The social and the political, life and world

The concepts of ‘social’ and ‘society’ – like the related terms ‘societal’ and ‘sociability’ – can mean several things depending on political and historical context. The Latin term societas referred to a loose federation of allies for a specific purpose and later to particular fellowships and partnerships of various sorts (such as ‘High Society’ in the eighteenth century). There are many forms of human collective and not all of them are ‘social’ in the sense developed here. Humans are obviously dependent on others and ‘provisions must be made’, as Arendt put it, ‘that affect the existence of all, since without such provisions, communal life would be impossible’.Footnote ¹⁷ Robert Castel has usefully described this element of communal life as ‘societal’ and is the elementary relationship of dependency that can be understood in terms of human primary sociability.Footnote ¹⁸ At the most basic and general level, collective existence can be referred to as ‘societal’ and is chiefly concerned with tending to the basic needs of life. Primary sociability is the dominant form of interaction in feudal communities, which tend to be defined by patrimonial relations of obligation and protection, blood bonds, strict hierarchies of gender and sexuality, and, in Castel's words, seemingly ‘permanent relationships of dependence and interdependence rooted in bounded territorial communities’.Footnote ¹⁹ Such historically and geographically variable arrangements can be characterised as ‘societies without the social’.

Human collectivities become ‘social’ when primary sociability breaks down and ‘public order’ – as defined by dominant political and economic groups – is disturbed. More specifically, social institutions are those specialised bodies – hospitals, orphanages, homeless shelters, refugee camps – which arise in more complex human collectivities when the primary bonds of sociability are inadequate to the task of attending to basic needs to an extent which threatens existing economic and governance hierarchies. Castel has suggested five formal characteristics that can be found in all social institutions: 1) ‘a collective construct of practices whose function is protective, integrative, and only later, preventative … societal assistance arises from the intervention of society upon itself’; 2) ‘some degree of specialisation and later professionalisation in the provision of social assistance’; 3) ‘a level of routinisation in the determination of when “social” interventions are required, which groups should receive it and which should not’; 4) ‘delivery of social assistance is always implicated in the creation of new forms of space, of territorialisation and localisation, of treatment in a specialized institutional site’; and 5) ‘the criteria for receipt of assistance depends on communal belonging’.Footnote ²⁰ Later we will describe and analyse some of the formal characteristics of these institutions that are evident in the administration of human security. The point to note here is that we can describe these institutions as ‘public’ in that they reflect matters of common concern. However, strictly speaking, they should not be understood as ‘political’.

The social and the political are not synonymous concepts. Confusion over the difference, according to Arendt, can be traced, in part, to a misreading of Aristotle's famous definition of the essence of humans as zōon politikon, as a political animal. As early as Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas this became ‘homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis (“man is by nature political, that is, social”)’.Footnote ²¹ ‘“Social animal”’, sociologist Raymond Aron similarly asserted, ‘is as good a definition of zoon politicon as “political animal”’.Footnote ²² Yet Aristotle's ‘politikon’, Arendt insisted, did not mean any form of human collectivity. It referred only to the organisation of the polis, ‘a unique, outstanding way of life, of being-together’.Footnote ²³ If what is particular to humans is that we are social beings then surely we would not have needed Aristotle to realise the ‘banality’.Footnote ²⁴ As Castel has put it, ‘the social should not be understood … as the collection of relationships that distinguish humanity as the species’.Footnote ²⁵ Yet one consequence of the claim that homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis is that in modern sociology and even much ‘political philosophy’, argued Arendt, ‘politics does not even have an origin of its own: it came into being because of the elementary and prepolitical fact of biological necessity, which makes men need each other in the arduous task of keeping alive’.Footnote ²⁶ Up to and including the contemporary period, the management of communal life is imagined to be the end purpose of ‘politics’, now conceived as a form of governmental administration. Its purpose is to manage the basic needs and processes necessary to sustain human life. Such assumptions about politics – that it is to ‘secure life, livelihood, and a minimum of happiness for the many’ – make it plausible to assume that politics exists everywhere and every form of human interaction is political.Footnote ²⁷

