’ or triumph of a classless society.
The Origins of Totalitarianism examined a number of the recurrent themes that appeared throughout Arendt’s political writings, including an examination of the conditions necessary for a humane and democratic public life; the historical, social and economic forces that undermined these conditions; the conflict between private interests and the public good; and the impact of intensified economic cycles of production and consumption that derailed the traditional context of human life. The book aroused a controversy because Arendt equated anti-Semitism and imperialism in her examination of the destabilizing pathologies which had undermined the tenets of politics; a number of her critics maintained that these were separate in both origins and nature.
Arendt’s most influential work was The Human Condition (1958), in which she rejected the Western philosophical tradition from Plato through Marx, arguing that the apex of human achievement was not philosophical thought, but active life. She argued that Western philosophical tradition had elevated contemplation and ideas over actual appearances and the human activity which responds to appearances. She took a phenomenological approach to politics, attempting to uncover the true character of lived political experience which had, for the most part, been obscured and distorted by philosophical tradition, and hoping to reinstate the life of public and political action to the apex of human values and goals.
Arendt divided the active life into three areas: labor, which is repetitive but sustains life; work, which creates objects and the collective human world; and action, new activity, especially political, which involves shared enterprise. She placed these areas in an ascending hierarchy with action at the top. The fundamental defining quality of action was its freedom, its status as an end in itself, subordinate to nothing outside itself. Furthermore, this freedom was visible and not just a quality of inner contemplation. Freedom was first experienced as a tangible reality in intercourse with other human beings, before it became a mental concept. To act was to take initiative, to set something in motion, and it was this capacity to initiate something new that gave action the qualities of novelty, uniqueness and unpredictabliity.
Men are free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same. The Human Condition
Arendt regarded action as a public category, a practice that is experienced through interaction with others. She maintained that actions could only be justified by their public recognition and the shared rules of a political community, not for their own sake. Action would have no meaning if there were no one present to see it and give meaning to it. Action only had meaning in the presence of others like ourselves who could both understand our actions and recognize our uniqueness. Arendt connected action to speech, since intercourse with others required communication.
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition - not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam [sufficient condition] - of all political life.
On Revolution (1961) was an application of Arendt’s political concepts to the modern era. She challenged both liberal and Marxist interpretations of modern political revolutions, disputing the liberal claim that revolutions such as the French and American were mostly concerned with establishing a limited government that allowed individual liberty, and the Marxist claim that they were an attempt by the suffering masses to overcome exclusion by the privileged few. Instead, she claimed that these revolutions were exercises of individuals acting together for a common purpose, the establishment of public spaces of civic freedom and participation