The state and society reconfigured: Resolving Arendt's “social question” through Kojève's “right of equity”

The equivocation of modern civil society—its democratic potential and the actuality of economic inequality—has been accentuated by the political situations in the East and West during the 20th century. In the former, the democratic potential of civil society was stifled under state socialism, while in the latter, the welfarism of state capitalism kept the exploitative features of capitalist civil society intact. With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in the East and the perceived intellectual demise of Marxism everywhere, the neoliberal era in the West was marked by optimism in automation and the promotion of “democracy and human rights” in the East and the Global South. However, as a result of the neoliberal reconfiguration of the state and civil society, human rights became associated almost solely with formal liberties at the expense of substantive social rights, so much so that, as Samuel Moyn (2018) argued, “human rights have become prisoners of the contemporary age of inequality” (p. 6). This article departs from the presumption that it is not enough to only criticize neoliberalism. Instead, it is necessary to think of an affirmative way to reconfigure the relationship between the state and society and reconstruct the normative foundations of social rights out of the modern intellectual tradition.

The modern analysis of rights formalism can be seen as stemming from Hegel's critique that while Kant and Fichte's philosophies of right hinge on the primacy of subjective autonomy, the subject itself should be understood as historically and socially conditioned. Once formal rights are revealed as conditioned by historically identifiable social relations, the question of rights can be recast in terms of substantial inequality and its potential overcoming.¹ This critique of right formalism was extended by Marx to the analysis of property relations under 19th-century capitalism. It is not that Marx rejected traditional formal rights and the liberal conception of justice, but offered an immanent critique of these rights in the conditions of substantial inequities determined by capitalist property ownership (Shoikhedbrod, 2019).

However, 20th-century Continental political philosophy significantly deviated from the critique of rights formalism and the question of substantial (in)equality. Contemporary Continental thinkers disavow notions of juridical rights altogether (Agamben, 1998, 1999; Hardt & Negri, 2003), recast the question of human rights in terms of radical democracy (Lefort, 1988; Rancière, 2004), or discuss the question of law and right in neo-Kantian ethical terms (Derrida, 2006; Lévinas, 1998).² Influenced by Arendt's thinking about the communicative aspect of political action, Habermas (2001) theorized economic welfare as a condition of deliberative democracy. However, his theory of justice advances socioeconomic rights without offering a critique of economic exploitation. Similarly, Honneth's (1996) elaboration of intersubjective recognition downplays the socioeconomic critique of rights formalism. These contributions signify not only a departure from the Hegelian–Marxian tradition toward a formalistic approach to rights but also an abandonment of the phenomenological approach to the social ontology of right. In this respect, it is particularly striking that the “capabilities approach,” responding to Rawls's liberal and formalistic A Theory of Justice (1971) from the analytic philosophy tradition, provides a deeper understanding of social rights (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2005).

To resuscitate the phenomenological way to expound rights that is simultaneously attentive to the historical reality, in particular the persistence of the modern contradiction between the institutions of the state and civil society, this paper will revisit Arendt's phenomenology of right and her critique of welfare rights by contrasting it to Kojève's phenomenological approach to substantial rights. The contemporary ontology of the “political” as it is understood in the Continental philosophy tradition is largely attributed to 20th-century phenomenology (Marchart, 2007; Mihai, McNay, Marchart, et al., 2017, White, 2000). Heidegger's early writings, notably Being and Time, stand out for their ontological exploration of Dasein's anxiety-toward-death—an awareness of finitude that shapes our temporal existence—and the interplay between lived experience so understood and historical hermeneutics. Yet, the revelations from the Black Notebooks caution that the political implications of Heidegger's phenomenology cannot be disentangled from his disgraceful Nazi affiliations (Wolin, 1993, 2023). This problem was perceptively recognized by his contemporaries such as Arendt and Kojève, who crafted explicitly political phenomenologies in response to Heidegger's apolitical or Nazi-leaning philosophical musings. In fact, the contemporary ontology of the “political” owes much to the phenomenological contributions of Arendt and Kojève (Marchart, 2005, 2007).

In reflecting on the political, both Arendt and Kojève devised phenomenologies of right. While Kojève concurs with Heidegger's emphasis on human finitude, his phenomenology leans more toward a Hegelian–Marxian approach, articulating the phenomenon of right through different historical aspects of the struggle for recognition. Conversely, Arendt introduces the phenomenological concept of natality, underscoring the innate human capacity to create anew politically. In Arendt's perspective, political rights emerge in the realm of public deliberation that constitutes the collective. Regardless of their differences, both Kojève and Arendt took seriously the Marxian critique of rights formalism in relation to the economy and imperialism. However, Arendt's phenomenology is often at odds with her otherwise historically grounded critique. For example, she deploys a Marxian historical critique of bourgeois civil society in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but subsequently rejects it in what can be seen as her polemics against Marx's theory of labor in The Human Condition.

In recent literature, Arendt is increasingly presented as the phenomenologist of human rights (Bell, 2018; Birmingham, 2006; Parekh, 2008). At the same time, despite his immense influence on 20th-century phenomenology and Continental philosophy,³ Kojève's Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, written in 1943, published in 1982, and translated into English in 2000, has received only introductory treatment (Frost, 1999; Frost & Howse, 2000; Roth, 1983b). Because Kojève's Outline of a Phenomenology of Right was not published during his lifetime, Arendt could not have possibly offered a direct response to his theory of right, for example, in her critique of socioeconomic rights. However, her theory can be seen as a response to his Heideggerian phenomenological recasting of Hegel and Marx, with which she was definitely familiar.

