Quotation
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“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality.”
Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy · Modern · 1958
What does it mean?
Action is the activity that goes on directly between people, without things or matter in between, and it corresponds to plurality. Labour meets the body's necessity. Work makes a world of objects. Action needs others because it is speech and deed appearing among equals. A rival reading thinks this scorns material life, as if politics were a conversation floating above food and houses. She thinks those are different activities, and that a society which only labours and works has lost the space where freedom appears. Another reading collapses action into any behaviour.
Did Hannah Arendt really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Arendt's English in the opening chapter. Action is distinguished from labour and from work. It needs other people and no material intermediary. The sentence is a definition, and the book is the defence of the definition.
Where it comes from
The Human Condition, chapter 1
Approximate date: 1958.
How to use it
A residents' meeting in Tower Hamlets is not the same activity as the repairs to the stairwell, and both matter. She would not let the repairs be called politics just because they are urgent, and she would not let the talk be dismissed because it produces no object. The distinction shows what each is for. A council that only consults, and never repairs, fails a different test. Her test is what happens to the space between people.
A mindset reading
The intermediary of things is the clause that stops the sentence being 'be nice to each other'. Action is not labour and not fabrication. If your example needs a product to count, you are in work, which she does not despise. She locates it.
Understand the philosophy
Chapter 1 of The Human Condition states the triad. Later chapters on labour, work, and action fill it. The vita activa is her subject, against a tradition she thinks ranked contemplation so high that action became an embarrassment.
- freedom
- society
- power
FAQ
What does it mean?
Action is the activity that goes on directly between people, without things or matter in between, and it corresponds to plurality. Labour meets the body's necessity. Work makes a world of objects. Action needs others because it is speech and deed appearing among equals. A rival reading thinks this scorns material life, as if politics were a conversation floating above food and houses. She thinks those are different activities, and that a society which only labours and works has lost the space where freedom appears. Another reading collapses action into any behaviour.
Did Hannah Arendt really say this?
Well attested. Arendt's English in the opening chapter. Action is distinguished from labour and from work. It needs other people and no material intermediary. The sentence is a definition, and the book is the defence of the definition.
Which work is it in?
The Human Condition, chapter 1 Approximate date: 1958.