PSIR Optional Paper I Section B by R P Singh

Model Answer

Question #1. Critically examine Hannah Arendt's conceptual triad of labour, work and action.

Hints:

Labour, work and action are the three elements that constitute Han-nah Arendt’s vita activa. Together, and in combination, they represent Arendt’s account of what it means to be human. The vita activa is a radical and profound challenge to two traditions in political thought. 1 The first tradition Arendt opposes is one that privileges contemplation and theoretical knowledge, the vita contemplativa, over action. She traces this view to ancient Greek political thought, which is continued in Christian ideas about the proper ends of human life. In essence, this tradition disengages from the world and demotes and diminishes the value of political action. The vita activa recovers an alternative tradition that values action and worldliness. Second, Arendt opposes a modernist tradition that, while it rejects the vita contemplativa, values labour and work over political action. In other words, Arendt not only defends the vita activa, she also defends a particular hierarchical ordering of its elements -privileging political action over work and labour.

Arendt’s vita activa has three components: labour, work and action. It is her distinction between labour and work that should concern us just now.

Labouring is simply what we do to survive. We labour to eat, to keep our bodies healthy, to keep roofs over our heads, and to keep life reproducing. All animals labour, with or without coaxing, as do slaves and women who, often literally, labour behind closed doors. There’s nothing special about labour, save for the fact that without it we would die.

Work, on the other hand, gives collective meaning to what we do. When we work to produce something we both put something into and leave something lasting in the world: a table (Arendt, like many philosophers, was fond of furniture examples), a house, a book, a car, a rug, a high precision piece of engineering with which we can order the days into time, or keep a body breathing.

In short, what we work at makes up the human reality that we all share. Work is part of what Arendt called “human artifice”: it means that we are more than mere nature, and that we have made something that endures. We labour by necessity; we work to create a human reality.

Action, for  Arendt, is  “revelatory”  in that  the  person engaging  in action discloses  their  essential  being  to others. A  crucial  element  of  action is  the  fact  that the  end is  unknown at  the  time  of  acting.  In action, the end is  “not  pursued  but  lies  in the  activity itself”. We  are  not  “in control”  of  our  action in the  way  that  we  are  in control  of  our labor  or  work . Labor  and work have  very  specified means  or  ends, whereas in action the  means  and  ends  are  inextricable  from  one  another.

Question 2. Provide arguments to support the statement “Liberty and equality are inherently opposed to each other”.

Hints:

Deliberative democracy values open and public deliberation on issues of common concern. It starts from the assumption of individuals as autonomous persons, but does not view the social relationships between these autonomous persons as relationships of conflict of interest. Rather, it sees people as relating to each other and seeking to influence each other through reasoned argument and persuasion. For advocates of deliberative democracy, persuasion is the best basis for political power, because it alone respects the autonomy of individuals and values their capacity for self-government. It also gives individuals control over an important aspect of their lives, and makes for greater and continuous accountability.

Unlike participatory democracy, which requires individuals to be constantly engaged in making decisions, deliberative democracy allows for a political division of labour between citizens and professional politicians, though citizens are involved in deliberation about public issues.

Participatory democracy

Participatory democracy is a process emphasizing the broad participation of constituents in the direction and operation of political systems. Participatory democracy strives to create opportunities for all members of a population to make meaningful contributions to decision-making, and seeks to broaden the range of people who have access to such opportunities. Since so much information must be gathered for the overall decision-making process to succeed, technology may provide important forces leading to the type of empowerment needed for participatory models, especially those technological tools that enable community narratives and correspond to the accretion of knowledge while on the other hand Deliberative democracy or discursive democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of legitimacy for the law. Deliberative democracy is compatible with both representative democracy and direct democracy. Some practitioners and theorists use the term to encompass representative bodies whose members authentically deliberate on legislation without unequal distributions of power, while others use the term exclusively to refer to decision-making directly by lay citizens, as in direct democracy. The term "deliberative democracy" was originally coined by Joseph M. Bessette in his 1980 work "Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government"

Since the objectives of the both modes are aimed at imparting more participation and increased decision making to the common citizen they can be safely described as two coins of the same coin. Deliberation is one of the most direct forms of participation and forms the bedrock of citizen participation specially in modern representative democracies which are increasingly being criticized for being distant and aloof in their decision making