This paper will reconstruct Kojève and Arendt's respective political phenomenologies in light of their implications for political economy and the “social question.” While Arendt's articulation of deliberative action presents a counterpoint to Kojève's political existentialism, her phenomenology of the “social” dismisses the political and conflictual dimension of the economy advanced by Kojève, thus precluding a reconfiguration of modern institutions. Against the backdrop of these phenomenological theories, the paper then scrutinizes Arendt and Kojève's philosophical interpretations of the French Revolution and the events post-1848 apropos their contrasting viewpoints on the institutions of socioeconomic rights.

Despite her initial critique of rights formalism and political economy, Arendt's phenomenology of the “social” compels her to reject the French Revolution's vindication of economic rights; meanwhile, she only appreciates the political events post-1848 to the extent that they diverge from the principles of the French Revolution. In stark contrast, Kojève perceives the French Revolution as providing both the foundation for formal equality and the potential for substantive equality post-1848. Despite these differences, I argue that Kojève responds to Arendt's “social question” by way of a double gesture. Firstly, Kojève offers a phenomenological account of the illusion of “natural” existence that conceals the French Revolution's legacy of right formalism. Secondly, his concept of the “right of equity” permits an egalitarian reconfiguration of the state and civil society post-1848, which tackles the problem of right formalism immanently, while preemptively considering Arendt's warning against conflating the state and economic society. The article suggests that this reconfiguration of the state and civil society, conceptualized as the phenomenological “right of equity” and socialist property relations, makes it possible to rethink the contemporary predicament of socioeconomic rights.

While Arendt's “right to have rights” presents a significant contribution to democratic theory, the status of economic conditions behind this notion is less clear and debated. On the one hand, Parekh (2008), Suuronen (2018), and Klein (2014) argue that Arendt acknowledges the strong role of socioeconomic rights as a precondition of political life. On the other hand, Bernstein (1986), van der Walt (2012), and Emden (2019) contend that Arendt sees the “social question” as detrimental to the public realm. The following paper is not a contribution to the debate, but an attempt to show how Kojève's theory can be seen as an answer to Arendt's “social question.” A short excursus into Arendt's theory of right and “the social” is thus required.

Arendt's notion of the “right to have rights” from The Origins of Totalitarianism is said to receive its full meaning in her later political phenomenology of The Human Condition (Birmingham, 2006; Parekh, 2008). There, Arendt draws on Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of being in the world to expound an account of active human life, or vita activa, conditioned by the fundamental phenomena of action, work, and labor. Arendt understood that, despite Heidegger's attempt to overcome abstract subjectivity, his notion of Dasein remains politically solipsistic (Benhabib, 2003, pp. 51–56). In contrast to the centrality of existential finitude in Heidegger, Arendt offers a political notion of “natality” that indicates that humans are born in the condition of plurality and with the political ability to create anew.⁴ This means that our political existence is not defined by the individualizing death of Dasein but rather by the singularity of birth that takes place in the “human togetherness” and “the web of relations” out of which human action springs forth (Arendt, 1998, pp. 180, 183–184). Influenced by Aristotle's definition of the human as a speaking animal, Arendt further conceives action primarily in terms of the nonviolent power of speech.⁵ Humans can act in the full sense of the word because they are capable of acknowledging the presence of the plurality of others and “acting in concert,” exercising nonviolent discursive power that gives rise to the “political” public sphere. In this way, the political “right to have rights” designates the fundamental right to belong to a discursive political community, on the basis of which a normative understanding of other rights can develop.

The foundational to the “right to have right” political phenomenon of action is distinguished from the pre-political phenomena of work and labor. For Arendt, work signifies the human ability to create objects that form a temporally stable and durable “human artifice.” The activity of work, and its correlated figure Homo Faber, is not properly political and embodies what can be understood as fabricating or instrumental rationality. Arendt further distinguishes work and Homo Faber from labor and the phenomenological type that it represents: the animal laborans. The stakes of these novel demarcations are high, for in responding to theorists of labor, from Locke to Smith and Marx, Arendt aims to establish a phenomenological description of the economy as such. “Unlike the productivity of work,” she writes, “the productivity of labor power produces objects only incidentally and is primarily concerned with the means of its own reproduction…it never ‘produces’ anything but life” (p. 88). This process of life's reproduction through labor is relegated by Arendt to the “social” sphere of the economy. Insofar as the repetitive processes of the laboring activity stem from “natural necessity”—and this is crucial for Arendt—they do not imply any meaningful participation of others in the public realm, or the human artifice that would sustain the public realm. In the absence of political participation, the “social” economy becomes a paradoxically asocial private sphere. Based on this phenomenology of labor, Arendt goes as far as to say that “political economy” is a contradiction in terms.

