The Human Condition was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1958, and it is Arendt’s most systematic philosophical work — her attempt to articulate a comprehensive theory of human activity and its relationship to the political realm.
Arendt distinguishes three modes of human engagement with the world: labor (the activity that corresponds to the biological process of the human body — production and consumption of the necessities of life), work (the activity that produces a durable world of objects — fabrication, craftsmanship, art), and action (the activity that occurs directly between human beings in the public realm — speech, deliberation, the initiation of new beginnings). These three activities correspond to three aspects of the human condition: life (natality and mortality), worldliness (the need for a stable framework of meaning), and plurality (the fact that human beings, not Man in the abstract, inhabit the earth).
Arendt’s argument is that the modern age has systematically degraded the hierarchy of these activities. In the ancient Greek understanding, which she takes as her reference point, action was the highest activity — the capacity to appear in the public sphere, to speak and act among equals, was what made human life distinctively human rather than merely biological. Modernity has reversed this hierarchy: the rise of “the social” (neither private nor public, but a hybrid realm in which the biological needs of the species are administered collectively) has reduced politics to economics, action to behavior, and citizens to consumers.
The concept of “natality” — the capacity to begin something genuinely new, inherent in the fact that each human being is born into the world as a newcomer — is Arendt’s most original contribution. Action, she argues, is the political expression of natality: the ability to interrupt the automatic processes of nature and history with something unprecedented.
Collecting The Human Condition
First edition (University of Chicago Press, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $400–$1,200
- Without jacket: $50–$150
- Paperback editions: $8–$15