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Bernstein, R. Why read Hannah Arendt now Biesta, G. Hannah Arendt , Thinking without Most recently, Richard J. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? Social Work Education 30 7 , pp. Parallax 34, pp. Arnett, Ronald C. Bernstein, Richard J. Skip to content.

She was extremely perceptive about the dark tendencies in contemporary life that continue to plague us. She developed a concept of politics and public freedom that serves as a critical standard for judging what is wrong with politics today. He explores her thinking about statelessness and refugees; the right to have rights; her critique of Zionism; the meaning of the banality of evil; the complex relations between truth, lying, power, and violence; the tradition of the revolutionary spirit; and the urgent need for each of us to assume responsibility for our political lives.

This short and very readable book will be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand the forces that are shaping our world today. Born in Germany in , Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. Here is a long, complex piece of writing that conforms to no established pattern, crammed with unexpected insights but lacking a clearly apparent argumentative structure.

There are more intertwined strands of thought than can possibly be followed at first reading, and even repeated readings are liable to bring surprises. But one thing she is clearly not doing is writing political philosophy as conventionally understood: that is to say, offering political prescriptions backed up by philosophical argu- ments.

Readers accustomed to that genre have tried to find something like it in The Human Condition, usually by stressing Arendt's account of the human capacity for action. Since the book is laced with criticism of modern society, it is tempting to suppose that she intended to present a Utopia of political action, a kind of New Athens. Nor is this caricature entirely without foundation.

Arendt was certainly drawn to participatory democ- racy, and was an enthusiastic observer of outbreaks of civic activ- ity ranging from zAmerican demonstrations against the Vietnam War to the formation of grassroots citizens' "councils" during the short-lived Hungarian Revolution of Reminding us that the capacity to act is present even in unlikely circumstances was certainly one of her purposes. But she emphatically denied that her role as a political thinker was to propose a blueprint for the future or to tell anyone what to do.

The results that emerge from such interaction are contingent and unpredictable, "matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considera- tions or the opinion of one person" p. Not political philosophy, then; and, indeed, a good deal of the book does not on the face of it appear to be about politics at all.

The long analyses of labor and work, and of the implications of modern science and economic growth, are concerned with the setting for politics rather than politics itself. Even the discussion of action is only partially related to specifically political acts. Shortly after the book's publication, Arendt herself described The Human Condition as "a kind of prolegomena" to a more system- atic work of political theory which she planned but never com- pleted.

Since "the central political activity is action," she ex- plained, it had been necessary first to carry out a preliminary exercise in clarification "to separate action conceptually from other human activities with which it is usually confounded, such as labor and work. Arendt argues that these distinctions and the hierarchy of activities implicit in them have been ignored within an intellectual tradition shaped by philosophical and religious priorities.

However, there is con- siderably more to the book than the phenomenological analysis, and more even than Arendt's critique of traditional political phi- losophy's misrepresentation of human activity. For those con- cerns are framed by her response to contemporary events. When she says in her prologue that she proposes "nothing more than 1. From a research proposal submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation after the publication of The Human Condition, probably in II The prologue opens with reflections on one of those events that reveal the human capacity for making new beginnings: the launch of the first space satellite in , which Arendt describes as an "event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom.

For, noting that this amazing demonstration of human power was greeted on all sides not with pride or awe but rather as a sign that mankind might escape from the earth, she comments that this "rebellion against human existence as it has been given" had been under way for some time. By escaping from the earth into the skies, and through enterprises such as nuclear technology, human be- ings are successfully challenging natural limits, posing political questions made vastly more difficult by the inaccessibility of modern science to public discussion.

Arendt's prologue moves from this theme to "another no less threatening event" that seems at first sight strangely unconnec- ted: the advent of automation. While liberating us from the bur- den of hard labor, automation is causing unemployment in a "so- ciety of laborers" where all occupations are conceived of as ways of making a living.

Over the course of the book, framing the phenomenological analysis of human activities, a dialectical con- trast between these two apparently unrelated topics is gradually developed. On the one hand, the dawn of the space age demon- strates that human beings literally transcend nature. On the other hand, in a de- velopment Arendt traces to "alienation from the world" modern, automated societies engrossed by ever more efficient production and consumption encourage us to behave and think of ourselves simply as an animal species governed by natural laws.

Human animals unconscious of their capacities and responsi- bilities are not well fitted to take charge of earth-threatening powers. This conjunction echoes Arendt's earlier analysis of to- talitarianism as a nihilistic process propelled by a paradoxical combination of convictions: on the one hand the belief that "ev- erything is possible," and on the other that human beings are merely an animal species governed by laws of nature or history, in the service of which individuals are entirely dispensable.

