From Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:

Marx’s notion of “making history” had an influence far beyond the circle of convinced Marxists or determined revolutionaries. … For Vico, as later for Hegel, the importance of the concept of history was primarily theoretical. It never occurred to either of them to apply this concept directly by using it as a principle of action. Truth they conceived of as being revealed to the contemplative, backward-directed glance of the historian, who, by being able to see the process as a whole, is in a position to overlook the “narrow aims” of acting men, concentrating instead on the “higher aims” that realize themselves behind their backs (Vico). Marx, on the other hand, combined this notion of history with the teleological political philosophies of the earlier stages of the modern age, so that in his thought the “higher aims” — which according to the philosophers of history revealed themselves only to the backward glance of the historian and philosopher — could become intended aims of political action. …the age-old identification of action with making and fabricating was supplemented and perfected, as it were, through identifying the contemplative gaze of the historian with the contemplation of the model (the eidos or “shape” from which Plato had derived his “ideas”) that guides the craftsmen and precedes all making. And the danger of these combinations did not lie in making immanent what was formerly transcendent, as is often alleged, as though Marx attempted to establish on earth a paradise formerly located in the hereafter. The danger of transforming the unknown and unknowable “higher aims” into planned and willed intentions was that meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends — which is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history — the progressive unfolding and actualization of the idea of Freedom — to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this ultimate “end” as the end-product of a manufacturing process. But neither freedom nor any other meaning can ever be the product of a human activity in the sense in which the table is clearly the end-product of the carpenter’s activity.

The growing meaninglessness of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end. Meaning, which can never be the aim of action and yet, inevitably, will rise out of human deeds after the action itself has come to an end, was now pursued with the same machinery of intentions and of organized means as were the particular direct aims of concrete action — with the result that it was as though meaning itself had departed from the world of men and men were left with nothing but an unending chain of purposes in whose progress the meaningfulness of all past achievements was constantly canceled out by future goals and intentions. It is as though men were stricken suddenly blind to fundamental distinctions such as the distinction between meaning and end, between the general and the particular, or, grammatically speaking, the distinction between “for the sake of…” and “in order to…” (as though the carpenter, for instance, forgot that only his particular acts in making a table are performed in the mode of “in order to,” but that his whole life as a carpenter is ruled by something quite different, namely an encompassing notion “for the sake of” which he became a carpenter in the first place). And the moment such distinctions are forgotten and meanings are degraded into ends, it follows that ends themselves are no longer safe because the distinction between means and ends is no longer understood, so that finally all ends turn and are degraded into means.

In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical consciousness — by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even to pragmatism in general — we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making.

It seems obvious to me that most people — or at least most people one is likely to encounter in a corporate environment — think exclusively in terms of fabrication.