She divided all human activity into three categories and warned that modernity was collapsing them into one.
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, fled Nazi Germany in 1933, and eventually settled in the United States. In 1958, she published The Human Condition, a philosophical investigation of what she called the vita activa, the life of activity.1
Arendt divided the vita activa into three fundamental categories. Labor was the activity tied to biological survival, the endless cycle of producing and consuming that humans share with all living creatures. Work was the fabrication of durable objects, tools and buildings and books, that outlast the maker. Action was the capacity to begin something new in the company of others, the distinctly human exercise of freedom.2
Her argument was that modernity had blurred the boundaries between these three activities, and that the highest, action, was being swallowed by the lowest, labor. Industrialization reduced craftsmanship to factory production. Consumer culture turned durable goods into disposable objects. The modern worker was no longer a maker of lasting things but a laborer trapped in cycles of production and consumption, defined entirely by a job.3
Arendt wrote that modern society had made biological necessity into a public matter and, in doing so, had corrupted the realm of free action. There was no longer a space free from the demands of survival.
Her other landmark works included The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which analyzed the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which introduced the phrase "the banality of evil" after she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker.4
Arendt held academic positions at several American universities, including the University of Chicago, and was the first woman appointed full professor in politics at Princeton. She died in New York City in 1975.5