Kojève was likewise influenced by Heidegger,⁶ but his political recasting of existential phenomenology is in line with his famous anthropological reading of Hegel and Marx in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Kojève, 1980). According to Kojève's central phenomenological structure, which he elaborates in more practical terms in Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (2000), two original consciousnesses are awakened by the desire for a nonnatural end, that is, for the other's desire. This desire for the “pure prestige” of recognition by the other yields the capacity to risk their lives in a mortal struggle. The result of this struggle is initially marked by power asymmetry: having voluntarily renounced the struggle for recognition out of fear of death, the vanquished consciousness becomes enslaved to the victorious other, the future master. The slave then labors for the enjoyment of the master in exchange for security, for example, by preparing food for the other's consumption. In contrast to Arendt's debasement of labor to a prepolitical category, Kojève sees labor for the other as the first political characteristic of the laboring consciousness. Having not recognized the slave, however, the master consciousness is not satisfied with the recognition it fought to attain. As a result, the master consciousness finds itself in an existential impasse, while the slave consciousness embraces its mastery of the natural world through transformative work on which the master depends.

The second political aspect of Kojève's phenomenology is this transformative and educative capacity of work. Under the master's coercion, the working consciousness's potential is gradually realized as labor becomes work that humanizes and educates. Kojève (2000) describes the essence of work as a process of abstraction from the natural “here and now,” wherein the working consciousness transforms the spatiotemporal material into lasting cultural and technological artifacts. This transformative work develops the human capacity to think and speak, insofar as “to preserve objective reality while abstracting from the natural hic et nunc…is to violate the essence of existence; it is to conceive reality in and by a concept (Logos)” (p. 432). If producing for the other can be understood as a political variant of Arendtian “labor,” then the educative and transformative aspect of production clearly overlaps with “work.” To be sure, Kojève does not separate labor from work, but rather accounts for the dialectical aspects of the multifaceted laboring-working consciousness that unfolds historically; he shows how labor for the other is intertwined with the fabrication of human artifice, and, finally, how the formative work yields the slave's capacity to overcome the fear of death and the master through revolutionary action, which actualizes the repressed existential desire for recognition in the working consciousness. Revolutionary action is the third and most political aspect of labor–work, which allows for the incorporation of both mastery and slavery into the figure of the “citizen” who is recognized for their individual work.

While Arendt's references to Kojève in her published works are scarce (Arendt, 1977, pp. 40, 47; 1992, p. 57), she was familiar with his influential seminars on Hegel⁷ and his overall theoretical project.⁸ Her phenomenology of the political can be seen as a response to Kojève that (1) replaces the violent revolutionary action with a theory of action expounded in terms of speech; (2) decouples laboring activity and fabricating rationality from their politically formative role, instead making them “pre-political” conditions for political communicative action; (3) further distinguishes between work and labor by linking the latter to the so-called life-process. Arendt would be doubtlessly correct to point out that Kojève's existential struggle for recognition lacks the deliberative aspect of the public sphere; and because Kojève believes human reason is engendered by the transformation of nature into technological and cultural artifice, it remains at the level of fabricating, or instrumental, rationality of Homo Faber. Furthermore, if it is the slave who develops Logos through the work for the other, the master can be only “speechless,” which goes against Kojève's own identification of the Ancient Greek aristocratic political ethos with the Logos of Greek philosophers (1980, pp. 100–30; 2000, p. 224).

At the same time, if Arendt's distinction between work and labor adds nuance that is only implied by Kojève, her evacuation of the political aspect from both of these phenomena makes them impervious to political transformation through modern institutions. Crucially, Arendt can be herself criticized for introducing the problematic notion of life-process, which is the basis of the elimination of political struggle from the realm of economy. To this end, Arendt's phenomenology of labor and the “social” economy has been criticized even by the most serious Arendt scholars. Arendt's description of the “social,” as Hanna Pitkin (1998) argues, relies on the imagery of the “Blob….a monstrous, jellylike substance…, which has a predilection for coating and then consuming human beings and grows with each meal” (p. 4). While Arendt herself cautioned against these types of mystifications, observes Pitkin, in her polemics against Marxian thinkers, she nonetheless resorts to an image of an “abstract, personified agency beyond human influence” by articulating the economy in terms of natural biological necessity expressed in the irresistible force of the vitalistic and pernicious “blob” (pp. 6, 11). Arendt posits the rise of this transhistorical and debased “social,” Gillian Rose (1992) explains, as a result of her confusing natural differences with “socially developed and recognized differences: the equality and inequality which are historical constructions, and which ‘political’ institutions may equally reinforce as seek to abolish” (p. 226).

In contrast, Kojève unequivocally views labor as not merely a natural phenomenon but a humanizing one. This anthropogenic character of labor is premised on the slave's original desire for a nonnatural end, not mere survival or procreation. The slave renunciation of the struggle out of the fear of death is moreover based not on the fear of natural death, such as from disease or old age, but from the fear of the master, who “goes to the very end of the Struggle to the death of Recognition” (Kojève, 2000, p. 431). This does not demean the working consciousness to an animal laborans, but instead illuminates the connection between its biological life and potential human recognition.⁹ He states, “to work for the Master, to work for another, to exert effort without profiting from the results, is to act against animal nature, against his biological interests: it is to negate his innate animal nature, and consequently to negate Nature in general, the natural given” (pp. 431–432). Far from an animal laborans, Kojève posits the working consciousness as a “human in potentiality.” Further, the specific human character of the economy lies in the phenomenon of exchange: “Exchange of the products of Work realizes and reveals the specifically human character of these products and of Work itself: for there is only exchange when there is genuine Work, and this is why there is no Exchange in the animal world” (p. 433). In the final analysis, the human character of economy originates from the working consciousness's potential humanity and from granting the products of labor relative autonomy.

