beings, each of whom can act and start something new. The
results that emerge from such interaction are contingent and
unpredictable, "matters of practical politics, subject to the
agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considera-
tions or the opinion of one person" (p. 5).
Not political philosophy, then; and, indeed, a good deal of the
book does not on the face of it appear to be about politics at all.
The long analyses of labor and work, and of the implications of
modern science and economic growth, are concerned with the
setting for politics rather than politics itself. Even the discussion
of action is only partially related to specifically political acts.
Shortly after the book's publication, Arendt herself described The
Human Condition as "a kind of prolegomena" to a more system-
atic work of political theory which she planned (but never com-
pleted). Since "the central political activity is action," she ex-
plained, it had been necessary first to carry out a preliminary
exercise in clarification "to separate action conceptually from
other human activities with which it is usually confounded, such
as labor and work."1 And indeed the book's most obvious or-
ganizing principle lies in its phenomenological analysis of three
forms of activity that are fundamental to the human condition:
labor, which corresponds to the biological life of man as an ani-
mal; work, which corresponds to the artificial world of objects
that human beings build upon the earth; and action, which corre-
sponds to our plurality as distinct individuals. Arendt argues that
these distinctions (and the hierarchy of activities implicit in
them) have been ignored within an intellectual tradition shaped
by philosophical and religious priorities. However, there is con-
siderably more to the book than the phenomenological analysis,
and more even than Arendt's critique of traditional political phi-
losophy's misrepresentation of human activity. For those con-
cerns are framed by her response to contemporary events. When
she says in her prologue that she proposes "nothing more than
1. From a research proposal submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation after
the publication of The Human Condition, probably in 1959. Correspondence
with the Rockefeller Foundation, Library of Congress MSS Box 20, p. 013872.
IX