During the students' movement of the 1960s The Human Condi-
tion was hailed as a textbook of participatory democracy, and as-
sociation with that movement in turn alienated its critics.
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. If she were alive today, she might point
to a novel variation on the familiar theme of power and help-
lessness, again connected with the emergence into the public
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