To better distinguish the social from the political it is necessary to briefly review the philosophical-anthropological character of primary sociability, the requirements of human ‘life itself’. Arendt's approach is famously built on her analysis of three forms of human activity: labour, work, and action. The closest activity to the primary sociability described by Castel is the elemental character of labour and labouring activities. Arendt defined labour as ‘the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself’.Footnote ²⁸ We engage in labouring activities, humans as animal laborans, to sustain natural, biological life on earth, an activity we have in common with all animals. Animal laborans is not the labouring class itself, or any ‘sociologically’ defined group. Rather it is a ‘way of life, even of a relationship to the world’.Footnote ²⁹ Human labour links us most closely to nature and the earth we inhabit with other living creatures. We confront the physical realities imposed on us independently of our will, through our subjective needs and wants, though the conditions under which humans labour are always shaped by human conventions.

In contrast to the life sustaining activity of labour, work is the human effort to create, to fabricate and make an artificial and objective world of durable objects and things. This ‘world’ is different from the natural environment of the earth, the lived place shared by all biological creatures. ‘the human condition of work’, Arendt suggested, ‘is worldliness’.Footnote ³⁰ To engage in work, humans as homo faber, is to rebel against the dictates of nature, perhaps even to the point of destroying it. Work is constituted by a world of objects and things governed by the categories of means and ends; the ends justify the means. Fabrication, reification, and instrumentalism are the modes and methods of homo faber. ‘If nature and the earth generally constitute the condition of human life’, Arendt maintained, ‘then the world and the things of the world constitute the condition under which this specifically human life can be at home on earth’.Footnote ³¹ From art and architecture to laws and public monuments, it is through work that humans create the artefacts that make the world our home.

Arendt's third and distinctively political activity is action. This is the human capacity for initiative and spontaneity, the ability to begin something new that cannot have been predicted. It can never be captured by a plan or blueprint found in the making activities of work. The ontological bases of political action are two facts: natality and plurality. The former is the biological fact of birth, which means that the essence of humans is that we are beginners. Through action and speech, humans have the capacity to begin and create new worlds and thereby interrupt and disrupt the endless processes associated with labour and the instrumentality associated with work. Metaphorically and literally, childbirth and childrearing connect labour to the public, political world; it is how the human body is ‘transcended into a common world’.Footnote ³² This is human life in its ‘non-biological sense, the span of each time man has between birth and death’. This form of life, Arendt wrote, ‘manifests itself in action and speech’.Footnote ³³ Plurality refers to the fact that there are many of us, but in a manner more than the simple multiplication of the human species; ‘nobody is ever the same as anyone else who lived, lives, or will ever live’. This ‘plurality’, she argued, ‘is specifically the condition … of all political life’ and is expressed in the human capacity to join together with others to create a public political world.Footnote ³⁴ In common with the activity of ‘work’, political action is constitutive of a public realm; it is a worldly and world-making activity.

Pause to note how this conception of political action is fundamentally at odds with the theory of political realism. While Arendt agreed with Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau that political conflict and the political realm could not be reduced to a scientific problem with a technical solution, that the political was distinct from other forms of human endeavour, she possessed an entirely different evaluation of the meanings of politics, power, and violence.Footnote ³⁵ As Margaret Canovan has put it, Arendt ‘defied the German tradition of “realism” by maintaining that it is action-as-speech rather than government that constitutes true politics; that agreement and consent, not domination, found republics, and that acting in concert, not violence, creates power.’Footnote ³⁶ It is also important to note here that political action discloses a unique form of political subjectivity that Arendt described in terms of ‘who’ rather than ‘what’ we are. It is an account of political subjectivity wholly absent from the realist tradition but which illuminates something fundamental to social regulation as distinct from political action, a contrast we return to in the analysis of human security.

‘Who’ we are and ‘what’ we are is not the same. ‘What-ness’, Arendt argued, is an attribute of physical fact and identity that may connect a person to and define them against others, such as gender, race or sexuality. Once the identity construct has been adopted or imposed, this ‘what-ness’ becomes the quality that describes a certain type; it identifies different specimens ‘of the animal species man-kind’, such as the constructions of ‘women’, ‘men’ and ‘children’ or different ethnic and racial groupings.Footnote ³⁷ Someone's ‘who-ness’, in contrast, is their specific, unique, and distinguishing identity that is constantly recreated and revealed in political action and speech. As Arendt insisted, ‘only man can … distinguish himself, and only hecan communicate himself and not merely something – thirst or hunger, affection or hostility or fear’.Footnote ³⁸ This is action and speech among individuals that are not the same but equal.Footnote ³⁹ Who somebody is, Arendt wrote, is ‘implicit in everything somebody says and does’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This agent is disclosed to others through words and deeds in the common public realm that is itself constituted by such action and speech. This distinctly human ability to initiate new beginnings and found new political spaces is, in practice, an historical and cultural construction. It is within the capacity of all humans to found and sustain a political world, but only under certain conditions.