Production by the slave and consumption by the master are then not reducible to the recurring cycle of production and consumption—the realm of life's necessity—attributed by Arendt to the animal laborans and the “social” realm. Instead, labor is a relational and humanizing activity, while the economy is emphatically human and historical, from which follows that the institutions underpinning economic relations can be transformed. This theory of labor informs Kojève's conceptualization of the economy and rights that avoids attributing labor to a life-reproducing activity of animal laborans: it is pointless, according to Kojève, “to discuss the biological ‘theories’ of Right….Right is a specifically human phenomenon and is not found in non-human nature” (Kojève, 2000, p. 117, translation altered).

In spite of the limitations of Kojève's understanding of political action, his phenomenology of the struggle for recognition explains how the asymmetry between autonomous and working consciousnesses yields political action throughout history. Kojève identifies the possibility of mutual recognition with the concept of socioeconomic rights that emerged with the French Revolution. In contrast, Arendt sees the French Revolution as marking the “unnatural rise of the natural” social realm.

In the historical exposition of The Human Condition, Arendt first applies the phenomenological typology of Homo Faber and animal laborans to craftsmen and slaves in the Greek polis. Although both these figures are excluded from Greek public life, it is the slave as animal laborans who is said to dwell exclusively in the realm of privacy of the household economy, the oikos, and labor with their bodies to tend to the necessities of life (Arendt, 1998, pp. 7, 24, 40, 80). Arendt emphasizes that the Greek wisdom was to keep the household, the domain of necessity and strictest inequality, separate from the public realm of the agora, where Greek citizens enjoyed civic equality to deliberate city affairs (p. 32). This is not to suggest that Arendt approves of the Greek solution to maintain the realm of public freedom with the institution of slavery. However, the capacity for action of Greek citizens does reflect her phenomenological theory of political action. The Greek understanding of politics will be lost, Arendt laments, first in the coexistence of the private and public sphere in the Roman Empire, then in the gradual disappearance of the public realm in the Middle Ages and, finally, in the “fire” of the French Revolution (1998, pp. 23, 34, 59).

Arendt further elaborates in On Revolution (1990) that the French Revolution represents a reversal in vita activa.¹⁰ The sphere of political action becomes dominated by the instrumental thinking of Homo Faber and, ultimately, by the asocial, natural needs of animal laborans (p. 298). Arendt clarifies that the fixation on the “social question” occurred as a response to oppression, mass poverty, and destitution in feudal France, which the revolutionaries sought to liberate themselves from (pp. 60, 112). Acting under the “dictate of their natural bodies,” the multitude of the poor “rushed to the assistance of the French Revolution, inspired it, drove it onward, and eventually sent it to its doom” (p. 60). In the writings of Rousseau and the actions of Robespierre, the socioeconomic welfare of the people emerged as a political virtue (pp. 73–75). Here, “the social question” appears as an attempt to address the problem of poverty which, Arendt maintains, should not be tackled politically lest it lead to terror. The “social,” embodied in the welfare needs of the multitude, is thus accused of “submersing” the public realm (pp. 48, 60). This submersion degrades politics into “political economy,” a term Arendt finds contradictory since polis and oikos should remain separate rather than merged into a “nation-wide administration of housekeeping” (1998, p. 28).

Arendt contends that the notion of “mankind” introduced by the French revolutionaries is a progenitor of Marx's thinking about class, as both emanate from the force of life itself and reduce the human ability to act. Marx is said to have elevated the laboring activity to an essential characteristic of the whole of society (pp. 89–90). As a result, his transformation of classical political economy's emphasis on individual egoistic life into “socialized mankind” meant that any possibility of genuine political action was lost. Arendt's central polemical point is that the late modern ideal of “socialized humanity” espoused by Marx aims at reducing humanity to the natural circuit of consumption and production. According to this thesis, “what was left was a ‘natural force,’ the force of the life process itself, to which all men and all human activities were equally submitted (‘the thought process itself is a natural process’) and whose only aim, if it had an aim at all, was survival of the animal species man” (p. 321). In attempting to solve the “social” economic question, Marx is said to have followed the French Revolutionary tradition and espoused a pernicious doctrine of “liberty,” thereby abdicating freedom to necessity (pp. 61–62, 65).

From the perspective of Arendt's contentious thesis on labor,¹¹ the French Revolution, and Marx, Kojève's approach can be seen as suspect. However, as I will show, Kojève's Hegelian phenomenology, Marxian political economy, and interpretation of the French Revolution present a more “workable” conception of socioeconomic rights, so much so that it constitutes a resolution of Arendt's social question. In contrast to the apolitical character of Arendt's “social” economy, Kojève (1980, p. 45) treats the phenomenology of the working consciousness and the correlated sphere of the economy as the driving historical force behind the three stages of “universal history” culminating in the French Revolution. In the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, Kojève (2000) derives from these stages a dialectic account of principles of right.¹² As Panu Minkkinen (2009) explains, the interplay between the working consciousness and the need for recognition serves as a logically necessary origin of right in “a similar way as Kelsen's basic norm is the ‘transcendental-logical’ assumption of the legal system” (p. 120).

