Arendt
• On Arendt
• Labor, Work, Action

References for Theme: On Arendt

• Backman, Jussi
• "The end of action: An arendtian critique of Aristotle's concept of praxis" (2010)

• Baena, Victoria
• "Labor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt" (2020)

  (p.83) While Arendt describes thought as a natural need of human life, “thoughtlessness” is, for her, a temptation of modern life, as well as a possible condition for evil. The Life of the Mind is wary, in turn, towards those whom Arendt (with Kant) calls the “professional thinkers.” Arendt would remain reluctant to include herself among those ranks, though also eager to downplay any difference between philosophers and other people, as she argued that philosophers’ mere common sense acquainted them with the out-of-order nature of thought.3 Yet if thinking is something that happens but leaves nothing behind—an event without a structure...

• "Labor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt" (2020)

  (p.87) Yet the relationship between thought, work, and aesthetic or literary objects ultimately remains undertheorized in The Human Condition. This constellation would return with particular salience in Arendt’s late The Life of the Mind, which replaced the earlier laborwork-action paradigm with another tripartite division of intellectual activity, this one between thinking, willing, and judging. The “Thinking” section of The Life of the Mind begins by querying the nature of thought, before continuing negatively: thinking is not the social self, not the soul, not the everyday reasoning self. Arendt argues that thinking, unlike productive works or even the performing arts, leaves the...

• "Labor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt" (2020)

• Bakan, Mildred
• "Hannah Arendt’s concepts of labor and work" (1979)

• Bell, Dorian
• "Hannah Arendt, the Jews, and the Labor of Superfluity" (2012)

• Canovan, Margaret
• "On Levin's “Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt” (Volume 7, No. 4, November 1979)" (1980)

  (p.403) Arendt frequently does use the term animal laborans and its analogs to refer to particular social groups, especially in her frequent discussions of premodern societies. This is a claim that is easy to document. In The Human Condition, for example, Arendt considers Labor partly as one human activity among others, but also identifies this mode of life with particular social groups, such as the slaves of ancient Greece, whom she sees as restricted to a life of Labor and nothing else. It is clear that in this context, animal laborans refers not to all men some of the time, but...

• "On Levin's “Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt” (Volume 7, No. 4, November 1979)" (1980)

  (p.404) Arendt’s views on premodern societies (which arestrangely neglected by Dr. Levin) are clear, if unpalatable. The ambiguities begin when she comes to talk of Labor in the modern world. One might expect, given the rise in general prosperity and the liberation of whole populations from the pressure of objective bodily necessity, that there should be more scope for Action in the modern world than ever before. But Arendt maintains, on the contrary, that the effect of modeinization has been to give an undue predominance to the servile values of “Life” and to turn virtually everyone (not just the working class)...

• "On Levin's “Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt” (Volume 7, No. 4, November 1979)" (1980)

• Coeckelbergh, Mark
• "Technology as Skill and Activity: Revisiting the problem of Alienation" (2012)

  (p.214) This turn to skill—and indeed to technology as skilled activity—implies that at the ontological, transcendental level there is no problem of alienation—with regard to technology or otherwise. In this sense it is appropriate to say that if we feel alienated, it is always alienation ‘in spite of’: alienation amounts to not recognizing the deeper bonds that are there at the transcendental level. We are already related. What alienates us, are theories, principles or procedures that make us feel as if we are detached from the world. What matters, instead, is finding out good ways of doing and good ways of...

• "Technology as Skill and Activity: Revisiting the problem of Alienation" (2012)

• Dejours, Christophe
• Souffrances en France. La banalisation de l'injustice sociale (2015)

• Dinan, Matthew
• "The robot condition: Karel Čapek's R.U.R. and Hannah Arendt on labor, technology, and innovation" (2017)

  (p.109) For Arendt the desire to escape labor through technology has, in a kind of diabolical inversion, led to the creation of a society devoted exclusively to laboring. Where humans previously enjoyed a variety of forms of the active life, we now devote our striving to caring for our bodies. Modern technology in this way dislodges the traditional world-building role of techne in human life; this is perhaps why Arendt so rigorously distinguishes work from labor in The Human Condition, a distinction some critics of her work consider fraught. In her analysis of the tools used by homo faber, for instance,...

