The Human Condition (1958)
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
333 pages
I’ll freely admit from the get-go that I’m not a philosophy major, or even someone who’s read a lot of books on philosophy. Not surprisingly, then, reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition represented a pretty significant stretch. Nonetheless, I learned much as I – quite literally at times – worked my way through it. In the following, I’ll aim to give a flavor of her arguments and what I found most impactful, particularly her analysis and conclusions regarding our present-day economic system, and its implications for our society’s future.
Arendt opens by pointing out the sharp distinction made in ancient Greece between one’s private life – home and family – and one’s political life – engaging in the activities of the city-state; she describes these realms as having been “mutually exclusive” for Greeks. Beginning already with the Romans, however, this dichotomy evolved and weakened, and eventually leading to
the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, … [and] whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state. (28)
She notes that, contrary to the common understanding, this social conformism came before the focus on equality, and that “the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm.” (41) This enforced conformism has also had a variety of follow-on effects, including enabling “economics … [to] achieve a scientific character,” (42) and suppressing deviation to the extent that “large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule” (43) in order to enforce it.
To analyze in detail the dramatic changes in the human condition that have occurred from ancient Greece to the modern age, Arendt defines “three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.” (7) Action involves our engagement as humans with one another. Work and labor she notes, broadly overlap in modern usage, but have a fundamental distinction: labor consists of all activities required to directly sustain life, to produce the consumables necessary to stay alive; work, on the other hand, results in what can be considered durable goods – chairs, buildings, the infrastructure of life. She distinguishes the implications for the human conditions as:
Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. (8-9)
Arendt argues that in antiquity, people exalted action and contemplation. In order to pursue these activities more fully, they relegated both labor and work to slaves, based on their view
of the slavish nature of all occupations that served the needs of the maintenance of life. It was precisely on these grounds that the institution of slavery was defended and justified. To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity. (83)
Thus, the human condition in antiquity was based on the primacy of action, at least for those fortunate few who were wealthy and powerful enough to have others perform the labor and work required to provide life’s necessities.
In the modern age, however, (which she defines as having begun some several centuries ago) the human condition has fundamentally changed. There has developed “a glorification of labor as the source of all values,” (85) as well as an emphasis by theorists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx on distinguishing not between labor and work, but between productive and unproductive labor. She notes that Smith classified
all occupations which rest essentially on performance – such as the military profession, “churchmen, lawyers, physicians and opera singers” – together with “menial services,” [as] the lowest and most unproductive “labor.” By contrast, for early Greeks it was precisely these occupations – healing, flute playing, play-acting – which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man. (207)
This focus on productivity over all else has so dominated humankind’s thinking in the modern age that it can be difficult, she points out, for historians to recognize that
the institution of slavery in antiquity, though not in later times, was not a device for cheap labor or an instrument of exploitation for profit but rather an attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of man’s life, [since] what men share with all other forms of animal life [that is, the labor required to stay alive] was not considered to be human. (84)
With the subsequent atomization of production through the division of labor, argues Arendt, we have largely abandoned a reverence for work – for craftsmen who create durable goods. We have sacrificed the “ideals … of permanence, stability, and durability” of work, shifting instead to an ideal of abundance, becoming a consumer society with “labor and consumption … but two stages of the same process, imposed on [us] by the necessity of life.” Concrete examples of Arendt’s observations abound: the tendency to settle for less expensive furniture that we construct ourselves and do not expect to last perhaps even our own lifetime, as opposed to buying the work of a craftsman that might last generations; more generally, the ubiquitous lament that products today seem made to have a short life, forcing us to buy a replacement.
As a consequence, our social and economic systems now require that we be productive to demonstrate our worth. We have arrived at a
leveling [of] all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living,” such is the verdict of society. (126)
The only exception granted, Arendt observes, is for the artist, the only worker left; otherwise, anything not labor (not productive) is considered play, or a hobby. And she finds that the growing focus on labor has become self-reinforcing for society. For a modern laborer,
spare time is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life, does not change the character of this society, but harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption. (133)
Critically, this shift to a focus on labor has effects far beyond what we spend our lives doing: the resulting ever-increasing consumption leads to the consumptive destruction of the natural world, as “our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared.” (134) As a result, as Wendell Berry observes in
More profoundly for our future, Arendt also foresees an inability of our society “to recognize its own futility,” (135) in no longer striving for the durable, the permanent – that which distinguishes humans from animals. This lack of recognition of what we have lost has the dire consequence that with the increasing implementation of automation, we now live in
a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. … We are confronted with … the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. (5)
There is much more to learn in Arendt’s deeply considered analysis. But the challenges to our future that she identified already some 70 years ago as arising from a shift in the human condition to an economic structure of laborer-consumers have only become more pressing as our technologies have progressed. How will we address the increasingly widespread environmental destruction that our economic system causes? How will society adapt to a future in which labor may for many no longer be necessary or even available?
Other notes and information:
Arendt has a fascinating discussion on the shift, since Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter, from science as a contemplative exercise of philosophers to one focused on experimental results, eventually reaching the point in the 20th century that “scientific truth may not only not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason.” (290)
She discusses a consequence of the shift in the human condition in modern age as “a glorification of violence as the only means for” making a “new body politic,” (228) noting “Marx’s dictum that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,’ that is, of all change in history and politics.” (228) Pankaj Mishra arrives at a similar conclusion in his book Age of Anger, in which he argues that the loss, during the Enlightenment, of seemingly immutable social structures and the introduction and spread of the idea of equality for all, has meant a constant roiling of society as the
In the chaos of the first half of 2025, hard not to stop and reflect long on Arendt’s observation that: “The will to power … far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possible even their most dangers one.” (203)
At the dawn of the space age, Arendt lamented the idea that humankind welcomed the initial steps into space as being, quoting a front-page news story, the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” She notes “the banality of the statement” and observes that
nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon,” and goes on to describe “the earth [as] the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which [humankind] can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. (1-2)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
