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Constitutive Work, Recognition, and Why Hannah Arendt Matters

Going through a layoff can be devastating.

When I got laid off from a Christian University that had been struggling financially (typical of such post-secondary institutions in the 2000s), I needed to come to the deep logic which eliminated me from the equation. After all, I was in my early 50’s, and I had thought I was in a position that would take me to retirement – but that had come to an end. The conflict that generated my dismissal, which was one of a couple of layoffs in that year’s round of layoffs at a struggling institution. The temptation, and commonly understood answer, was that my layoff was needed because, by keeping my position, the long-term financial health of the institution would be jeopardized. That logic still seemed to widely hold even though my department was producing a surplus that could pay for a director-level salary over and above my own.

The answer I would like to share with you here will explain so much more than my layoff.

There is a social logic revolving around the nature of work that is untenable. As I have written elsewhere, work serves more than the end of bolstering our purchasing power. Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, identifies that the end of work as not just securing our purchasing powers as consumers (distributive work), but also as producers, who build and who are recognized in contributing to a common good (productive work), pp. 197 - 222. He outlines that the dominant stream of economic theory from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes saw work as aiming toward the distributive end, at the exclusion of the considerations of productive work. However, Sandel also invokes another economic tradition that has existed through thinkers as varied as Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy. Such a tradition tapped into the deep awareness of the importance of recognition that comes from our work, further sourcing this from the notoriously difficult philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel.

You will completely understand, if you have read my other work, or any of the philosophers of the romantic tradition, including Charles Taylor, that recognition is necessary to our moral characters as human beings. In the days of the early, professional economists, the key focus was on political economy, a focus we can barely recognize these days in the western world. The primacy of investor financing, and the remarkable income inequality that has followed, makes broad concerns with worldwide flourishing nearly impossible for any particular economist to consider. Thomas Picketty tried, but has notoriously under-delivered to consider political economy in its broad focused largely because he did so from the standpoint of distributive work, and almost completely ignored what Sandel called productive work, and what I have called constitutive work. It is worth noting that all the people mentioned who focus on productive work are not professional economists. Instead, they are philosophers and religious people with credible economic chops.

Why is this important? Well, it goes to where they sourced the information. The Adam Smith of the late eighteenth century, for example, was a kind of top-down professional economist. When he writes, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interests of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as [they] may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer,” he subsumes all production under the activity of consumption. In other words, human beings are primarily to be understood as a consumer according to neoliberal economics. As such, it is fair to say that neoliberal economic theory has taken this very literally. Sandel notes that Keynes echoes Smith nearly 200 years later, proclaiming that consumption “is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” The top-down goal of work, in the opinion of the professional economists, and axiomatic of neo-liberal economies, is distribution for the purpose of consumption.

However, in Sandel’s account, an important thinker is left out in his evaluation of what he calls “the dignity of work.”

Hannah Arendt, in the Human Condition (free download), does not put production and consumption in any hierarchy. She treats them as two sides of the same coin in her extensive analysis of labor. Arendt, with great etymological evidence, characterizes our activity in our private lives as “Labor.” We labor in order to acquire consumer goods, food and the like. We labor quite hard, in most cases, and often consume no less energetically. In both aspects of this cycle, the end of one is the beginning of the other. We labor, and as soon as we stop laboring, we begin consuming. As soon as we finish consuming, we need to labor some more. The activities are, at the most fundamental level of our biological existence, cyclical; the process never truly ends. But importantly, it is rooted in our biological life process (rather than our "climbing a social ladder") which needs the shelter of the private world. We need privacy both to shelter the essentially cooperative relationship of laboring and consuming, and to sustain the biological life process.

Importantly, Arendt distinguishes between the activities of labor and work. Work differs from labor in the sense that work is something which has a definite beginning and a definite end. This includes tools that we make to help us in the laboring process, to less “useful” objects of fabrication such as works of art. Visualized, the concept of time that accompanies work is a line segment. Labor, on the other hand, is visualized as a circle. To have a definite beginning and a definite predictable end is the mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic alone distinguishes itself from all other human activities. Labor, caught in the cyclical movements of the biological life process, has neither a beginning nor an end properly speaking – only pauses and intervals between exhaustion and regeneration.

What I think is crucial to understand, for the purposes of understanding the depth of what I here have called “the social logic of work,” is that what we now refer to as work has been colonized by a world that treats both the private life of individuals as primarily characterized by consumption, and our labouring life as fitting somewhere on a social ladder. In other words, our understanding of work is distorted from our life process as biological human beings.