The distinction between labour, work, and action is also a distinction between ‘life itself’ and the possibility of constituting a public, political ‘world’. Since Aristotle's The Politics, various traditions of political thought and practice have struggled over the meaning of the difference between life and world. The distinction is at the root of the most important political binaries in Western thought – between private and public, subject and citizen, even though the usage of these terms frequently changes as an effect of gendered, economic and military power. Sometimes the distinction between life and world has appeared fundamental to the way humans have thought about and organised community and sometimes the distinction has been ignored. Life and world have been understood as constituted by different activities, different spatial locations and sometimes they have merged into a concrete historical formation, as in the modern social realm described in more detail momentarily.

To be clear, political action and the founding of a public political realm should not be conflated with the human togetherness of primary sociability. It is much more episodic and rare. Political action is not the same as cooperating with others socially for the sake of sustaining life processes or treating others instrumentally as means to the end of securing and accumulating wealth. Yet international theory has not been very good at explicitly distinguishing between forms of life and human activity, such as biological ‘life’ and ‘world’. To be sure, the field has now belatedly joined others in the humanities and social sciences in investigating the deep interest power has in the human body and the politics of regulating the biological life of populations.Footnote ⁴¹ As the growing literature on ‘biopolitics’ suggests, analysis of the distinction and blurring of the distinction between our biological and political lives is important, but this is only to the extent that such work does indeed rely on the existence of such a distinction. To in any way replicate the blurring, for example, in embracing such a thing as ‘bare life’ as an exemplary form of political action,Footnote ⁴² is to reinforce rather than challenge the modes of governance that have come to dominate in the contemporary period.

Thus far it has been suggested that certain preliminary distinctions – between primary sociability, social institutions and political action – underpin the difference between life and world and ‘what’ and ‘who’ we are. In the next two sections, these distinctions will be used to describe and analyse the blurring of life and world into the modern social realm under capitalism that underpins the human security agenda. International interventions that constitute and act on subjects based on ‘what-ness’ homogenise and depoliticise their subjects. Rather than empowering the most marginalised, the subjectivity of those governed this way is produced in a manner destructive of the plurality and capacity for new beginnings required for political action. This is not an accident; it is a mode of conduct integral to the modern social realm under capitalism. However, to make this argument in relation to the human security agenda it is necessary to describe and analyse the historical rise of the modern social realm from late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

The ‘social’ realm as historical formation

To think historically about the modern rise of the social is to think through the political consequences of the transformation of primitive economy to a complex capitalist and nation-state system. At first glance, Hannah Arendt's peculiar understanding of the modern social as the realm ‘where the life process has established its own public domain’Footnote ⁴³ is idiosyncratic. Indeed, her writing in this area has not always been well received or well understood, even by those sympathetic to her thought. For Hanna Pitkin, whenever the concept of the social appeared in Arendt's work it unwittingly resembled the Blob from the 1958 movie Attack of the Blob. Pitkin accused Arendt of reifying the social, turning it into a horrifying monster menace ‘capable of doing and being done to’.Footnote ⁴⁴ On this view, we need to demystify the Blob to properly understand the ‘real world’ problems Arendt was trying to address, according to Pitkin: ‘the gap between our enormous, still increasing powers and our apparent helplessness to avert the various disasters – national, regional, and global – looming on our horizon’.Footnote ⁴⁵

