The Human Condition

The Human Condition (1958) is the magnum opus of Hannah Arendt, the German-American political thinker. Originally intended to be titled "Amor Mundi" (love of the world), the book takes "what we are doing" as its theme and unfolds around the "vita activa," distinguishing three fundamental human activities—labor, work, and action—each corresponding to a condition given to human life on earth: labor to the life process that must be sustained, work to the need to build a durable man-made world, and action to the need to reveal "who" one is through interaction. The book's implicit frame is the contrast between the vita activa and the contemplative life, retelling how the hierarchy that placed contemplation above action formed in Western thought and how it collapsed in modernity. Arendt examines the rise and merger of the public and private realms, analyzes how the expansion of "the social" reduces politics to housekeeping, and diagnoses the modern condition through "world alienation" and "introspection": once the sacred world is no longer believed in and contemplation is expelled from meaningful human capacities, fabrication loses its measure, the man-made world grows ever more relative, and people retreat into lonely inwardness for certainty—at the cost of losing the world and losing action. First published in 1958, the 1998 second edition added an introduction by Margaret Canovan and a preface by Danielle Allen. The simplified Chinese edition, translated by Wang Yinli, was published by Shanghai People's Publishing House. Because of its unclassifiable originality, the poet W. H. Auden once suggested reading it as a dictionary.