Let me fulfill my promise and connect the dots with my own layoff story. In the case of my layoff, the work I had done for the institution had been disconnected with the Arendtian understanding of labor I had put into it. The value of my work for the institution had been evaluated on the value it provided for the institution as that institution existed as a fixed entity. The logic of the institution, which was social by nature, dictated that any individual contribution to the institution could be essentially disassociated from the individual contributing to it. This, of course, disregards any constitutive value it had for me. But, perhaps most importantly, they discounted the productive value of the work it had for the institution itself. In academia, the work that is given is supposed to, in itself, produce beyond its initial effort. Students and faculty were to engage in the offering of learning to take that learning on exponentially. That is the way education is supposed to work. However, the institution was treating academic work as if it was a product to be consumed. In short, I had a constitutive account of work; my former employer had a consumptive account of it.

But the current fashion of treating all work as subservient to the activity of consumption is exactly the model of neoliberal economics which is primarily social and devoted to the preservation of the social world in which it is received. And, it seems to all those under contemporary working conditions, that it is this social world into which we are born, and out of which we will depart. But, I believe this to be a categorical misunderstanding. If we believe Arendt about the cyclical nature of the biological life process, we need labor to be sheltered by the realm of privacy. Ask any expectant mother and they will say that laboring needs the shelter of privacy.

The important aspect that the theorists of productive (or constitutive) work need to mention is that what privacy also shelters is a deeply moral type of recognition, that it turns out, is not at home in the social world. As Arendt draws on, and theorists such as Charles Taylor explain, it is in the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau that we can see that there is a difference between recognition and esteem. For Rousseau, the kind of esteem that he thought to be most corrosive of individual freedom was preferential esteem. As it turns out, contemporary society would be thoroughly condemned by Rousseau because of the complete tyranny of preferential esteem in the social world. When that type of preference seeps into the private world and eventually colonizes the deep sense of recognition that is a basic humanizing need, we have indeed allowed the social world into a place it doesn’t belong; it now lays a claim on our identities as moral creatures. It guts us. Instead of finding our worth in the private world of significant others that include friends, family, and trusted mentors, we are now at the mercy of a mass social world that will discard us at the first sign we do not align with its preferences. Not only does this perhaps explain why I was discarded by the Christian university, but it can also explain the deep resentment of white, non-college educated voters that gave impetus to the support for Donald Trump in 2016, and at least some of the polarization which grips us now. They feel discarded because they do not fit the preferential esteem of American society.

Hegel and Rousseau were both aware of this essential distinction between esteem and recognition, and yet modern theorists tend to overlook it. Recognition, in the sense of a deep fulfilling way in which we are known and developed as individuals, happens amidst our significant others. If we expect that we will be fulfilled by preferential esteem, on the other hand, we will, in fact, be sorely disappointed. And depressed. And anxious. And even, perhaps, suicidal. We will no longer want to go to the office.

You see, preferential esteem, in fact, is based on the principle of exchange and is built into our strictly social relationships. And if we are to experience the kind of recognition which will never disregard and discard us, we must have a sheltered space for it to appear.

We are now reaping what has been sown. The desire to increasingly work from home is, indeed, a recoiling from the social sphere into the private sphere – to the world of friends and family, of child-rearing and of romance. It is evidence that many are not getting the recognition that they need. They have realized that social, preferential esteem is not enough for fulfillment.

And perhaps the increase of “deaths of despair” (through suicide, and drug and alcohol overdoses) can, in part, be understood in this corruptive relationship of recognition and esteem. If we believed Sandel, the ones who are at the top end of the economy have confused recognition and the moral worth it conveys with the preferential esteem they have been bestowed by mass society. Sandel would have us believe that explains how we wrongly equate moral worth with our the rather fortunate circumstances of having been in the right place at the right time. As Scott Galloway rightly intuits, “I can predict your likelihood of being in the top 10% of earners by your zip code and what degree you have.” In other words, we don’t deserve our success or failure primarily by our effort, but instead, our social success is in large part, given to us.

And this is why it is important to understand the constitutive element of work – the element that does two related things, both of which are necessary to understand works importance. Some may call these Marxian insights, because indeed, there is no greater theorist of labor than Marx. The two elements that work ought to provide is: 1) sustaining the biological life of the individual, and 2) allowing for the expressive needs of each person. If we understand that, as labor, which is sheltered in the private realm, they are both present. However, if it is corrupted by the infiltration of the social world – then they are both eroded.

If we think work is merely about increasing our ability to consume, then we will indeed be the most unfree of all. We will not have any authentic responsibility for our own identities. We will indeed be at the mercy of mass society.

Source: Constitutive Work, Recognition, and Why Hannah Arendt Matters

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