no Exchange in the animal world" (p. 433). In the final analysis, the human character of economy originates from the working consciousness's potential humanity and from granting the products of labor relative autonomy. Production by the slave and consumption by the master are then not reducible to the recurring cycle of production and consumption—the realm of life's necessity—attributed by Arendt to the animal laborans and the "social" realm. Instead, labor is a relational and humanizing activity, while the economy is emphatically human and historical, from which follows that the institutions underpinning economic relations can be transformed. This theory of labor informs Kojève's conceptualization of the economy and rights that avoids attributing labor to a life-reproducing activity of animal laborans: it is pointless, according to Kojève, "to discuss the biological 'theories' of Right….Right is a specifically human phenomenon and is not found in non-human nature" (Kojève, 2000, p. 117, translation altered). In spite of the limitations of Kojève's understanding of political action, his phenomenology of the struggle for recognition explains how the asymmetry between autonomous and working consciousnesses yields political action throughout history. Kojève identifies the possibility of mutual recognition with the concept of socioeconomic rights that emerged with the French Revolution. In contrast, Arendt sees the French Revolution as marking the "unnatural rise of the natural" social realm. In the historical exposition of The Human Condition, Arendt first applies the phenomenological typology of Homo Faber and animal laborans to craftsmen and slaves in the Greek polis. Although both these figures are excluded from Greek public life, it is the slave as animal laborans who is said to dwell exclusively in the realm of privacy of the household economy, the oikos, and labor with their bodies to tend to the necessities of life (Arendt, 1998, pp. 7, 24, 40, 80). Arendt emphasizes that the Greek wisdom was to keep the household, the domain of necessity and strictest inequality, separate from the public realm of the agora, where Greek citizens enjoyed civic equality to deliberate city affairs (p. 32). This is not to suggest that Arendt approves of the Greek solution to maintain the realm of public freedom with the institution of slavery. However, the capacity for action of Greek citizens does reflect her phenomenological theory of political action. The Greek understanding of politics will be lost, Arendt laments, first in the coexistence of the private and public sphere in the Roman Empire, then in the gradual disappearance of the public realm in the Middle Ages and, finally, in the "fire" of the French Revolution (1998, pp. 23, 34, 59). Arendt further elaborates in On Revolution (1990) that the French Revolution represents a reversal in vita activa.10 The sphere of political action becomes dominated by the instrumental thinking of Homo Faber and, ultimately, by the asocial, natural needs of animal laborans (p. 298). Arendt clarifies that the fixation on the "social question" occurred as a response to oppression, mass poverty, and destitution in feudal France, which the revolutionaries sought to liberate themselves from (pp. 60, 112). Acting under the "dictate of their natural bodies," the multitude of the poor "rushed to the assistance of the French Revolution, inspired it, drove it onward, and eventually sent it to its doom" (p. 60). In the writings of Rousseau and the actions of Robespierre, the socioeconomic welfare of the people emerged as a political virtue (pp. 73–75). Here, "the social question" appears as an attempt to address the problem of poverty which, Arendt maintains, should not be tackled politically lest it lead to terror. The "social," embodied in the welfare needs of the multitude, is thus accused of "submersing" the public realm (pp. 48, 60). This submersion degrades politics into "political economy," a term Arendt finds contradictory since polis and oikos should remain separate rather than merged into a "nation-wide administration of housekeeping" (1998, p. 28). Arendt contends that the notion of "mankind" introduced by the French revolutionaries is a progenitor of Marx's thinking about class, as both emanate from the force of life itself and reduce the human ability to act. Marx is said to have elevated the laboring activity to an essential characteristic of the whole of society (pp. 89–90). As a result, his transformation of classical political economy's emphasis on individual egoistic life into "socialized mankind" meant that any possibility of genuine political action was lost. Arendt's central polemical point is that the late modern ideal of "socialized humanity" espoused by Marx aims at reducing humanity to the natural circuit of consumption and production. According to this thesis, "what was left was a 'natural force,' the force of the life process itself, to which all men and all human activities were equally submitted ('the thought process itself is a natural process') and whose only aim, if it had an aim at all, was survival of the animal species man" (p. 321). In attempting to solve the "social" economic question, Marx is said to have followed the French Revolutionary tradition and espoused a pernicious doctrine of "liberty," thereby abdicating freedom to necessity (pp. 61–62, 65). From the perspective of Arendt's contentious thesis on labor,11 the French Revolution, and Marx, Kojève's approach can be seen as suspect. However, as I will show, Kojève's Hegelian phenomenology, Marxian political economy, and interpretation of the French Revolution present a more "workable" conception of socioeconomic rights, so much so that it constitutes a resolution of Arendt's social question. In contrast to the apolitical character of Arendt's "social" economy, Kojève (1980, p. 45) treats the phenomenology of the working consciousness and the correlated sphere of the economy as the driving historical force behind the three stages of "universal history" culminating in the French Revolution. In the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, Kojève (2000) derives from these stages a dialectic account of principles of right.12 As Panu Minkkinen (2009) explains, the interplay between the working consciousness and the need for recognition serves as a logically necessary origin of right in "a similar way as Kelsen's basic norm is the 'transcendental-logical' assumption of the legal system" (p. 120). Similar to Arendt, Kojève's historical exposition of the phenomenon of right begins with the ancient Greeks. However, while Arendt evades the problem of slavery and instead draws inspiration from the discursive activity of ancient Greek citizens in the agora, Kojève derives the principle of "pagan" right from the master and slave dialectic. To recall Kojève's phenomenological schema, the master and the slave both voluntarily undertake a humanizing existential risk. The equal value of this risk,13 according to Kojève, generates the aristocratic principle of equality of condition, or the right of status. However, the political reality is initially different, with the master having the right in actuality and the slave only in potentiality (Kojève, 2000, pp. 219–222). For the Greek masters, who are citizens only insofar as they make war, the principle of equality of condition generates egalitarian practices such as "primitive communism," universal suffrage of aristocrats, including the equality of votes and the right of veto, and the communitarian principle of exchangeability of combatants (1980, p. 57; 2000, pp. 228, 240). Applying the equality ideal is practically difficult because the affirmation of status presupposes only negative duties on the part of masters and the absence of obligations (2000, p. 244). Thus, following the principle of lex talionis, aristocratic law is essentially criminal law and prohibits actions that threaten strict equality and autonomy (pp. 244, 250). Just as aristocratic right treats the status of masters as fixed, slaves are treated as "natural." This, according to Kojève, is reflected in Aristotle's philosophy of "natural slavery," which asserts that "[m]an is born with a slavish or free 'nature,' and he will never be able to overcome or modify it; Masters and Slaves form something like two distinct animal species, irreducible or 'eternal,' neither of which can leave its 'natural place' in the immutable Cosmos" (1980, p. 224).14 Since the potential humanity of the slave is not recognized from the master's point of view, the aristocratic state will refuse to recognize slaves as subjects of right (2000, p. 234). However, while the concept of aristocratic right is not contradictory in itself, it exists in social contradictions: All human beings cannot be masters (p. 264). These social contradictions generate historical development: Because the slave's work is excluded from being recognized in its human value, the Greek city-states will be driven by perpetual wars for prestige and then dissolved in the Roman Empire (1980, p. 62). Kojève then articulates the legal principle underlying the "bourgeois" period that began with the Roman Empire and culminated in the French Revolution. As we have seen, the working consciousness initially sought recognition but abandoned the struggle in exchange for security (2000, pp. 223, 252). From this exchange, Kojève derives the principle of equivalence between the duty of working for others and the benefits of security. What appears just for the working consciousness is