The Human Condition, 2nd Edition 2nd Edition

by Hannah Arendt (Author), Margaret Canovan (Introduction)

248 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0226025988

ISBN-10: 0226025985

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 6 versions

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by Alisen LLC

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

46 used from $9.62

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon or get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

Usually ships within 6 to 10 days.

Ships from and sold by Mall Books.

Arrives: Feb 11 - 24

9 new from $42.35

+ $3.89 shipping

A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its original publication, contains an improved and expanded index and a new introduction by noted Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan which incisively analyzes the book's argument and examines its present relevance. A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the leading social theorists in the United States. Her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy and Love and Saint Augustine are also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Frequently bought together

Total price: $76.22

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:The Human Condition, 2nd Edition by Hannah Arendt Paperback $42.35
Ships from and sold by Mall Books.
Mr. Potter: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid Paperback $15.00
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00. Details
Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche Paperback $18.87
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00. Details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Product details

Publisher : The University of Chicago Press; 2nd edition (December 1, 1998)
Language : English
Paperback : 370 pages
ISBN-10 : 0226025985
ISBN-13 : 978-0226025988
Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #156,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #250 in History of Technology
- #285 in History of Philosophy
- #345 in Modern Philosophy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
248 ratings

Start reading The Human Condition: Second Edition on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Customer reviews

5 star		79%
4 star		9%
3 star		6%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jill Darley-Vanis

Prescient and meaningful: to be read with a group

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

Arendt is challenging, unorthodox, and prescient in this too-hard-to-qualify genre of a work. Without naming the Holocaust, she is always talking about the Holocaust; without knowing it, she predicted the moment we're living in now.

This is one for a class or group. She's on my short list of "don't go there alone," but I'm so glad that I've finally read her and this seminal work.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

The Human Condition

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt is a magnificent book. I really enjoy Hannah Arendt's work. I highly recommend this book.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mark P.

A classic

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is a brilliant book that will change the way you think about the possibilities of politics and the potential for humans, acting together, to generate power and change their shared world. Writing in the depths of the Cold War, Arendt was prescient about the internal threats to the U.S. and also the potential that was realized thirty years later when the Iron Curtain crumbled.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Reverend Pirate

Not Recommended

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

If you want to study "The Human Condition". I recommend you understand that "The Human Condition" is a real thing. This book was not interesting at all.
If you open your eyes, you would be surprised what you already KNOW about "The Human Condition"

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

C. Shara

Not quite what I expected but a classic nonetheless

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2006

Verified Purchase

Arendt's book is really more a disquisition on political theory than an explanation of the human condition in all its endlessly tragic vicissitudes.

It was interesting, and I learned more about ancient Greek and Roman political theory than I really wanted to know; with the most interesting facet being the defining of the terms "labor", "work", and "action" as they pertain to the the means by which the human animal has his being in the world. But by and large, it really didn't touch on the human condition in a way that enlarged my understanding of the essence of its gestalt.

The most interesting chapter is the one on action as the public realm in which some men choose to live and act, and how that affects both the present and the future. While action is essentially ephemeral in nature, its impact on the human condition is one that can and often does have unintended consequences reaching far into the future like ripples on a pond spreading outward from a central occurence. It is that very unpredictability that is its foremost feature.

Labor too is ephemeral in nature, in its attendance on the basic needs of mankind, food and shelter. Only work, in Arendt's estimation is durable and in this category she places all forms of art.

It is not an easy book to read but, given a little effort, accessible to even a novice at political theory.

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tom

gives on pause to consider what we assume -- often without good reason to do so

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

Challenging insights into what we know and don't know. Highly thought provoking, gives on pause to consider what we assume -- often without good reason to do so.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jiang Xueqin

A Grand Yet Mundane Work

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2013

Verified Purchase

Hannah Arendt is easily one of my favorite political philosophers, a clear and powerful thinker of the human condition. But while I was truly impressed by "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and "On Revolution," I am not so keen on "The Human Condition." Here, Arendt seeks to be much more all-encompassing and grander than in her previous works, but I find it more mundane and limited.

In this sprawling work (it's only a little more than 300 pages, but it feels longer) Hannah Arendt dissects the three conditions of man: labor, work, and action. Labor is what a slave or a man in the state of nature must do: toil with his body in order to obtain the nutrients and subsistence necessary to live one more day. Work is what a craftsman does, an expression of his individual identity through physical exertion and toil. Action is what humans in a pluralistic action do -- think and speak, invent and imagine in order to win the respect of their equals and to elevate themselves in their eyes.

