Revised, condensed, and sharpened version

For Hannah Arendt, the archetypal animal laborans designates not merely those who work, but those whose activity is governed by necessity and whose horizon is confined to the satisfaction of bodily needs. As Marlyse Pouchol paraphrases, such individuals are “trapped in the privacy of their bodies,” engaged in cyclical, consumptive activity, and oriented toward sensation rather than judgment. Where necessity reigns, there is little room for thinking or evaluation; action becomes repetitive, pre-reflective, and essentially thoughtless. Arendt’s critique is not of necessity as such, but of its elevation to the dominant—indeed exclusive—criterion of value. To define the human primarily as an economic or social being is to foreground amoral absorption in tasks, to privilege “how” over “why,” and to naturalize survival as the organizing principle of existence. In this sense, the oikos expands and mutates into what Arendt calls “the social,” colonizing domains previously oriented toward action, judgment, and meaning, and collapsing distinctions between labor, life, and public life.

By contrast, homo faber names the human capacity to make a world: to fabricate objects and institutions that possess relative permanence, stability, and durability. This is the realm in which a shared world can emerge and in which meaning can be sedimented over time. Here, reflective and judgmental capacities appear, though in a limited and instrumental form: means–ends rationality dominates, and the world is apprehended primarily as a resource, tool, or problem to be solved. Under conditions of acceleration and disposability, however, even this fragile permanence erodes. What homo faber builds is increasingly provisional, replaceable, and stripped of the durability required for meaningful common worlds.

Arendt’s notion of “the social” should not be confused with ordinary sociability. It names a historical transformation in which concerns traditionally confined to the private sphere—economic necessity, biological life, reproduction, and administration—come to dominate all other domains. In this process, animal laborans does not merely coexist with other forms of human activity; it subsumes them.

Most consequentially, necessity encroaches upon and deforms what Arendt calls action (praxis)—the activity of homo politicus. Action, for Arendt, is irreducibly plural, public, and unpredictable. It involves speech, judgment, and collective deliberation, and it is here that personhood properly appears—not as a what or a how, but as a who. Drawing on the Athenian assembly as a heuristic rather than an ideal, Arendt understands politics as the shared activity of thinking together, deciding together, and orienting collective life toward what appears, through reflection and judgment, to be right. Participation itself is eudaimonic—not because it maximizes welfare, but because it actualizes human plurality and freedom. Arendt is not a eudaimonist in any classical sense; flourishing, for her, is not an outcome but an activity.

Yet it is increasingly plausible that homo politicus, bios theoretikos, and even homo faber have all been subordinated to—or colonized by—homo laborans, whether in the guise of the economy, the administrative state, or their fusion. This is not merely a conceptual confusion, nor is it resolved by reinstating sharp boundaries between polis and oikos. Historically, such boundaries were often enforced through compulsion: slavery, exclusion, and the routinized violence of reproductive and domestic labor—facts Arendt herself only partially acknowledges. The issue is not crossover, which has always existed, but domination.

This domination corresponds to the ascendance of a crude utilitarianism in which activities are valued almost exclusively in terms of economic output. Competing salience frames—ethical, political, existential—are displaced or subordinated, and even proposed remedies are framed in the language of necessity, productivity, and management. Action gives way to behavior; judgment to optimization. The behavioral sciences—above all economics—replace politics, while diffuse mechanisms of normalization and conditioning, quasi-Skinnerian and Pavlovian in character, are rebranded as rational governance.

With the rise of the social, human action is redescribed as an extension of economic administration. Labor becomes economics; economics becomes management; management becomes politics; politics becomes existence; and existence itself is reduced to survival-driven, amoral, anti-reflective behaviorism masquerading as reason.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy succinctly puts it, for Arendt modernity is marked 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 merely politics, but the very space in which meaning, judgment, and plurality can appear at all.

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