leaving the future alarmingly open. On the other hand, in a de-
velopment Arendt traces to "alienation from the world" modern,
automated societies engrossed by ever more efficient production
and consumption encourage us to behave and think of ourselves
simply as an animal species governed by natural laws.
Human animals unconscious of their capacities and responsi-
bilities are not well fitted to take charge of earth-threatening
powers. This conjunction echoes Arendt's earlier analysis of to-
talitarianism as a nihilistic process propelled by a paradoxical
combination of convictions: on the one hand the belief that "ev-
erything is possible," and on the other that human beings are
merely an animal species governed by laws of nature or history,
in the service of which individuals are entirely dispensable. The
echo is not surprising, for The Human Condition is organically
linked to Arendt's work on totalitarianism, and the two together
contain an original and striking diagnosis of the contemporary
human predicament.
The book grew from the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation lec-
tures which Arendt gave at the University of Chicago in April
1956, themselves an outgrowth of a much larger project on "To-
talitarian Elements in Marxism." Arendt had embarked on this
project after finishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, which con-
tained a good deal about the antecedents of Nazi anti-Semitism
and racism, but nothing about the Marxist background to Stalin's
murderous version of class struggle. Her new enterprise was to
consider what features of Marxist theory might have contributed
to this disaster. In the event, her trawl brought up so rich and
variegated a catch that the Marx book was never written, but
many of the trains of thought involved found their way into The
Human Condition, notably her conclusion that Marx had fatally
misconceived political action in terms of a mixture of the other
human activities she calls work and labor.
To understand political action as making something is in Ar-
endt's view a dangerous mistake. Making—the activity she calls
work—is something a craftsman does by forcing raw material to
conform to his model. The raw material has no say in the pro-
cess, and neither do human beings cast as raw material for an
XI