realm of a natural function hitherto cloaked in privacy. 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. 2). 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. 246), pointing out that in human affairs it is actually quite
reasonable to expect the unexpected, and that new beginnings
cannot be ruled out even when society seems locked in stagna-
tion or set on an inexorable course. Since the book's publication,
her observations on the unpredictability of politics have been
strikingly confirmed, not least by the collapse of communism.
The revolutions of 1989 were notably Arendtian, illustrating her
account of how power can spring up as if from nowhere when
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