For Hannah Arendt, animal laborans names not a sociological category but a civilizational logic. It designates a form of life governed by necessity, absorbed in the repetitive satisfaction of bodily needs, and confined to the privacy of sensation. As Marlyse Pouchol paraphrases, such individuals are “trapped in the privacy of their bodies,” oriented toward consumption rather than judgment. Where necessity dominates, thought is not merely discouraged but rendered superfluous: there is nothing to deliberate, nothing to judge, only cycles to be maintained. Arendt’s critique does not target labor or biological life per se; it targets the elevation of necessity to the supreme criterion of value. Once this elevation occurs, moral reasoning collapses into procedural rationality, and politics into administration.

To define the human primarily as an economic and social being is therefore not a neutral descriptive move. It is a normative reduction that privileges “how” questions—efficiency, optimization, management—while foreclosing “why” questions altogether. Survival becomes self-justifying; necessity becomes unquestionable. In Arendt’s terms, the oikos does not merely expand—it metastasizes, producing what she calls “the social,” a domain in which biological life processes and economic imperatives overwhelm action, judgment, and meaning. Appeals to inevitability, realism, or pragmatism at this point are not explanatory but ideological: they are precisely the language through which domination by necessity is naturalized.

Homo faber initially appears to offer resistance to this reduction. As the maker of durable objects and institutions, homo faber generates a shared world marked by relative permanence and stability—conditions without which meaning cannot arise. Yet this sphere is itself compromised by its instrumental logic. Means–ends reasoning dominates; the world appears as a stock of resources or a technical problem awaiting solution. Under conditions of acceleration, disposability, and planned obsolescence, even the limited durability homo faber once provided collapses. What remains is not world-building but throughput. Permanence is no longer eroded accidentally; it is treated as an obstacle.

Arendt’s concept of “the social” must therefore be understood not as sociability, but as a historical configuration in which economic necessity and biological life colonize all other forms of human activity. Most decisively, they colonize action (praxis)—the domain of homo politicus. For Arendt, action is irreducibly plural, public, and unpredictable. It is the space in which persons appear as who rather than what or how. Politics, in this sense, is not governance, representation, or policy delivery, but the collective activity of judging, speaking, and deciding together. Participation is not instrumentally valuable; it is constitutive of freedom. To lose this space is not merely to lose democracy, but to lose the conditions under which personhood can appear at all.

The contemporary claim that politics must be subordinated to economic necessity, administrative expertise, or behavioral management is therefore not modest or realistic. It is eliminative. It redefines action as behavior, judgment as preference aggregation, and freedom as choice within prestructured constraints. The behavioral sciences—above all economics—do not supplement politics here; they replace it. Normalization, conditioning, and incentive design are redescribed as rational governance. This is not a drift but a transformation: action is absorbed into management, and management into survival.

It is insufficient to respond that the polis/oikos distinction was always unstable, historically contingent, or ethically compromised. Arendt herself acknowledges that its maintenance often depended on exclusion, slavery, and the routinized violence of reproductive labor—facts that decisively undermine any nostalgic retrieval. But this does not rescue the present configuration. The issue is not whether domains ever overlapped; it is whether one domain has achieved total dominance. Historically, such dominance required overt coercion. In modernity, it presents itself as necessity.

This dominance corresponds to the ascendance of a stripped-down utilitarianism in which value is measured almost exclusively in terms of economic output and system stability. Alternative salience frames—ethical, political, existential—are not rebutted; they are sidelined as impractical, emotive, or naïve. Even critiques of the system are permitted only insofar as they are articulated in the language of animal laborans: resilience, wellbeing, productivity, sustainability. The horizon never shifts; survival remains the unquestioned telos.

The result is a closed circuit. Labor becomes economics; economics becomes management; management becomes politics; politics becomes existence. Existence itself is reduced to survival-driven, amoral, anti-reflective behaviorism, all while retaining the rhetoric of rationality and responsibility. This is not a failure of moral imagination but its systematic displacement.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, for Arendt modernity is characterized by a “loss of the world”: the contraction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of private introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. What is lost is not simply politics, but the shared space in which meaning, judgment, and plurality can appear. Appeals to complexity, compromise, or inevitability do not mitigate this loss; they are among its primary mechanisms.

To accept this configuration while lamenting its excesses is therefore incoherent. One either defends the dominance of necessity—and accepts the reduction of persons to managed life—or one rejects it and confronts the implications. There is no moral high ground available from within the logic of animal laborans. The exit is not reformist. It is conceptual—or it is not an exit at all.

The objection that “material needs matter” does not rebut this argument; it merely reiterates its underlying logic and thereby commits a category error. No serious account denies the reality of biological vulnerability or the harms of deprivation. It is of course true—and morally non-negotiable—that conditions of extreme deprivation foreclose meaningful action altogether, and nothing here denies the urgency of alleviating such conditions. The critique concerns not the existence of necessity but its Machiavellian political elevation to a supreme and unquestionable pseudo-principle, a mostly mythological carrot that one seldom reaches or even sees. Where there are carrots the sticks are never far away and they are not, unfortunately, mythological. That such interventions may alleviate suffering in the short term does not resolve the issue, since the question at stake is not whether people are benefiting, but whether amelioration is administered in a form that structurally forecloses their appearance as political agents. To respond by insisting that material needs matter is to shift from a critique of dominance to a performative defense of existence, leaving the structure of reduction intact. In doing so, politics is tacitly redefined as the management of need, persons are redescribed as administrable life, and judgment, action, and plurality are subordinated to optimization and survival metrics. Appeals to necessity have historically not protected the vulnerable but legitimized coercion and depoliticization by rendering dissent irresponsible and action reckless. Moreover, the claim that political judgment must await the satisfaction of material needs is self-defeating: necessity is inexhaustible, and when action is deferred until survival is secured, it is deferred indefinitely. To say that material needs matter is therefore not to answer the critique but to confirm it. It demonstrates how thoroughly the logic of animal laborans has come to dominate moral and political thought, to the point where the reduction of the human to managed life or 'bare life' appears as common sense rather than as the problem at hand. What presents itself as moral realism here is better understood as complicity in the normalization of a political order that recognizes humans only insofar as they can be managed, stabilized, and kept alive.

What ultimately emerges from this configuration is not merely the dominance of necessity, but the quiet redefinition of the human itself. When politics is reduced to the administration of life, when judgment is displaced by metrics and action by management, the space in which persons appear as more than living organisms contracts to a vanishing point. The public world does not disappear through repression alone; it is dissolved through care, protection, and optimization, until nothing remains to be acted upon except life itself. In such a regime, freedom is no longer denied—it is rendered unintelligible. What Arendt diagnosed as the loss of the world thus converges with a form of power that no longer governs through law or deliberation, but through the continuous management of vulnerability. The result is a political order that presents itself as humane precisely insofar as it has learned to operate without politics at all.

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