• "The robot condition: Karel Čapek's R.U.R. and Hannah Arendt on labor, technology, and innovation" (2017)

• Fayard, Anne-Laure
• "Notes on the Meaning of Work: Labor, Work, and Action in the 21st Century" (2021)

  (p.217) Going back to Arendt’s suggestion to “think what we are doing” , I propose to do just that to make sense of the changing nature of “work,” to study what we are doing. Considering whether the activities people engaged in are work or not will allow us to unpack the social and political implications of the emerging activities, new organizational arrangements, and sociotechnical practices they include.

• "Notes on the Meaning of Work: Labor, Work, and Action in the 21st Century" (2021)

• Gardiner, Rita A
• "Ethical responsibility - an Arendtian turn" (2018)

• Gardiner, Rita A; Fulfer, Katy
• "Family matters: An Arendtian critique of organizational structures" (2017)

  (p.507) In this paper we use Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of action and her critique of family as the foundation for organizational structure to diagnose how praxis and diversity initiatives may suffer when family is used as an organizing principle. Our critique of family as an organizing principle contributes to the feminist scholarship on diversity and inequities. Organizations that are family-like may view themselves as promoting diversity, as family values such as trust and honesty arguably facilitate diverse participants within an organization. However, because hierarchy is central to family as an organizing principle, it can perpetuate inequities within an organization. The constraints...

• "Family matters: An Arendtian critique of organizational structures" (2017)

  (p.509) The foundation for praxis is plurality, which is the recognition that, as human beings, our lives are embedded in relationships: ‘Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live’ . On the one hand, plurality’s emphasis on sameness indicates equality. On the other hand, her emphasis on difference enables a robust appreciation for differences in perspective, situation and history. Arendtian ‘equality in difference’ is not the same as modern-day notions of equality, which...

• "Family matters: An Arendtian critique of organizational structures" (2017)

  (p.516) Arendtian praxis encourages structures that enable diverse community members to share theirunique perspectives. It enables dominant power structures to be challenged. The potential of praxisto disrupt the status quo, however, depends on a deep and rich commitment to a plurality of individuals who, though equal, are not recognized as being the same. These structural changes enablechanges in organizational culture as well. For example, family-friendly policies for workers will beineffective in the workplace if hierarchical sameness is still embedded in the organizational structure.Rather, it is by troubling our foundational ideas about family that we may be able to think beyondthem. Arendt...

• "Family matters: An Arendtian critique of organizational structures" (2017)

• "Virus interruptus: An Arendtian exploration of political world-building in pandemic times" (2020)

  (p.157) The virus seems to have brought our existential vulnerability and interdependence to the fore. Thus, it alerts us to a paradox; that is, our physical health is vulnerable to the new virus, while our mental wellbeing is vulnerable through increased isolation. While it seems that many are grappling with this paradox of vulnerability, our argument is that the virus and this paradox should also alert us to pay attention to our social connections with others, to take responsibility for structural injustices that occur in the workplace and to recognize how they affect diverse working lives. In particular, what this pandemic...

• "Virus interruptus: An Arendtian exploration of political world-building in pandemic times" (2020)

  (p.159) Addressing structural injustices will require organizational change. Bloom (2019) asks how can we create the conditions for organizational politics to flourish. That is, how can we envisage new ways of organizing that offer space for diverse ways of being in the world? An Arendtian way of thinking about organizational action, he states, is not concerned with ‘a logic of means and ends but rather revel in the joy of simply acting to create the potential for something new to exist’ . As you mentioned earlier, questions about world-building presume a community already exists, when for many it does not, at...

