The politics of need

Abstract

This chapter examines 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. In The Human Condition, Arendt provides a phenomenology of action through which she attempts to understand politics on its own terms rather than from the perspective of transcendent reason. Ernst Vollrath argues that the rationality of the political should be understood in terms of its autonomy and authenticity. Hannah Arendt, the political describes a potential for the disclosure of a social world from the plural perspectives of individuals who come together to act in concert. From a Marxist perspective, the connection Arendt asserts between need, necessity and labor is ideological. The importance of Heller's interpretation of Marx for our purpose is that it emphasizes the relation between the experience of unmet need and the agency of the collective subject in bringing about radical social transformation.