Fear of Work: Hannah Arendt’s Cold War Aesthetics

This chapter explores one of the post-war period’s most influential accounts of labour through one of its most celebrated thinkers, Hannah Arendt. It outlines a philosophy oriented towards one principal anxiety: the perceived takeover of the liberal world order by workers and work. The chapter describes, through Arendt, how liberal political ideals can be stated as a denigration of labour, and explores one way in which labour may be denied any human actuality at all (namely, through insisting on its invisibility and inaccessibility). Starting with Arendt’s early reading of Marx, through The Human Condition and onto Arendt’s more explicitly political writings, the chapter unpacks the ideological convictions behind her metaphysics of labour, work and action. I finally consider Arendt’s claim that art redeems the first two of these, and her identification of the dictatorship of workers with the proletarianisation of the intellectual.