We have seen this sort of formulation before -- most notably in Plato's writings, and indeed Plato and the Greeks (especially Thucycides) are alluded to frequently here. It seems that for Arendt Greece was a pinnacle of human action in which humans thought and battled over ideas in their debates. It is a world of thought and action that Arendt writing as early as 1958 could see being withered and decayed by the growing onslaught of technology -- how technology has made our lives infinitely more convenient, but at the same time alienated us from our hands, and forced us into a cocoon of our lonely private lives. Arendt's call for action -- to restore the thinking and active life -- is noble and earnest, but reading it in a modern context -- with the dominance of Facebook, Apple, and Google -- it also seems quaint and silly.

This book is one of Arendt's more abstract works, and it's a very difficult text to read, something that the introducer (who wrote a fabulous introduction) mentioned repeatedly. Earnest Arendt fans must read this title, of course -- but for those who are looking to get started on Arendt, then "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a much more accessible and relevant work.

44 people found this helpful

Helpful

Erhan Ozdemir

Perfect

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2017

Verified Purchase

Another must read from Hannah Arendt. The contemporary world still needs ingenious thinkers like her to overcome the modern challanges before democracy.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Geoff Crocker

A rich menu of provocative assertion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2018

Verified Purchase

Hannah Arendt dissected the human condition, meaning the human situation rather than human nature, into labour, work and action. She wrote discursively, often in very long sentences and with little structure, regularly dropping seed ideas or little pearls of observation randomly. This leaves her philosophy lacking rigorous supporting argument, direction, or conclusion.

Her section on private and public realms, where she points out that ‘private’ meant ‘depriving’ someone of public role and engagement, is fascinating (p38). She points out that bureaucracy is the now prevalent government by nobody (p40). She perceptively foresees that automation will reduce labour (which historically was despised but is now glorified), leaving ‘the rather distressing alternative between productive slavery and unproductive freedom’ (p102). This is very relevant to contemporary concern at potential mass employment displacement by machines, leaving humanity free but needing to develop creative active life.

She follows her companion Heidegger in bewailing ‘the instrumentalization of the whole world’ (p157) – her whole analysis of labour is recognisably Heideggerian. She follows Hume in debunking rationality as supreme (p172). She shows great insight in suggesting that the views of Jesus of Nazareth have validity ‘in a strictly secular sense’ (p238) from which she examines forgiveness and promise. Humans are capable of action, but her musings don’t make it clear whether this is prompted by random neuron firing, how the epistemic constraint bites in making decisions to act, or whether a deterministic view of human action is proposed.

It seems an odd proposition that the modern age was ushered in by the three great events of the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the telescope (p248), but this is typical of the free unsupported assertions often offered by Arendt. Perhaps renamed as globalisation, Enlightenment, and science, her thesis might have more power. Her brief discourse on the philosophy of mathematics (p266) suggests that mathematics is invented as a mental construct rather than discovered imbedded in nature, but once again she doesn’t justify her assertion and treats it in passing. Her treatment of the philosophy of science is far too sketchy. She suggests that human awareness of the universe may indicate humanity’s universal origin (p270), and that ‘the beautiful and eternal cannot be made’ (p303) without considering the philosophy of emergence.

Arendt offered a rich menu of ideas, but too many to be treated with the depth they each need, often leaving unjustified mere assertion.

11 people found this helpful

Serenegreen

Thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2020

Verified Purchase

Read this alongside Sapiens, Brave New World and Carl Sagan's Cosmos and it is super enlightening. Technology has developed so far since Arendts writings, now in 5G, artificial intelligence. Its all changing what it means to be human, this book is super relevant now during coronavirus, highest good is 'staying alive' to continue the human species, we need more optimism Arendt's call to action, public discussion and 'thinking'.

2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

I also like the layout of the book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 5, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is a fascinating book - unique and truly perspective-changing. Arendt has a very distinctive voice, and distinguishes many aspects of human life in new ways, such as splitting labour and work. It can take a while to get into, especially since the first sections are so thick with specific definitions, but it's worth sticking with. I also like the layout of the book, it's pleasing to the eye and clear to read.

Definitely recommend!

5 people found this helpful

Thomas Samuel McNeill

Great edition and should be part of any philosopher's library.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

Very interesting and relevant book to many of the issues which society faces today. Arendt is a great political philosopher and her style is easy to grasp.

At points it does feel some points are a little laboured, resulting in the book being longer than it needs to.

This edition is very good and delivery was prompt.

One person found this helpful

Thomas A. Regelski

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

A classic.

See all reviews

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: history of engineering, human form

The Human Condition, 2nd Edition 2nd Edition

Buy used: $17.95

Buy new: $42.35

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers who bought this item also bought

Special offers and product promotions

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Buy used:

$17.95

Buy new:

$42.35