Similar to Arendt, Kojève's historical exposition of the phenomenon of right begins with the ancient Greeks. However, while Arendt evades the problem of slavery and instead draws inspiration from the discursive activity of ancient Greek citizens in the agora, Kojève derives the principle of “pagan” right from the master and slave dialectic. To recall Kojève's phenomenological schema, the master and the slave both voluntarily undertake a humanizing existential risk. The equal value of this risk,¹³ according to Kojève, generates the aristocratic principle of equality of condition, or the right of status. However, the political reality is initially different, with the master having the right in actuality and the slave only in potentiality (Kojève, 2000, pp. 219–222). For the Greek masters, who are citizens only insofar as they make war, the principle of equality of condition generates egalitarian practices such as “primitive communism,” universal suffrage of aristocrats, including the equality of votes and the right of veto, and the communitarian principle of exchangeability of combatants (1980, p. 57; 2000, pp. 228, 240). Applying the equality ideal is practically difficult because the affirmation of status presupposes only negative duties on the part of masters and the absence of obligations (2000, p. 244). Thus, following the principle of lex talionis, aristocratic law is essentially criminal law and prohibits actions that threaten strict equality and autonomy (pp. 244, 250).

Just as aristocratic right treats the status of masters as fixed, slaves are treated as “natural.” This, according to Kojève, is reflected in Aristotle's philosophy of “natural slavery,” which asserts that “[m]an is born with a slavish or free ‘nature,’ and he will never be able to overcome or modify it; Masters and Slaves form something like two distinct animal species, irreducible or ‘eternal,’ neither of which can leave its ‘natural place’ in the immutable Cosmos” (1980, p. 224).¹⁴ Since the potential humanity of the slave is not recognized from the master's point of view, the aristocratic state will refuse to recognize slaves as subjects of right (2000, p. 234). However, while the concept of aristocratic right is not contradictory in itself, it exists in social contradictions: All human beings cannot be masters (p. 264). These social contradictions generate historical development: Because the slave's work is excluded from being recognized in its human value, the Greek city-states will be driven by perpetual wars for prestige and then dissolved in the Roman Empire (1980, p. 62).

Kojève then articulates the legal principle underlying the “bourgeois” period that began with the Roman Empire and culminated in the French Revolution. As we have seen, the working consciousness initially sought recognition but abandoned the struggle in exchange for security (2000, pp. 223, 252). From this exchange, Kojève derives the principle of equivalence between the duty of working for others and the benefits of security. What appears just for the working consciousness is then not the equality of an autonomous aristocratic condition but the contractual equivalence between rights and duties. Following this bourgeois principle of justice, as Kojève explains, the property right ceases to be static and acquires the characteristics of exchange (p. 259). Because property relations boil down to economic exchange, work, and effort, the right of equivalence offers a potential for mutual recognition. The aristocratic right of status is challenged by the bourgeois right of contract, not the least because the bourgeois principle recognizes the work of everyone, not the status of a particular group (pp. 235, 259, 260–261, n18, 434). Coevally, the modern state becomes premised on a “social contract” that accepts the validity of aristocratic status only “if there is an equivalence between droits and duties that it implies” (p. 261). For example, in an allusion to the modern social contract theory, Kojève notes that bourgeois law requires property owners to work the land (pp. 258–259, n17).

If the aristocratic master and the legal subject coincided, the modern bourgeois right is predisposed to change and become its “other,” meaning fusing with the aristocratic right. This is articulated in phenomenological terms: The working consciousness derived from not only the principle of contractual equivalence but also the juridical notion of having a right to that security (p. 257). That is, even if not actualized immediately, the working consciousness already thought of itself as having juridical status. As the modern state of the “social contract” historically takes hold, for the bourgeois right of equivalence to be realized, it has to fuse with the aristocratic right of equality: the right of equivalence tends to recognize the right of equality (p. 265). This fusion happens in the French Revolution, which yields a synthesis of a “citizen–bourgeois” whom other citizens mutually recognize as having both status and duties (p. 445). As Kojève intimates, the working consciousness ceases to be a slave and becomes a governor by becoming a citizen of the post-revolutionary state (p. 266).

For Kojève, the force behind the French Revolution was not the unnatural rise of the natural as Arendt would have it, but the necessity to institutionalize the legal synthesis between the right to equality of status and the right of contract and equivalence between rights and duties. Contrary to attributing to the French Revolution the emancipation of the people not qua citizens but qua malheureux, Kojève finds that the French Revolution has the possibility for human satisfaction and mutual recognition. What is at stake in the legacy of the French Revolution is the distinction between principles embodied by a bourgeois citizen of the French Revolution and a socialist citizen of post-1848, as well as different institutional configurations of the state and civil society.

The economic equivocation of the state and civil society was not unfamiliar to Arendt. Rose (1992) contends that the first two parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism represent the most sustained attempt to develop Marx's account of the contradictory bourgeois emancipation and the concomitant split between state and civil society (p. 217). There, Arendt understands that formal equality, which implies substantial inequality, emanates from “the fundamental contradiction between a political body based on equality before the law and a society based on the inequality of the class system” (Arendt, 1973, p. 12). This contradiction is then investigated historically and sociologically in the origins of antisemitism, nationalism, and imperialism (Rose, 1992, pp. 216–223). Artemy Magun (2012) and Werner Hamacher and Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (2014) have further demonstrated that Arendt's theoretical frameworks bear a remarkable resemblance to Marx's critique of legal formalism and the liberal state.