In fact, Arendt's writing on the social is grounded on more than some generalised feeling of subjection. When properly read alongside comparable historical and theoretical work, Arendt's concept can be defended as a powerful analysis of the political consequences of industrial capitalism and supporting ideologies, that is, the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and the dominance of bourgeois categories of thought regarding economy and politics with their specific formulation of the public-private distinction and the collapsing of the distinction between life and world. We do not look to Arendt for a conventional history of the social and what she does say about its historical evolution is incomplete. In Origins of Totalitarianism, the elements that ‘crystallized’ into ‘the social’ (as well as the totalitarian) are the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie; imperial accumulation of capital in which ‘Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver, if and insofar as it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole’;Footnote ⁴⁶ and the rise (and decline) of the nation-state. In The Human Condition, ‘society's victory in the modern age’Footnote ⁴⁷ is again explained by capitalism and the bureaucratic nation-state in addition to three earlier events – imperial, religious, and scientific – at the ‘threshold’ of the ‘modern age’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As with her account of totalitarianism, Arendt deliberately resisted the temptation to offer a linear path of causality that might be understood as culminating in the creation of the modern social realm. Nonetheless, her writing in this area is united by the consistency of her unique form of philosophical anthropology, described above, and analysis of capitalist modernity.

The specifically capitalist modernity of the ‘social’ is captured in a remark of Justin Rosenberg's in Empire of Civil Society. ‘Sociology’, he noted,

The concept of society emerges with capitalism because newly defined ‘private’ economic activities needed to be distinguished from the state. Civil society was capitalist economy distinguished from state ‘politics’ defined as government. John Locke famously grounded civil society on the security of property and the capitalist requirement that labour-power be ‘free’ and separated from the means of production. This arrangement became liberal common-sense with ‘social contract’ theories that presented the conditions of bourgeois society as the state of nature existing prior to political order and justifying restrictions on state control of private property and wealth.Footnote ⁵⁰

The modern social realm is a distinctly capitalist form of public regulation. With Adam Smith, the concept of civilised society shifted from a contract binding the individual to the state toward a self-regulating domain emerging out of individual material interests and communal needs in a market economy.Footnote ⁵¹ As David Frisby and Derek Sayer have put it, ‘the very possibility of abstractly conceptualizing society at all would seem to have been historically dependent upon the concrete development of bürgerliche Gesellschaft: market society, civil society, bourgeois society. Only then did the generality society become visible, a possible object of theory, in a way comparable to the emergence of the polis as an object of reflection for the Greeks’.Footnote ⁵² Human life came to be understood as something to be rationally acted upon through a series of discrete ontological domains – economy, politics, and now society – each with its own distinct patterns and norms. Hegel, for example, conceived civil society as the totality of private individuals connected together into a ‘system of needs’ that could be integrated by the rational, universalising state that transcended the market, representing for the first time the interests of society as a whole.Footnote ⁵³ ‘Never before’, Arendt noted, ‘had any political organism sought to encompass all those who had actually lived in it’.Footnote ⁵⁴

As distinct from polis and oikos, modern market society was conceptualised as the mass or multitude of households in which ‘social housekeeping’ was to be provided by a bureaucratic state. Etymologically and in antiquity, oikonomia (economy) and oikonomikos (economics) denoted the management of the household with the aim of increasing its use value to household members. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in a famous entry for ‘political economy’ in Grande Encylopédie, ‘Economy or oeconomie, a word derived from oikos, meaning a house, and nomos, meaning law, ordinarily signifies merely the wise and legitimate management of a house for the common good of the entire family. The meaning of the term has since been extended to mean the management of the larger family of the state’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Gunnar Myrdal similarly drew an analogy between the traditional patriarchal model of the family household – in which the dominant paterfamilias is in control – and the hybrid ‘political economy’ of the modern bureaucratic state that ‘keeps house for its members’.Footnote ⁵⁶ For Arendt, explicitly drawing on Myrdal, ‘the collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one superhuman family is what we call “society”, and its political form of organization is called “nation”’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rather than the labouring classes identifying themselves as such, modern ‘society’ identified itself with a piece of territory called the nation-state.Footnote ⁵⁸ Its end purpose was to provide security for the life process of society.

