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This paper sets out to examine the limits of Hannah Arendt's notion of the "social," through a comparison with Robert Castel's historical sociology of wage labor. The issue is not simply to criticize Arendt's "political purism," which creates an institutional vacuum and stigmatizes the "social" in general, downgrading the latter to an apolitical deployment of the domestic order within the public space. However, the objective is to build a political theory relevant for capitalist-democratic societies. This requires the idea of institutional and collective resources as a prerequisite for the functioning of a real democracy with majority rule lacking with Arendt. This paper suggests that Castel's historical analysis, founded on the concept of "social property," offers such a frame.