Hannah Arendt is well known for her narrative concerning the “rise of the social” in modern Western societies. Almost without exceptions this narrative has been understood by her commentators as a one-sided and negative one and Arendt is read as a harsh critic of modern politics. In her narrative, supposedly, the political realm is replaced by the rule of nobody and by economic administration, political action transforms into social conformism and the unique singularity of human beings changes into mere homogeneous existence of the laboring animal and so forth. However, in a 1972 conference, dedicated to her own political thought, Arendt was asked what she means with this distinction. Referring to Friedrich Engels, Arendt simply noted: “Everything which can really be figured out, in the sphere Engels called the administration of things – these are social things in general. That they should then be subject to debate seems to me phony and a plague.” How can Arendt affirmatively refer to a communist author like Engels who advocates such an “administration of things” in the realm of politics, which Arendt had always criticized so harshly? Had Arendt changed her mind? In this paper I argue that a different reading is possible: I maintain that, in fact, Arendt´s whole political theory is defined by what I call a politics of affirmative exclusion. Arendt´s distinction between the social and the political should not be understood as a mere tool for historical analysis. On the contrary, her argument is a normative one, which states that in an epoch of unprecedented technological development and wealth, politics can and should only begin after the necessities of life have been taken care of by the state. Arendt is not an author who simply delimits all “things social” away from “things political,” but a theoretician who argues that this is what all developed societies should strive toward after “social things” have been correctly politicized. For Arendt, the primary task of modern politics is to exclude those things from the political realm, which should be understood as basic human rights and should never be under debate in the first place: the right for a home and shelter, the right for nutrition and water, or the right for education, for example. In other words, I claim that one can read Arendt as an author who sketches a model of affirmative biopolitics and who claims that the fundamental human right in all future developed societies should be the right for what is nowadays usually termed as a basic income, guaranteed by locally governed welfare-states within a larger international community.
