Got it — you want empirical-rational support (evidence in a more grounded, factual way) for the idea that the polis/oikos distinction was always underpinned by compulsion, normalized domination, and crossover between life and politics, not a pure separation.
Let's break it down carefully:

---

1. Historical Evidence: Labor, Slavery, and the Greek Polis

• Slavery in classical Athens:

  • Empirical fact: Athenian democracy — the ideal of political freedom and action that Arendt venerates — depended directly on a massive enslaved class (~1/3 of the population).

  • Moses Finley, in The Ancient Economy, shows that the economy and daily life of Athens were sustained by slavery. Without slaves doing agricultural, domestic, and artisanal labor, the citizen class could not have "freely" devoted themselves to political life.

  • → Implication: The clear division between bios politikos (action) and homo laborans (necessity) existed only because violent compulsion (slavery) secured the latter invisibly.

• Oikos management was political:

  • Empirical fact: Managing the household (especially large households with slaves) required forms of rule and control — political practices within the so-called "private" sphere.

  • Aristotle, in Politics, openly discusses that ruling slaves and wives is a form of governance, albeit "inferior" to public governance.

  • → Implication: Politics and domination were already deeply enmeshed in the oikos — no clean division.

---

2. Modern Empirical Support: Feminist Economic Histories

• Reproductive labor as economic base:

  • Empirical research: Feminist scholars (e.g., Silvia Federici, Maria Mies) show that unpaid reproductive labor (domestic work, childrearing) has historically subsidized capitalist economies and nation-states without formal recognition.

  • → Example: If women’s unpaid labor were waged, it would amount to trillions of dollars in GDP terms today (studies by the International Labour Organization, Oxfam, UN Women).

  • → Implication: The supposed "non-political" sphere of care and reproduction has always been structurally necessary for "public" economies and states — but invisibly, under normalized compulsion.

---

3. Theoretical-Philosophical Support: Colonization of Human Faculties

• Marcuse and "one-dimensional man":

  • In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse shows that technological society collapses distinctions between free activity (action, thought) and necessity (labor, survival), by instrumentalizing all life-processes for production and consumption.

  • → Implication: Even thought (bios theoretikos) and action (bios politikos) are absorbed into labor-like functions today — calculability, productivity, performativity.

• Giorgio Agamben and "bare life":

  • In Homo Sacer (1995), Agamben shows that modern sovereignty rests on the ability to reduce people to "bare life" — life stripped to survival, to being killable — linking politics to the management of biological existence.

  • → Implication: Politics today is not the realm of free action but the administration of survival, necessity, and exclusion.

---

4. Empirical Example: Colonialism and Race

• Race as the oikos/polis distinction exported:

  • Historical fact: In colonial empires, European states ruled colonies as oikos (zones of necessity, labor, domination), while preserving the polis ideal at home (freedom, citizenship).

  • Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: colonial governance shows that racialized subjects were relegated to bare biological life, domestic labor, and unfree labor conditions.

  • → Implication: The separation of labor and politics was racially imposed and structurally violent.

---

Short Summary of the Support You Now Have:

Claim	Empirical/Theoretical Evidence
Classical polis depended on labor compulsion	Slavery in Athens (Moses Finley)
Oikos itself involved political rule	Aristotle’s Politics
Reproductive labor sustains modern economies invisibly	Federici, ILO studies
Modernity collapses action/theory into labor	Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man
Sovereignty today governs bare life	Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Colonialism exported the oikos/polis domination	Ann Laura Stoler

---

So in short: You have hard historical evidence (slavery, domestic labor, colonial administration), economic data (on unpaid labor), and theoretical diagnosis to rationally and empirically support your deeper claim that compulsion, not just confusion, structures the relation between action, labor, and politics — both historically and today.