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Hannah Arendt on Capitalism and Socialism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Ronald S. Beiner
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Extract

…the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false — not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing a different hat.

So you ask me where I am. I am nowhere. I am really not in the mainstream of present or any other political thought. But not because I want to be so original — it so happens that I somehow don't fit. For instance, this business between capitalism and socialism seems to me the most obvious thing in the world. And nobody even understands what I am talking about, so to speak.

FOR US IT IS ENTIRELY NATURAL TO ASSUME THAT THE paramount political question of our time is whether to move in the direction of a socialist or capitalist organization of the economy, or to decide what manner of welfarist compromise between them ought to be struck. But merely to make this assumption is already to be committed to a particular view about what defines politics, the political priorities of our society, the nature of the relationship between state and society, and so on.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1990 , pp. 359 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

1 Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, p. 214 Google Scholar.

2 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1979, p. 336.

3 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, New York, Viking Press, 1965, p. 219 Google Scholar.

4 Crises of the Republic, p. 213.

5 ibid., p. 211.

6 The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed., New York, W. W. Norton, 1978, p. 228; cf. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 99 Google Scholar.

7 The Human Condition, p. 87.

8 ibid., pp. 80–81.

9 Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future, enl. ed., New York, Viking, 1968, p. 206 Google Scholar.

10 The Human Condition, p. 136.

11 ibid., p. 124.

12 ibid., p. 134.

13 ibid., p. 133.

14 ibid., p. 112.

15 ibid., pp. 115–116.

16 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, p. 320.

17 Crises of the Republic, p. 214

18 ibid., p.213.

19 The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 476.

20 The Human Condition, pp. 126–127.

21 Crises of the Republic, p. 220.

22 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public world, p. 335. For a similar argument, comparing the USA of the nineteenth century to the USSR of the twentieth century, see Wills, Garry, Confessions of a Conservative, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1979, pp. 128–29Google Scholar.

23 The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 486.

24 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, p. 320; Crises of the Republic, p. 214.

25 Crises of the Republic, p. 217

26 On Revolution, p. 220

27 ibid., p. 219.

28 The Human Condition, p. 159.