Not all political thinkers, however, have had such a clear preference for
society over the state, or wished so dearly to keep politics at bay. There is,
for instance, a tradition which portrays politics favourably precisely
because it is a ‘public’ activity. Dating back to Aristotle, this tradition
has been kept alive in the twentieth century by writers such as Hannah
Arendt (see p. 58). In her major philosophical work The Human Condition
(1958) Arendt placed ‘action’ above both ‘labour’ and ‘work’ in what she
saw as a hierarchy of worldly activities. She argued that politics is the most
important form of human activity because it involves interaction among
free and equal citizens, and so both gives meaning to life and affirms the
uniqueness of each individual. Advocates of participatory democracy have
also portrayed politics as a moral, healthy and even noble activity. In the
view of the eighteenth-century French thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see
p. 242), political participation was the very stuff of freedom itself. Only
through the direct and continuous participation of all citizens in political
life can the state be bound to the common good, or what Rousseau called
the ‘general will’. John Stuart Mill (see p. 256) took up the cause of
political participation in the nineteenth century, arguing that involvement