Labor, Work, and Action: Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition"

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a profound and original meditation on what we do when we are active in the world, and on what modern life has done to our capacity for genuine action. Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany and became one of the great political thinkers of the century, was worried that we had lost our understanding of the most distinctively human activity of all. She distinguishes three fundamental modes of human activity, labor, work, and action, and argues that modernity has elevated the lowest while crowding out the highest, with troubling consequences for our public life and our humanity. It is a book that made me rethink what we are actually doing with our days.

Here is what The Human Condition taught me about the three forms of activity, about the irreplaceable value of action, and about the modern eclipse of public life.

Key takeaways

• Labor is the endless toil of meeting our biological needs.
• Work is the making of lasting things, the human-built world.
• Action is acting and speaking together in public, where we reveal who we are.
• Action brings natality: the capacity to begin something genuinely new.
• Modern life elevates labor and consumption, eroding genuine public action.

Labor, work, and action

The heart of the book is Arendt’s threefold distinction. Labor is the activity tied to the biological processes of life, the endless, repetitive toil of producing what we consume to survive, food, the daily maintenance of the body; its products are used up almost as soon as they are made, and the cycle never ends. Work is different: it is the fabrication of durable things, tools, buildings, artworks, the stable human-made world that outlasts us and gives our lives a setting. And action, the highest of the three, is what we do when we act and speak together with other people in public, initiating new things, appearing before others as distinct individuals. Each has its place, but Arendt insists they are not the same, and that confusing them, or losing one of them, deforms our humanity. The distinction sounds dry but proves illuminating; it gave me a new way to see what I am actually doing when I am busy.

The miracle of action

Action is the activity Arendt cares about most, and her account of it is genuinely inspiring. It is through action and speech in public, she argues, that we reveal who we are, not just what we are, disclosing our unique identity to others in a way that labor and work never allow. And action carries what she calls “natality,” the human capacity to begin something new, to start a chain of events that did not have to happen, to introduce genuine novelty into the world. Every human being, by being born, is a new beginning, and in acting we exercise that power to begin again. This is the basis of freedom and of politics in the deepest sense, people coming together to create something new in common. There is real hope in this idea. Against every determinism, Arendt insists on the human power to start afresh.

The modern eclipse of the public

Arendt’s worry is that modern life has inverted the proper order. We have, she argues, elevated labor, the realm of mere biological necessity and consumption, to the highest place, organising entire societies around production and consumption, around the endless cycle of making and using up. Meanwhile the space for genuine action, the public realm where free individuals come together to speak, act, and create something lasting in common, has shrunk and decayed. We have become, in her famous phrase, a society of laborers and consumers, increasingly private, increasingly absorbed in the cycle of getting and spending, and increasingly estranged from the public, political life in which our highest human capacities are exercised. Reading this, decades after she wrote it, I found her diagnosis startlingly prescient. The eclipse of public life she feared has only deepened.

What I’m taking with me

The Human Condition changed how I see my own activity and my own society. What I am taking from Arendt is her clarifying distinction between labor, work, and action, which lets me ask what kind of activity actually fills my days; her luminous account of action as the place where we reveal who we are and exercise our power to begin something new; and her sober warning about a modern world that has reduced us to laborers and consumers while letting the public realm wither. She reminds me that to be fully human is not only to produce and consume but to act, together, in the open, and to keep alive the fragile, precious capacity to begin again.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Human Condition about?

It is Hannah Arendt’s analysis of human activity, distinguishing labor, work, and action, and arguing that modern society has overvalued labor and consumption while eroding the public realm where genuine action takes place.

What is the difference between labor, work, and action?

Labor meets our biological needs in an endless cycle; work makes durable things that build a lasting world; action is speaking and acting together in public, where we reveal who we are and begin new things.

What does Arendt mean by “natality”?

The human capacity to begin something genuinely new. Because each person is born as a new beginning, action lets us initiate fresh chains of events, which is the basis of freedom and politics.

References & further reading

1. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
2. Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
3. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Yale University Press, 1982.