Homo Faber, Action Hero Manqué: Crafting the State in Coriolanus

  You have made good work, You, and your apron-men; you that stood so much Upon the voice of occupation and The breath of garlic-eaters!

—Coriolanus, 4.6.96–99¹

With News having arrived that the banished Martius has joined with Aufidius to lead an attack on Rome, Menenius castigates the plebeians for the political role they have played in the state’s misfortunes. In doing so, Menenius illustrates a contradiction that Hannah Arendt locates at the heart of classical Western political philosophy. On one level we hear the patricians’ contempt for craftsmen’s participation in the sphere of political action: “You have made fair hands, / You and your crafts! You have crafted fair!” (ll. 118–19). Menenius expresses a similarly paternalistic disdain in the play’s opening scene when he denounces the plebeians’ political aspirations to trade solitary work in their shops for concerted action in the political realm: “What work’s, my countrymen, in hand? Where go you / With bats and clubs?” (1.1.54–55). The First Citizen’s response (“Our business is not unknown to th’Senate; they have had inkling this fortnight what we intend to do, which now we’ll show ’em in deeds” [ll. 56–58]) both acknowledges and deflects the insult. If “business” refers ambiguously to labor as well as to action, “deeds” signifies more definitively the citizens’ self-conscious engagement in the business of politics, not the business of the market, thereby countering the claim that they are engaged in “work” rather than action. On another level, however, Menenius’s sentiments correlate with the conceptual “substitution of making [i.e., work] for acting” that Hannah Arendt identifies in Western political theory.² To favor the durability and predictability of a made thing over the distinctive uncertainty of action is a category mistake—one that stifles our ability to recognize new political formations and possibilities as they arise.

Menenius’s suggestion that the plebeians have ineptly “made” the political world they inhabit implies an analogy between the work of craftsmen and the actions of citizens. The irony that Menenius thereby expresses is one that Arendt attributes to the thought of both Plato and Aristotle, who even while being among “the first to propose handling political matters and ruling political bodies in the mode of fabrication” simultaneously “thought craftsmen not even worthy of full-fledged citizenship.”³ But this contradiction, observed by both Arendt and Shakespeare, is only the most ironic by-product of the fabrication trope’s takeover of the space of the political. In Coriolanus, we witness both the radical newness initiated by the political action of the plebeian craftsmen asserting their rights as citizens as well as the deeply embedded political metaphors of crafts-manship, or work, that help to deny that anything fundamentally new could ever arise in political life. When we imagine the state as something that emerges solely through a craftsman-like process of reification—as in the Roman myth of foundation in which the sovereign founder draws the sacred boundaries of the city—we are likely to conceive of it as an object that is or ought to be impervious to human plurality, to the multiplicity of perspectives and individual actions that constitute, preserve, and augment any common political world. In Coriolanus, even as the patricians attempt to deny or ignore the obvious fact that the craftsmen’s political action has radically interrupted and reconstituted the political world they share with them (resulting in the establishment of a new political institution, the tribunes of the plebeians), these same patricians view the city as if it were a made object that they themselves crafted.⁴

In what follows, I examine the three categories of human engagement with the world that Arendt develops in The Human Condition—labor, work, and action—and, in particular, the political consequences of the tendency to understand political action in terms that are better suited for work, or making. This conceptual conflation, which Coriolanus carefully considers, occludes the subtle interrelations between these two modes. Political constitutions...