Key Arguments

• A 'complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” ... ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely, by nobody'
• In this condition 'state and government gives place here to pure administration' matching Marx’s 'withering away of the state'
• Arendt: Marx 'was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about' and 'even more wrong' to think it would yield the 'realm of freedom'

Source Quotes

From the viewpoint of society, these were merely disturbing factors in the way of a full development of “social forces”; they no longer corresponded to reality and were therefore, in a sense, much more “fictitious” than the scientific “fiction” of one interest. A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” whose outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely, by nobody. What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration—a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the “withering away of the state,” though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the “realm of freedom.”

A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” whose outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely, by nobody. What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration—a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the “withering away of the state,” though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the “realm of freedom.” To gauge the extent of society’s victory in the modern age, its early substitution of behavior for action and its eventual substitution of bureaucracy, the rule of nobody, for personal rulership, it may be well to recall that its initial science of economics, which substitutes patterns of behavior only in this rather limited field of human activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as “behavioral sciences,” aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.

Key Concepts

• A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” whose outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely, by nobody
• What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration—a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the “withering away of the state,”
• though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the “realm of freedom.”

Context

6 THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL: Political consequences of social triumph and reassessment of Marx’s predictions.