However, an issue arises when Arendt's phenomenology deviates from this insight and rather polemically misrepresents modern economic society as a sphere of necessity and the circularity of life. This not only precludes a phenomenological analysis of the socially and historically conditioned inequalities of human artifice, especially the “constitution of apparently separate and yet contrary sets of institutions which presuppose and are implicated in each other—state and civil society” (Rose, 1992, p. 231), but also leads Arendt to portray the legacy of the French Revolution in terms of the politically debased concern with welfare. In doing so, she forecloses any imminently alternative modern notion of rights that would recognize and counteract the inequality of condition. In contrast, but in line with Arendt's own critique of bourgeois emancipation, Kojève presents a phenomenological interpretation of the French Revolution that demystifies the “natural” predicament of the historical bourgeois civil society—“the social”—and proposes an immanent reconfiguration of the state and civil society post-1848.

As we have seen in Kojève's dialectic between the principle of equality and equivalence, the bourgeois, who emerges from the working consciousness, is inherently predisposed to change and to become its “other.” According to Kojève's Notion of Authority (2014), this means that the bourgeois seeks to forget their “lowly” origins and tends to disown the past (p. 64). In becoming revolutionary, the bourgeois disowns its subservient political condition under the feudal past and embraces the primacy of the future, with this revolutionary project realized in the Napoleonic Code. This turn against the ancien régime toward the future lasts from the French Revolution of 1789 until 1848 (p. 65). Starting with 1848, however, “the future becomes the demand of another ‘class’…the Future intervenes in the Present in the guise of a ‘revolutionary project’ other than that of ’89.” The bourgeoisie, which has rejected the past, comes in opposition to the revolutionary project of the working class and, in so doing, also rejects the future. This marks what Kojève calls the period of “bourgeois domination” between 1848 and the time of writing (1942), during which the state is “absorbed” by the bourgeois class (p. 69).

This account explains the historical contradiction of bourgeois emancipation that creates the illusion of “natural” existence that, to be sure, Arendt did not fail to notice, albeit one-sidedly, in her account of the “social.” As Kojève observes, during the period post-1848, the bourgeoisie lived in “a ‘natural’ Present, non-human, non-historical, non-political” (p. 65). Insofar as political reality disappears for the bourgeoisie, its existence comes to be dominated by “animal” aspects (p. 66). It can be said then that it is not the French sans-culottes and Marxists who have reduced politics to the natural existence of animal laborans, as Arendt polemically argues, but the bourgeoisie that turned against the past and future, thereby reducing political existence to the continuous “natural” present. In the same vein, the problem is not the rise of the eternal recurrence of nature, but an illusion of this “naturalness” that conceals the contradictory aspect of bourgeois emancipation under capitalism. The abstractness of life in the continuous “natural” present is revealed to be sustained by the bourgeoisie through the exclusion of the working class's demand for substantial equality. In this way, Kojève offers historical determinations behind the illusion of the natural existence of the bourgeoisie post-1848.

This, of course, starkly contrasts with Arendt's perspective on the events post-1848. While she recognizes the post-revolutionary contradiction between state and civil society outlined by Marx, she rejects the continuity between the French Revolution and what she sees as genuine political revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Unlike Kojève, who accentuates the interests of the working class emergent post-1848, Arendt surveys (1990) these events to find the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition capable of combining the flourishing of public opinions and enduring republican institutions (pp. 227–228). While she concedes that the French Revolution indeed gave rise to the public sphere, Arendt dismisses the French tradition for its eventual prioritization of the representative Assembly, which is said to uphold the welfare of “the great popular Society of the whole French people” at the expense of revolutionary societies and clubs (pp. 241–246). Importantly, Arendt dismisses the commission pour les travailleurs, which emerged from the labor-driven French Revolution of 1848, as merely perpetuating the French Revolution's focus on the social question (p. 262). Concurrently, she views the public deliberations of the Paris Commune of 1871, the soviets of 1905–1917, the German Rätesystem of 1918–1919, and the Hungarian council systems of 1956 as antithetical to left party politics, which she correctly argues is integral to the tradition of the French Revolution (pp. 257–266). Here, Arendt relies on Luxemburg's critique of Lenin–Trotsky theory of party dictatorship (p. 264) but illustratively omits that Luxemburg couches her critique of the suppression of political freedoms immanently from within socialist politics.

In attributing significance to the communicative power of public spaces, but not to the attempts to reconfigure modern “Weberian” representative institutions or revolutionary party politics, Arendt endorses the political events of post-1848 only to the extent that they depart from the principles of the French Revolution. As we have seen, Kojève does not offer a sustained perspective on the public realm, which is the primary weakness of his theory predicated on political existentialism. Nonetheless, he can be seen as offering an answer to the “social question.” He does so by a double gesture. First, he accounts for the illusion of the “natural” existence of the bourgeois civil society that demystifies Arendt's exposition of the “social”—the “blob”—in terms of his phenomenological principles of right. The second gesture is affirmative in the sense that he presents a normative reconfiguration of the institutions of state and civil society in the spirit of events post-1848.

