- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
The Human Condition, published in 1958, is arguably Hannah Arendt's most influential book. Written seven years after The Origins of Totalitarianism had analysed the darkest forms of modern politics, it asked a more hopeful question: what are human beings doing when they are active in the world, and what makes political freedom possible? Her original title for the book was Amor Mundi, love of the world.
Arendt distinguishes three kinds of human activity. Labour meets the endless biological needs of life and leaves nothing lasting behind. Work makes durable things, such as tools and buildings, that form a shared human world. Action, people acting and speaking together in public, is for her the highest, because it is how human beings achieve freedom. She worried that modern societies, by defining people chiefly as job-holders, were losing sight of the public realm where free action takes place.
Against the emphasis on mortality in the philosophy of her former teacher Martin Heidegger, Arendt stressed natality, an idea she had first explored in her doctoral thesis on Saint Augustine: every human birth brings into the world someone capable of beginning something new. People, she wrote, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. The miracle that saves the world of human affairs from its natural ruin is, she argued, ultimately the fact of natality. The scholar Karin Fry considers it the most optimistic idea in her political thought.
She also identified two actions essential to human life together: forgiving past wrongs, which frees people from the consequences of what has been done, and making promises, which creates stability in an uncertain future. Together, she suggested, they allow people to keep acting freely despite the mistakes of the past.
A second edition appeared in 1998 with an introduction by Margaret Canovan, and the book continues to inspire. Its account of active citizenship places Arendt in the tradition of civic republicanism, and its ideas about action, forgiveness and new beginnings are drawn on by democratic thinkers, activists and educators. A documentary film about the book, In Search of the Last Agora, appeared in 2018.
Why it matters
Arendt's ideas about action, forgiveness and new beginnings have inspired democratic thinkers, activists and educators around the world.
About Hannah Arendt
Political theorist; "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and the phrase "the banality of evil."
More about Hannah Arendt
- Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for exposing antisemitismIn 1933 Hannah Arendt secretly gathered evidence of Nazi antisemitism for the Zionist Federation of Germany. The Gestapo jailed her for eight days but could not read her coded notes.
- Arendt wrote the most widely read essay on refugeesHannah Arendt's chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, drawn from her own statelessness, has been called the most widely read essay on refugees ever.
- Hannah Arendt explained how ordinary people enable evilRefugee philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and later coined "the banality of evil", ideas still used to understand how ordinary people take part in atrocity.
- Institutes in America and Germany carry Arendt's nameHannah Arendt's legacy lives on in Hannah Arendt Centers at Bard College and the New School, an institute for totalitarianism research in Dresden, and an annual prize for political thinking.
- Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism explained NazismHannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism through antisemitism and imperialism, and established her as a major thinker.
- Hannah Arendt helped Jewish children escape to PalestineIn Paris from 1935 to 1939, Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and became its special agent for rescuing refugee children.
Sources
- Hannah Arendt Wikipedia
- The Human Condition (Arendt book) Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.