In a previous post, Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons, I discussed the moral hazards of voting and why democracy does not legitimize the state or protect our liberty. I also discussed how statist democracy, particularly representative democracy, is manipulative and conducive to top-down central planning of society. (Statist) politics tends to reduce all basic social issues to problems requiring administrative manipulation. In this post, I’m going to delve into this issue further and draw upon insights by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition¹ to illustrate how (statist) politics is inherently an attempt to run society as one massive organization, organism, or machine.

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the differences between action (praxis)² and work – and between politics, which involves action, and fabrication or making (poi?sis), which involves work – has negative implications for the central planning of society that is characteristic of modern representative-democratic states. In particular, I have in mind her criticism of Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, regarding their tendency to view society as a sort of organization and politics as the running of society as such an organization – or, in their words, politics as akin to household management. This fits with the tendency in many cultures to refer to one’s country as “the Fatherland” or “the Motherland” and with socialists and communitarians (on the left and the right) essentially modeling their ideal society after the family.

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(Statist) Politics as Household ManagementRead More »

1. All page numbers, provided for your convenience, refer to the 1998 2^nd Edition. ↩

2. Arendt uses the term ‘action’ more narrowly than do the praxeologists of the Austrian School. ↩