Marx, of course, powerfully exposed civil society as bürgerliche Gesellschaft, as bourgeois society. The abstractions of both ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ were ideological justifications for class interests.Footnote ⁵⁹ This problematic, the reality of class conflict and the increasing radicalisation of workers, called forth a novel set of ‘social questions’, namely how to secure private wealth in light of the misery of the working classes.Footnote ⁶⁰ The class dimension of the rise of the modern social realm and social administration is crucial. Recall Robert Castel's characterisation of ‘societies with the social’, communities that have developed specialised bodies to deal with the break down of primary sociability or the requirements of more complex communal life. Large-scale social assistance is associated with maintaining existing hierarchical structures, especially to the extent that it shores up ‘public order’ as defined by dominant classes. In the pre-industrial period, the dominant formulation of the Social Question was how to contend with the disordering effects of vagabonds, purposeless wonderers who did not work. With industrial capitalism, not the vagabonds at the margins but the labouring masses themselves were a threat to public order and the security of property. Rather than mass poverty and vagabondage caused by the absence of the means of subsistence, widespread pauperism, Castel observed, was now the result of ‘the precariousness of employment … at the very heart of the wealth-creating process’.Footnote ⁶¹ The issue was no longer how to maintain social harmony in the face of vagabonds who did not work but the insecurity of those integrated into the system of wage labour; ‘labor as a human activity …’ Arendt observed, ‘became a public political fact of the first order’.Footnote ⁶²

Social welfare emerged as a compromise between the cruelty of the profit motive under capitalism and the strategic requirements of minimal solidarity. In mitigating the worst effects of capitalism, existing property relations could be secured through a combination of ‘social’ and moral regulation. For political realists, accepting the reality of class antagonism but rejecting socialist hopes for its resolution, the creation of and intervention into the social realm served an important function for state power.Footnote ⁶³ Observing first German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's formation of comprehensive social insurance during the 1880s, the first system of its kind, Max Weber realised that a strong Sozialstaat was necessary in the context of the power struggle between nations; state run social policy would tie the fate of the German working classes to the success of the imperial nation.Footnote ⁶⁴ Successful realpolitik required strong socialpolitik. Impressed by the ‘social imperialism’ of nineteenth century England, in which class resentment was partially displaced by the cultivation of working class pride in the Empire, Carl Schmitt believed that in ‘protect[ing] one and disarm[ing] the other’ social policy neutralised the friend-enemy opposition of class antagonism.Footnote ⁶⁵ In France, Émile Durkheim's conception of solidarity emerged as a third way beyond liberal individualism and Marxist class conflict. For Durkheim, social cohesion was based on the degree of dependence the component parts of society have on each other. Society itself and the social ties between people were conceived as objects of intervention with the state and its laws the ‘public’ entity responsible for maintaining the bonds of solidarity.Footnote ⁶⁶

The mechanics of such modern ‘social’ arrangements are not captured in Hobbes’ sovereign model of power and its associated conception of security. ‘Security remained the decisive criterion’, Arendt noted, ‘but not the individual's security against “violent death”, as in Hobbes … but a security which should permit an undisturbed development of the life process of society as a whole’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The term ‘government’, from ‘govern’, the Greek word kubernan, ‘to steer’, indicates the purpose of civil administration, the steering of large-scale human conduct and the remodelling of ‘society’. Successful nation-states are imagined to secure a way of life in which the pursuit of ‘private’ interests is made compatible with the so-called ‘public’ good. However, the social realm is neither properly public nor private. Matters related to building the common public political world, as described above, are conflated with those related to maintaining life; the so-called public (government) became a function of private, class interests.Footnote ⁶⁸ In such a system, Arendt insisted, any so-called common good (as in Rousseau) or common-wealth (as in Hobbes) ought to be distinguished from notions of the worldliness of the public realm; concepts of common good or common-wealth signal ‘only that’ newly defined ‘private individuals have interests in common’, that is, the security of life and property.Footnote ⁶⁹

The public was redefined and made synonymous with government and government's primary rationale was the sustenance of ‘society’. In Arendt's terminology, ‘the criterion for action within’ this new realm of the social ‘is competence and efficiency in securing life's necessities’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is the context for Foucault's increasingly influential claims regarding the workings of ‘power over man insofar as man is a living being’.Footnote ⁷¹ Biopower, he argued, regulated populations through pastoral care, producing whole populations – societies – amenable to coordination and mobilisation in the face of new threats and material vulnerabilities. Novel forms of statistical and demographic knowledge justified and sustained systems of intervention into more and more areas of life; it determined whether some groups needed more direct management than others, more targeted interventions in populations subdivided socially, that is, along lines of nationality, class, gender, sexuality, and race. While modern life was made healthier, longer lasting, rational, productive and efficient, man-as-species became an object of administrative control, intervention and normalisation.