In the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, Kojève (2000) offers a phenomenological critique of capitalist property rights under bourgeois domination, that is, in the bourgeois civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). In particular, Kojève explains bourgeois “natural” existence in terms of a formal capitalist pseudo-synthesis of state and economic society. This capitalist quasi-synthesis is a perversion of both the principle of equality and equivalence. What makes the formal right based on this synthesis erroneous is the exclusion of both the desire for recognition and work (p. 449). The capitalist property owner follows the aristocratic principle and treats property as hereditary. However, property is passed on arbitrarily, without either the imperative of struggle to justify oneself as an aristocratic master-owner or the duty to work in exchange for the property attained through the bequest. Having revolted against the ancien régime, the bourgeoisie itself becomes a new aristocracy.

However, this new bourgeois aristocracy does not generate aristocratic–egalitarian property rights as the original aristocratic right would; “it admits the inequality of Properties both in fact and in Right” (p. 450, translation altered). This is because the capitalist property right follows the bourgeois principle of equivalence by reducing all property to monetary value while at the same time likening property rights to the aristocratic static right by evading the duty to exchange. Because the imperative of exchange is corrupted by the static aristocratic principle, property gets accumulated and becomes Capital: “a movable likened to an immovable.” This inherited and accumulated property Capital thus yields revenue by transforming itself into financial Capital; “the loan of Capital being bought at so many percent.” Moreover, this pseudo-synthesis of the bourgeois and aristocratic right, that is, a synthesis of the arbitrariness of inheritance and inegalitarian accumulation of Capital, is made for the owner's benefit, not the worker's (p. 450, n. 170). Property produced by the worker is treated solely in terms of the bourgeois principle of equivalence, but without attaining any of the surpluses that the capitalist gets as accumulated.

Here, Kojève is articulating Hegel and Marx's critique of bourgeois civil society in terms of his political phenomenology. The formal, or “imperfect synthesis,” of the two principles of right is a synthesis of the need for recognition, the socialization of which creates the state, and the working consciousness, which leads to the constitution of an economic society (p. 428). The “imperfect” social structure that corresponds to this legal formalism is the bourgeois civil society. While Kojève account mirrors that of Marx in his insight that there is nothing “natural” about bourgeois civil society (Marx and Engels cited in Keane, 1998, pp. 63–64), his correction of this “imperfect” synthesis is more in line with Hegel's emphasis on institutional configurations of right. Unlike Marx, Kojève does not believe in the “emancipation” of civil society into the proletariat, or that the juridical realm should be abolished. Instead, he revives the egalitarian promise of the French Revolution as a transformation of socioeconomic rights. What is at stake here is the transition from the republican principle of the French Revolution to what Alain Badiou (2013) called its second, egalitarian, principle that is not yet actualized.¹⁵

Against Arendt's prescription to not intermingle the economy with the political, Kojève seeks to find the correct synthesis between the collective nature of aristocratic statist property and exchange-based individualistic bourgeois economy. On the phenomenological level, this synthesis is predicated on the dialectical development of the working consciousness toward the need for recognition. To recall, the bourgeois principle corresponded to the equivalence between rights and duties that the working consciousness establishes upon the abandonment of the struggle for recognition; the aristocratic principle of right corresponded to the strict equality established by the humanizing risk present in both master and slave consciousnesses. Because Kojève conceptualizes work as a human phenomenon with the potential for universal mutual recognition, it is the work-based bourgeois right of equivalence that evolves by gradually enveloping the aristocratic right of status (pp. 264–269). When in balance, however precarious one can imagine this balance to be, the two principles coalesce in the socialist right of equity (the citizen's right or the “absolute” right). The synthesis overcomes what is particular and restricted about each principle by fully realizing their essences in a way that coincides with each other (p. 269).

The right of equity can be actual only when it is stripped of formalism, when “all are equal and equivalent not only juridically, ‘before the law,’ but also politically and socially” (p. 268). Put otherwise, Kojève conceives a fusion of the bourgeois category of contract and the aristocratic category of status (p. 273). This means, for example, that property becomes not only a function of work, but property is also a “function of the very being of… man and citizen” (p. 274), a statement that resembles the principles behind some contemporary ideas of universal basic income or dividend. As Alexandre Frost and Bryan-Paul Howse aptly noted, Kojève's socialist right seeks to resolve the tension between equality of opportunity and equality of condition, which is reminiscent of the development of the contemporary welfare state (2000, p. 22). One could add that the right of equity is a specifically socialist reformation of the bourgeois welfare state.

The principle of equity would yield a corresponding socialist institutional configuration of state and economic society. In opposition to the erroneous capitalist synthesis of inegalitarian accumulation of capital in the interest of the capitalist property owner, as well as arbitrary inheritance, two major conditions of this reconfiguration arise: collective contracts and inheritance of citizenship status. On the one hand, the socialist collective property comes with the bourgeois duty of exchange and equivalence, which means participation in collective work (p. 449). Unlike in the aristocratic state of Ancient Greece, which premises the status of citizenship on military struggle, citizens in the socialist society are recognized for their work. And unlike in the capitalist bourgeois society, in the socialist society, wealth is not accumulated privately. The socialist state and society complex thus guarantees the minimum required work for all and regulates it through collective contracts, while allowing individuals to change jobs (pp. 274, 477). On the other hand, the right of status in this state would be stripped of aristocratic inheritance of property: all that is inherited is the status of citizen. From this also follows that the socialist state and civil society complex has to prioritize the status of the individual person, not her social group belonging (p. 449).

