Abstract
Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt offer two of the most influential accounts of alienation in the Western political tradition, accounts that are usually taken to be diametrically opposed. In this project, I challenge this reading of Marx and Arendt by bringing forth a common framework that shapes their seemingly dissimilar accounts. I show how the legacy of post-Kantianism leads both to make a peculiar division between nature and the world of human affairs. I argue that this division enables them to argue that human beings – a concept of which both offer similar, original interpretations – cooperatively build the world they inhabit. I show how their common framework is constructed around their comparable understandings of human beings and the world whose relationship is characterized by mutual dependency. These observations enable me to demonstrate that Marx and Arendt charge modernity with dehumanizing us because it obfuscates the nature of the relationship we have to our world. Thus, both take alienation to be an epistemological problem. I close this study by examining the central ambiguities in the works of Marx and Arendt: the former’s discounting of the political realm and the latter’s discounting of the realm of social production. I argue that Marx’s hostility toward politics is informed by a rigid understanding of what an unalienated existence would prime human beings to be. I show how existing scholarship on Arendt has fundamentally misunderstood the claim she is making against the social because of its neglect of her concern for form and appearance.