The Human Condition （Hannah Arendt）

The Human Condition, first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt's account of how "human activities" should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. 
 
Ancient philosophers insisted upon the superiority of the vita contemplativa, for which the vita activa merely provided necessities. Karl Marx flipped the hierarchy, claiming that the vita contemplativa is merely a superstructure on the fundamental basic life-processes of a society. Arendt's thesis is that the concerns of the vita activa are neither superior nor inferior to those of the vita contemplativa, nor are they the same. She distinguishes three sorts of activity (labor, work, and action) and discusses how they have been affected by changes in Western history.
 
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant and original thinker, her works include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), The Life of the Mind (1975).