It has not been difficult for international theorists of biopolitics to present human security as the latest effort to constitute subjects, this time in the global South, ‘that contribute to global stability through their good health, employability, competitiveness, productivity and political docility’.Footnote ⁷² This section has suggested that biopolitical forms of control, as well as political realist subordination of class conflict to state power, are two elements of something broader, the rise of the social realm under capitalism. Moreover, as the next section will illustrate, the distinction between the historical rise of the social and the worldliness of public, political action, thus far absent in international theories of biopolitics, offers a distinctive and broader position from which to query human security and suggests what is at stake in the emergence of the transnational management of human needs under worldwide capitalist relations: ‘the linkage of politics and life results in an inner contradiction that cancels and destroys what is specifically political about politics’.Footnote ⁷³

Human security as the social

The discourse of human security emerged, in part, out of dissatisfaction with orthodox conceptions of security and development, the former largely concerned with the power of the state against external risks and threats and the latter synonymous with economic growth in a global capitalist economy. When juxtaposed to state or geopolitical security, human security appeared to be revisionist almost by definition; the intention was to undermine many of the power structures that create humanitarian catastrophe. Much about the effort to move beyond orthodox conceptions of security and development is well meaning and the agenda here is not the reactionary one of merely criticising those seeking to assist those living in abject fear and want. Indeed, to extend a point made about social work in general, it is worth noting that human security ‘has a relationship of continuous tension arising from the conflicting roles of maintaining the consensus (and acting as an agent of social control) and on occasions of being involved in conflict and confrontation situations against authority’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Perhaps in the face of capitalism's relentless exploitation of both the natural earth and the public, political world the reformist social work of the human security agenda is the best that can be achieved.

To think about the modern social today means thinking in a context of the dismantling of welfare states, but also of the greater regulation of under-development and violent conflict by global and regional institutions.Footnote ⁷⁵ Given the long history of colonial administration and its heyday in the nineteenth century, forms of social regulation have always been implicated in imperial hierarchy.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, the ‘social policies’ that provide content to human security interventions take place in a transnational economic and military context in which a greater variety of institutions are involved in its design and implementation. Social forms of governance have become transnational in scope; the relationship between ‘social policy’ and the state is breaking down. The idea of the ‘national economy’ that was central to the rise of the social realm in the nineteenth century has given way to an awareness of the greater intensity and consequences of worldwide economic connections. Although governing elites still largely organise public administration based (with some exceptions) on a national and territorial logic ‘they no longer conceive of themselves as operating upon a naturally functioning and systematically integrated national population whose “social” coherence is a condition for its economic security’.Footnote ⁷⁷ National and transnational private entities are assuming responsibilities previously viewed as ‘public’. Governance has flowed upwards to supranational entities and downwards to local and regional governments. ‘The social’ is mutating.

For Robert Castel, recall, the primary purpose of all organised social assistance is to maintain or create the greatest possible social harmony, to uphold order and equilibrium. In our context, threats to security and development are no longer seen as unrelated or affecting only the most problematic parts of the earth. Dominant states and their international organisations have sought to intervene and transform other collectivities into societies with a functioning social realm; it is the most effective means of ensuring their ability to govern themselves. From the perspective developed earlier, the ‘social’ agenda of human security is the continuation of the process of capitalist security management in which the catastrophes created and sustained by imperial hierarchy are contained in the global South. As a result, an uneven global social realm has been conceived as a totality, ‘the facsimile of one superhuman family’,Footnote ⁷⁸ to borrow Arendt's words, that can be acted upon in the name of social progress. More specifically, human security regulates the life process of parts of the human species by watching over and intervening in the general health and wellbeing of certain populations in need, what the UN refers to as the ‘vital core of all human lives’.