This reconfiguration allows Kojève to conceive nonbourgeois property relations in a way that respects individual autonomy. It leads Kojève to theorize personal property, as opposed to private property, which is to be abolished by the principle of collective contracts. The citizens in this socialist society can possess and exchange personal property inasmuch as this property is “constituted by the owner's own body” (pp. 449, 471). That is, irreducible biological differences necessitate the application of the right of equivalence even within juridical egalitarianism (p. 271).¹⁶ Personal property so understood shares some similarities with Arendt's views on property and human corporality. Just as it is implied in Kojève's theory of personal property, for Arendt, the body is “the quintessence of all property because it is the only thing one could not share even if one wanted to” (Arendt, 1998, p. 112). But Kojève's discussion of personal property as grounded on the privacy of human bodies fundamentally differs from that which Arendt calls the principle of natural differentiation of human bodies and does not share the “deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is—single, unique, unchangeable” (Arendt, 1973, p. 301). For Kojève, in contrast, bodily differences are never merely natural but always already humanized as differences in character or tastes: “clothes must not only be warm, they must be pretty, fashionable and so on—likewise, the food must be good” (Kojève, 2000, p. 471). Kojève considers the natural body as a limit for collective property, not as a “natural” hindrance to the public realm.

Furthermore, the state and economic society are reconfigured but do not collapse into each other: “The State and Society will never entirely coincide” (p. 430). This statement can be seen as preemptively addressing Arendt's warning against collapsing the political and the social. For, economic society will possess relative autonomy, which, in turn, necessitates personal property possessions of individuals. Personal property so conceived hinges on the aristocratic status of the citizen, which exempts some property from collective work contracts. Practically speaking, apart from completing the socially necessary labor, citizens will be able to dedicate themselves to work during leisure time.¹⁷ Being alienable, products of work can then be subject to economic exchange. For example, a painter can produce paintings and seek to preserve them as her personal property or exchange them for a monetary equivalent (p. 472). Acting in her capacity as a personal owner, the painter becomes part of an economic society separate from the state while still dependent on the state's regulation of exchange. This way, personal property allows enjoying the fruits of one's labor, not the ability to exploit others that the institutions of private property imply.

Kojève demonstrates that the “natural” existence in the “social” realm is not the result of the “unnatural rise of the natural,” but an illusion that seeks to obstruct an egalitarian transformation of the state and civil society. Therefore, the resolution of the “social question” is not to demean it, but to discern the contradictions of modern institutions that naturalize inequalities. While this analysis coincides with Arendt's sociological critique of the contradiction between formal equality and class inequality, Kojève offers a normative solution that Arendt was reluctant to conceive due to her rupture with the legacy of the French Revolution. Instead of rejecting the French Revolution, Kojève provides a reconfiguration of the principle of right already contained within it, suggesting a corresponding configuration of the state and civil society complex post-1848. The right of equity, premised on the social conditions of collective contracts and personal property, represents a reconfigured human legal artifice, not a natural detriment to politics.

Even though written in the 1940s, Kojève's theory of socioeconomic rights aligns with the recent revival of the philosophy of socioeconomic rights undertaken by Samuel Moyn (2018) and contemporary analyses of capitalism. For instance, Kojève's insight into the inheritance of capital can be considered in light of Thomas Piketty's (2014) work on patrimonial capitalism, while the phenomenology of collective contracts can be discussed apropos Suuronen's (2018) elaboration of an Arendtian approach to basic income and even Yanis Varoufakis's (2016) proposal for a universal basic dividend. The phenomenology of socioeconomic rights elucidated here might present a robust alternative to the liberal version of welfare rights and a potential reconfiguration of the state and civil society as a pathway out of the neoliberal predicament.

If Kojève's phenomenology of rights provides a more consistent analysis of, and adequate response to, the economic problems arising from the split between state and civil society, the democratic potential of civil society is nonetheless absent in his theory. Arendt's “right to have rights” offers a more sustained account of the democratic potential of civil society. However, Benhabib (2003, pp. 23–25, 29) noted that an account of the “social” as a realm of voluntary associations of civil society is missing in The Human Condition, which can be attributed to Arendt's determination to distinguish the “social” from the “political” public sphere. Consequently, by severing the communicative understanding of the “right to have rights” from the economy in her polemic against political economists, she also detaches it from what can be viewed as the structural condition of the bourgeois public realm. To this end, the relationship between communicative power and its structural presuppositions, offered, for instance, by Habermas (1991), necessitates further phenomenological articulation in the spirit of the phenomenology of The Human Condition. Such rethinking would align with the recent emphasis on socioeconomic rights within the radical democratic tradition (Klein, 2020). This is crucial insofar as the deliberative aspect of Arendt's “right to have rights” can be seen as offering a possibility to deliberate about normative proposals like Kojève's right of equity and the transformation of the human edifice.