The echo is not surprising, for The Human Condition is organically linked to Arendt's work on totalitarianism, and the two together contain an original and striking diagnosis of the contemporary human predicament. The book grew from the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation lec- tures which Arendt gave at the University of Chicago in April , themselves an outgrowth of a much larger project on "To- talitarian Elements in Marxism.

Her new enterprise was to consider what features of Marxist theory might have contributed to this disaster. In the event, her trawl brought up so rich and variegated a catch that the Marx book was never written, but many of the trains of thought involved found their way into The Human Condition, notably her conclusion that Marx had fatally misconceived political action in terms of a mixture of the other human activities she calls work and labor. To understand political action as making something is in Ar- endt's view a dangerous mistake.

Making—the activity she calls work—is something a craftsman does by forcing raw material to conform to his model. Nonetheless, Arendt found that Marx had inherited this particular misconception of politics from the great tradition of Western political thought.

Ever since Plato turned his back on the Athenian democracy and set out his scheme for an ideal city, political philosophers had been writing about politics in a way that systematically ignored the most salient political features of human beings—that they are plural, that each of them is capable of new perspectives and new actions, and that they will not fit a tidy, predictable model unless these political capacities are crushed.

One of Arendt's main purposes in The Human Condition is therefore to challenge the entire tradition of political philoso- phy by recovering and bringing to light these neglected human capacities. But this critique of political philosophy is not the only grand theme in the book that stems from her reflections on Marx.

For although Marx spoke of making, using the terminology of crafts- manship, Arendt claims that he actually understood history in terms of processes of production and consumption much closer to animal life—labor, in fact. His vision of human history as a predictable process is a story not of unique, mortal individuals but of the collective life-process of a species. While he was in Arendt's view quite wrong to suppose that this process could lead through revolution to "the realm of freedom," she was struck by his picture of individuality submerged in the collective life of a human species, devoted to production and consumption and moving inexorably on its way.

She found this a revealing repre- sentation of modern society, in which economic concerns have come to dominate both politics and human self-consciousness. Arendt's point is illustrated by Mussolini's admiring comment on the Bol- shevik revolution, "Lenin is an artist who has worked in men as others have worked in marble or metal," quoted by Alan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin; Parallel Lives London: Fontana Press, , page Introduction A second grand theme interwoven with Arendt's phenomenology of human activities is therefore her account of the rise of a "la- borers' society.

Many readers have taken offense at Arendt's derogatory references to social concerns, and have also assumed that in criticizing the conformist materialism of modern society, Arendt intends to recommend a life of heroic action. But that reading misses the book's complexity, for another of its central themes concerns the dangers of action, which sets off new processes beyond the actors' control, including the very processes that have given rise to modern society. At the heart of her analysis of the human condition is the vital importance for civilized existence of a durable human world, built upon the earth to shield us against natural processes and provide a stable setting for our mortal lives.

Like a table around which people are gathered, that world "relates and separates men at the same time" p. Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.

Without it, we are each driven back on our own subjective experience, in which only our feelings, wants, and desires have reality. The main threat to the human world has for several centuries been the economic modernization that as Marx pointed out de- stroyed all stability and set everything in motion. Unlike Marx, for whom this change was part of an inevitable historical process, Arendt traces it to the unintended effects of contingent human actions, notably the massive expropriation of ecclesiastical and peasant property carried out in the course of the Reformation.

For property in the sense of rights to land passed down through the generations had always been the chief bastion of the civilized world, giving owners an interest in maintaining its stability. The great change set in motion by the expropriations of the sixteenth century was twofold. For one thing, peasants with a stake in the stability of the world were turned into day laborers entirely ab- sorbed in the struggle to satisfy their bodily needs.

Instead of inhabiting a stable world of objects made to last, hu- man beings found themselves sucked into an accelerating process of production and consumption. By the time that Arendt was reflecting on the implications of automation, this process of production and consumption had gone far beyond catering for natural needs; indeed the activities, methods, and consumer goods involved were all highly artificial.

But she points out that this modern artificiality is quite unlike the stable worldly artifice inhabited by earlier civilizations.

Ob- jects, furniture, houses themselves have become items of con- sumption, while automatic production processes have taken on a quasi-natural rhythm to which human beings have had to adjust themselves. It is, she says, "as though we had forced open the distinguishing boundaries which protected the world, the human artifice, from nature, the biological process which goes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which sur- round it, delivering and abandoning to them the always threat- ened stability of a human world" p.

Elsewhere in The Hu- man Condition she describes what has happened as an "unnatural growth of the natural" or a "liberation of the life process," for modernization has turned out to be extraordinarily good at in- creasing production, consumption, and procreation, giving rise to a vastly expanded human race which is producing and con- suming more than ever before.

