rise of the social

is the penetration of the 'household' concerns (i.e. Economic and administrative concerns) into public life. The more we think of the political realm as concerned with matters of subsistence and material reproduction, the more likely we are to accept hierarchy in the place of civic equality (participation), the more likely we are to replace human freedom with animal necessity.

We moderns have lost the clarity of this distinction, thanks mainly to what Arendt calls 'the rise of the social' and the penetration of 'household' (that is, economic and administrative) concerns into public life. But we have also lost it because philosophers beginning with Plato have created false analogies between the political and the house-hold realms, the better to make an authoritarian or hierarchical politics seem more plausibly 'natural' to those schooled in a democratic understanding of civic equality.12 To put Arendt's thought in a nutshell: the more we think of the political realm as concerned with matters of subsistence and material reproduction, the more likely we are to accept hierarchy in the place of civic equality... the more likely we are to see rule by elites of one sort or another as the quintessential political activity. Arendt's point is that, strictly speaking, ruling has nothing to do with genuine politics, since it destroys the civic equality the equality of rights and participation, the isonomia that is the hallmark of political relations and a democratic public realm.(Villa 2000: 10) . . . . . 'Drawing on the Aristotelian distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the household) from the polis (the public realm of the political community), Arendt argues that matters of labor, economy and the like properly belong to the former, not the latter. The emergence of necessary labor , the private concerns of the oikos, into the public sphere (what Arendt calls 'the rise of the social') has for her the effect of destroying the properly political by subordinating the public realm of human freedom to the concerns mere animal necessity.' http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/

rise of the social, n.All

rise of the social