Primary Readings

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Please read the whole book. We will be focusing our discussion on the following passages:

• Part I. The Human Condition, pp. 1-21
• Part II. The Public and the Private Realm, pp. 22-78
• Part III. Labor, pp. 79-96
• Part IV. Work, pp. 136-159
• Part V. Action, pp. 175-212
• Part VI. The Vita Activa and the Modern Age, pp. 248-327

Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror” (Chapter 13) in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 460-479.

Seyla Benhabib, “The Elusiveness of the Particular: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno” (Chapter 3) in Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 34-60.

Seyla Benhabib, “The Dialogue with Martin Heidegger: Arendt’s Ontology of The Human Condition” (Chapter 4) in The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 102-122.