Her contention is that since these economic concerns came to be the center of public attention and public policy instead of being hidden away in the privacy of the household as in all previous civilizations , the costs have been devastation of the world and an ever-increasing tendency for hu- man beings to conceive of themselves in terms of their desire to consume. The implication of her argument is not, however, that all we need to do is to haul ourselves up out of our immersion in labor and take action.

For this modern hegemony of laboring does not mean that human beings have ceased to act, to make new begin- nings, or to start new processes—only that science and technol- ogy have become the arena for "action into nature. For the counterpart of the "world-alienation" suf- fered by laborers was "earth-alienation" among scientists. While Archimedes had declared long ago that he would be able to move the earth if he could find a place to stand, Arendt argues that from the time of Galileo to contemporary space engineers and nuclear scientists men have found ways of looking at the earth from a cosmic perspective, and exercising the human privilege of making new beginnings have challenged natural limits to the point of threatening the future of life itself.

According to her diagnosis of the contemporary predicament, Promethean pow- ers—releasing processes with unfathomable consequences—are being exercised in a society of beings too absorbed in consump- tion to take any responsibility for the human world or to under- stand their political capacities.

She observes in her prologue that "thoughtlessness" itself related to the loss of the common hu- man world is "among the outstanding characteristics of our time," and her object in thinking aloud was surely to encourage thought in others.

Ill In so far as Arendt's purpose was to provoke thought and discus- sion, she has been resoundingly successful. Like many of her writings, The Human Condition has been the subject of intense debate ever since its appearance. Indeed, few other works of modern political theory have had such a mixed press, regarded by some as a work of genius and by others as beneath refutation.

Many academics have taken exception to the book's unorthodox style and manner. Paying no attention to mainstream debates, Arendt sets out her own analysis without defining her terms or engaging in conventional argumentation. Political controversies have also raged about the book.

Its treatment of the animal la- borans and its analysis of social concerns made its author unpopu- lar with many on the left, but her account of action brought a message of hope and encouragement to other radicals, including some in the Civil Rights movement and behind the Iron Curtain.

In recent years, as Arendt's thought has attracted increased at- tention partly for reasons she would not herself have welcomed, such as interest in her gender, her ethnicity, and her romantic relationship with Heidegger , the book's importance has come to be very widely recognized, but its meaning remains in dispute.

Such is the complexity of its interwoven threads that there is scope for many different readings. Aristotelians, phenomenolo- gists, Habermasians, postmodernists, feminists, and many others have found inspiration in different strands of its rich fabric, and the forty years since its publication are not nearly long enough to allow an assessment of its lasting significance.

If we can extract a central theme from so complex a book, that theme must be its reminder of the vital importance of politics, and of properly understanding our political capacities and the dangers and op- portunities they offer.

Arendt's account of the human condition reminds us that hu- man beings are creatures who act in the sense of starting things and setting off trains of events. This is something we go on doing whether we understand the implications or not, with the result that both the human world and the earth itself have been devas- tated by our self-inflicted catastrophes.

Looking at what she calls "the modern age" from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century , she diagnoses a paradoxical situation in which radical economic processes were set off by human action, while those concerned increasingly thought of themselves as helpless flotsam on the currents of socioeconomic forces.

Both trends, she be- lieved, were linked with a new focusing of public attention on economic activities that had traditionally been private matters for the household. In her prologue, however, she observes that this "modern age" of which she writes has itself now passed away, for the advent of nuclear technology has begun a "new and yet unknown age" in the long interaction between human beings and their natural habitat.

On the one hand, the advent of genetic engineering with its power to set off new processes that burst the bonds of nature strikingly confirms human transcendence and what she called "a rebellion against human existence as it has been given" p. On the other hand, our self-understanding as animals has deepened into an unprecedented stress not just on production but on reproduc- tion. Matters of sex, allowed only recently into the public arena, seem rapidly to be elbowing other topics out of public discourse, while neo-Darwinian scientists encourage us to believe that ev- erything about us is determined by our genes.

Since the gap between power and responsibility seems wider than ever, her reminder of the human capacity for action and her attempt "to think what we are doing" are particularly timely. However, we need to listen carefully to what she is saying, for we can easily misunderstand her message as a call for humanity to rise from its torpor, take charge of events, and consciously make our own future. The trouble with that quasi-Marxist scenario is that there is no "humanity" that could take responsibility in this way.

