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The Human Condition is about many topics which seem to be in the now practically extinct discipline of political economy. The book discusses and interprets economic changes from a slave economy to automation; political changes from the aristocratic citizenry of Athens to our modern citizenry which includes everyone; ideological changes from classicism, Christianity, Marxism, Utilitarianism, to our present Egalitarianism; philosophical changes from the rationalism of the classical world to the Enlightenment to the world of contemporary science; and social order changes from the social class of Athens of the Golden Age to present-day society. All of these themes are handled with remarkable confidence with reference to psychology, sociology, politics, and economics, with a great reliance on classical philology and philosophy. But fundamentally, Hannah Arendt has written a book on Man and Society.
More specifically, in her words, it is “an analysis of those great capacities which grow out of the human condition” and an historical analysis “to trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self, in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age.” This is a large program, an attempt usually made by either a very naive or a very sophisticated thinker. Miss Arendt is not naive.
In more than a trivial way, her analysis of the human condition has certain formal similarities to the Freudian explanatory system. A vocabulary, a set of constructs, is introduced to describe those differences in the processes of society that seem to be related to societal changes. Then an historical account of the changes of society is given with the description of the “social syndromes” characteristic of each period. Thus we have a set of three formal constructs: labor, work, and action; a histor