In The Human Condition, Arendt develops a phenomenological account of action that is provocative and of practical import. She makes a distinction between a hierarchy of human activity (vita active) labor, work, and action. Labor is the most basic human activity that serves human survival; work involves the making and construing of useful and beautiful objects to make life convenient and enjoyable; action is the communal practice of creating a common social world. Action presupposes the acknowledgment that we live in a plural world that is made possible by the value of the public space.
According to Arendt, political action should never be placed in the service of limited political aims and goals (however laudable they may seem at first), but rather that political action should be seen as participating in the public sphere of a free and plural shared world. Predetermined political goals turn thinking and acting into instrumental processes—always and inevitably leading to forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. In Between Past and Future, Arendt argues that political opinions and judgments are best formed in specific and concrete contexts—not guided by some grand narrative or abstract principle but guided by concrete examples: human stories that express some truth.
Selected Readings:
Arendt, H. (1951). The Origin of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken.
Arendt, H. (1958). Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking.
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1978). Life of the Mind. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.