Human beings are plural and mortal, and it is these features of the human condition that give politics both its miraculous openness and its desperate contingency. The most heartening message of The Human Condition is its reminder of human natality and the miracle of beginning. In sharp contrast to Heidegger's stress on our mortality, Arendt ar- gues that faith and hope in human affairs come from the fact that new people are continually coming into the world, each of them unique, each capable of new initiatives that may interrupt or divert the chains of events set in motion by previous actions.

She speaks of action as "the one miracle-working faculty of man" p. Since the book's publication, her observations on the unpredictability of politics have been strikingly confirmed, not least by the collapse of communism. But if her analysis of action is a message of hope in dark times, it also carries warnings. For the other side of that miraculous unpredictability of action is lack of control over its effects. Ac- tion sets things in motion, and one cannot foresee even the ef- fects of one's own initiatives, let alone control what happens when they are entangled with other people's initiatives in the public arena.

Action is therefore deeply frustrating, for its results can turn out to be quite different from what the actor intended. It is because of this "haphazardness" of action amongst plural actors that political philosophers ever since Plato have tried to substitute for action a model of politics as making a work of art.

Following the philosopher-king who sees the ideal model and molds his passive subjects to fit it, scheme after scheme has been elaborated for perfect societies in which everyone conforms to the author's blueprint. The curious sterility of Utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality. Although it is now forty years since Arendt made this point, mainstream political philosophy is still caught in the same trap, still unwilling to take action and plurality seri- ously, still searching for theoretical principles so rationally com- pelling that even generations yet unborn must accept them, thus making redundant the haphazard contingency of accommoda- tions reached in actual political arenas.

Arendt observes that there are some remedies for the predic- aments of action, but she stresses their limited reach. One is simply the permanent possibility of taking further action to in- terrupt apparently inexorable processes or set politics off on a different direction, but that in itself does nothing to cure the damage of the past or make safe the unpredictable future. Only the human capacities to forgive and to promise can deal with these problems, and then only in part.

Faced as so many con- temporary polities are with the wearisome sequence of revenge for past wrongs that only provokes further revenge, forgiveness can break that chain, and recent efforts at reconciliation between the races in South Africa offer an impressive illustration of Ar- endt's point.

Furthermore, this way of breaking the chain of consequences set off by action works only for human consequences; there is no remedy through forgiveness for the "action into nature" that sets off nuclear reaction or causes the extinction of species. Another way of coping with the unpredictable consequences of plural initiatives is the human capacity to make and keep promises. Promises made to oneself have no reliability, but when plural persons come together to bind themselves for the future, the covenants they create among themselves can throw "islands of predictability" into the "ocean of uncertainty," creating a new kind of assurance and enabling them to exercise power collec- tively.

Contracts, treaties, and constitutions are all of this kind; they may be enormously strong and reliable, like the U. Con- stitution, or like Hitler's Munich agreement they may be not worth the paper they are written on. In other words they are utterly contingent, quite unlike the hypothetical agreements reached in philosophers' imaginations.

Arendt is well known for her celebration of action, particularly for the passages where she talks about the immortal fame earned by Athenian citizens when they engaged with their peers in the public realm. But The Hum,an Condition is just as much concerned with action's dangers, and with the myriad processes set off by human initiative and now raging out of control. She reminds us, of course, that we are not helpless animals: we can engage in further action, take initiatives to interrupt such processes, and try to bring them under control through agreements.

But apart from the physical difficulties of gaining control over processes thoughtlessly set off by action into nature, she also reminds us of the political problems caused by plurality itself. In principle, if we can all agree to work together we can exercise great power; but agreement between plural persons is hard to achieve, and never safe from the disruptive initiatives of further actors. Perhaps it is not too rash to make another predic- tion: that future readers will find food for thought and scope for debate in The Human Condition, picking up and developing dif- ferent strands and themes in this extraordinary book.

That would have suited Arendt very well. As she said toward the end of her life, Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be.

I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it. Remarks to the American Society of Christian Ethics, In , an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars.

To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.

This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it.

But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal; it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which rilled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first "step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth.

They show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and adjust to scientific discoveries and technical developments, but that, on the contrary, they have outsped them by decades.

What is new is only that one of this country's most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction to which, un- fortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires. The banality of the statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever con- ceived of the earth as a prison for men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon.

Should the emanci- pation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudi- ation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky? The earth is 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 they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.

The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal en- vironment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.

It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the de- sire to mix "frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings" and "to alter [their] size, shape and function"; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man's life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.

There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this ques- tion cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.

While such possibilities still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made them- selves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend them- selves to normal expression in speech and thought.

The moment these "truths" are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the re- sulting statements will be "not perhaps as meaningless as a 'tri- angular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion' " Erwin Schrodinger. We do not yet know whether this situation is final.

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