There can be little doubt that the protection and sustenance of life processes has become the central function of national and now increasingly global forms of social governance. The institutional growth and acceleration of the human security agenda is partly driven by a logic Arendt identified as crucial to the social realm, its ‘irresistible tendency to grow’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is a cliché that bureaucracy, ‘the most social form of government’,Footnote ⁸⁰ expands to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is constantly produced and reproduced because, recalling Arendt's phenomenology of different human activities, ‘the life process itself … has been channelled into the public realm’.Footnote ⁸¹ The multiple and complex threats to human life from unequal access to heath services, food and water, climate change, and economic and military crises demand urgent action into the most basic conditions of human existence. These conditions are ‘born of a great urgency’, Arendt commented, ‘and motivated by a more powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends on it’.Footnote ⁸² This life sustaining labour is cyclical and repetitive and yet at some point the task of the bureaucratic administrator of social assistance ‘is less to keep the life process intact and provide for its regeneration’, Arendt warned, ‘than to care for the upkeep of the various gigantic bureaucratic machines whose processes consume their services and devour their products as quickly and mercilessly as the biological life process itself’.Footnote ⁸³ If the human security agenda can be understood as an expansion of ‘the organizational device of the household’,Footnote ⁸⁴ then it is not the despotic patriarch, but the bureaucrat, who rules.

The diversity of administrative forms and variety of non-state actors carrying out the human security agenda should be no surprise in light of the particular ontology of the social realm as a hybrid of public and private. None of the formal characteristics identified in Castel's study of social institutions require assistance to be provided by unambiguously ‘public’ or ‘private’ actors.Footnote ⁸⁵ Social institutions, recall, are those specialised and often professionalised constructions aimed at protecting and integrating members of a perceived collective; increasingly routinised decision-making processes determine who receives assistance; and these practices are ‘implicated in the creation of new forms of space’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The panoply of actors involved in the identification, provision, and implementation of human security, the creation of ‘humanitarian’ space, similarly constitutes a system of governance and all that this implies in terms of ‘steering’ human societies. Keeping in mind the distinction between different public forms, these humanitarian spaces should be understood as social, rather than political, as concerned with life rather than world.

In a manner comparable to the surveillance and governance of welfare recipients in the core capitalist states, human security workers are tasked with managing populations conceived as dangerous to others and themselves. The pressing task is to create operational procedures for implementing the new security agenda, the accumulated standards of knowledge and ideas about progress, on particular populations. In the administration of human security, populations are divided and segmented into ethnic, gendered, age, national, and regional categories. This system of distinguishing one group from another, Arendt argued, is a ‘constituent element of the social realm’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This is social discrimination based on human categories and types, and is necessary when operating on such a large-scale. The problem, Arendt continued, ‘is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is – as distinct from … who he is’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Recall the discussion of ‘what-ness’ and ‘who-ness’, the different social and political subjectivities. Because human security intervenes into different specimens of the human species, it constitutes subjects in the manner of social behaviour rather than political action. Behaviour is routine conduct, regulated and normalised, the following of norms, conventions, and standards created by expert others. The mentalities and modes of conduct required for political action, in contrast, not only reveals a unique ‘who-ness’, they require the presence of a plurality of others who are equal, but not the same (equality is to the political what sameness is to the social). This plurality underpins the human ability to do more than multiply and sustain the species for the sake of life; it is creative of a public political world, an artefact in-between people where it is possible to interrupt and disrupt the repetitiveness of labouring processes and the instrumentality of work.

With the modern rise and transnational expansion of the social – in which management of the life process of dangerous populations is the central function of governance – the distinction between life and world has collapsed. Seen in this light, the defining feature of modernity was not self-alienation, as Marx had it, but world alienation.Footnote ⁸⁹ Worldly political existence is different from the simple fact of living. To live and labour on the earth is not the same as inhabiting a world of stable institutions and experiences that make political life possible. In the 1950s, Arendt predicted that a new stage of world alienation would emerge from the processes now commonly associated with so-called ‘globalisation’ and the human security agenda: the ‘decline of the European nation-state system; the economic and geographic shrinkage of the earth …; the transformation of mankind, which until our own time was an abstract notion or a guiding principle for humanists only, into a really existing entity’.Footnote ⁹⁰ These conditions mark our current stage of world alienation, an era in which global governance, global steering, is a reality – the transnational, uneven, bureaucratic administration of the global life process. ‘Just as the family and its property were replaced by class membership and national territory’, Arendt observed, ‘so mankind now begins to replace nationally bound societies, and the earth replaces the limited state territory’.Footnote ⁹¹ Arendt was anticipating the extent to which forms of ‘social’ control would operate through humans as animal laborans, how the necessary metabolism with nature of millions could become the concern of an entire architecture of global governance.