• "Virus interruptus: An Arendtian exploration of political world-building in pandemic times" (2020)

• Garrett, Paul Michael
• "Hannah Arendt and social work: A critical commentary" (2020)

  (p.51) At least seven dimensions to her work appear which have stark and beneficial relevance for contemporary social work and the wider world. Each of these might give rise to future research and commentary.However, having outlined her ideas circulating around the ‘private’, the ‘public’ and the ‘social’, it was maintained that Arendt’s theorisation is riddled with major problems and that her work jars, in very fundamental ways, with more critical forms of theorisation within social work. Furthermore, this discussion has detailedArendt’s’ failure to provide any convincing account of the capitalist system in which the ‘social problems’, commanding practitioners’ attention and intervention, are constituted. More generally, despite the Arendt...

• "Hannah Arendt and social work: A critical commentary" (2020)

• Dissenting Social Work: Critical Theory, Resistance and Pandemic (2021)

• Geisen, Thomas
• Arbeit in der Moderne: Ein dialogue imaginaire zwischen Karl Marx und Hannah Arendt (2011)

• Geroux, Robert
• "Alternative Currency, Warren's "Time Store", and an Inquiry into Arendtian Labor" (2015)

• Guidi, Lucilla
• "A Groundless Place to Build: The Ambivalence of Production as a Chance of Action Between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt" (2017)

• Hao, Luo
• "Labor and Freedom—Comment on Arendt's Critique of Marx's Labor View" (2021)

• Holt, Robin
• "Hannah Arendt and the Raising of Conscience in Business Schools" (2020)

• Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri
• "Labor as Action: the Human Condition in the Anthropocene" (2020)

  (p.10) On the most fundamental level labor, for Arendt, corresponds to biological life – to the necessities of our subsistence. Borrowing Marx’s characterization of labor as the human “metabolism with nature”, Arendt understands the activity in cyclical terms. Once produced, the fruits of labor are immediately consumed and “return into the natural processes which yielded them”.31 This cyclicality distinguishes labor from work. The latter involves making and using instruments in order to erect a human world. Unlike labor, work has a definite beginning and a definite end. The products of work are designed to stand the test of time, and because...

• "Labor as Action: the Human Condition in the Anthropocene" (2020)

• Ince, Onur Ulas
• "Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism" (2016)

• Jansson, Inger
• "Occupation and basic income through the lens of Arendt’s vita activa" (2020)

  (p.135) Unemployment and insecure and vulnerable employment are global problems that lead to occupational injustice. Basic income is a frequently discussed issue. However, the reasons underlying claims for basic income have substantially different underlying ideologies. It is therefore important to scrutinize them when considering access to meaningful and developing occupations. If all aspects of human occupation are not considered, there is a risk that some people may be reduced to homo consumens and denizens. Taking account of all modalities in vita activa: labor, work and action, creates opportunities for enhanced occupational participation and deepened citizenship, in the sense that people participate not only in the labor modality but in all modalities.

• "Occupation and basic income through the lens of Arendt’s vita activa" (2020)

• Jansson, Inger; Wagman, Petra
• "Hannah Arendt’s vita activa: A valuable contribution to occupational science" (2017)

• "Hannah Arendt’s thoughts in relation to occupational science: A response to Turnbull" (2018)

• Kreber, Carolin
• "Transforming Employment-Oriented Adult Education to Foster Arendtian Action: Rebuilding Bridges Between Community and Vocational Education" (2015)

• Lenz, Claudia; Postl, Gertrude
• "The end or the apotheosis of “labor”? Hannah Arendt's contribution to the question of the good life in times of global superfluity of human labor power" (2005)

  (p.135) What is most impressive in The Human Condition is the visionary foresight of Arendt’s analysis of a labor society and its approaching end.

• "The end or the apotheosis of “labor”? Hannah Arendt's contribution to the question of the good life in times of global superfluity of human labor power" (2005)

  (p.138) The question of the good life is at least as old as Western philosophy. Labor, understood as hardship, drudgery, and the epitome of a lack of freedom, does not come off too well in this context.

• "The end or the apotheosis of “labor”? Hannah Arendt's contribution to the question of the good life in times of global superfluity of human labor power" (2005)

• Levin, Martin
• "On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note" (1979)

  (p.523) The whole ground of Arendt’s objection to the modern age is that animal laborans has become the dominant model of human life. However, this is not because the working class has taken over the public realm but because we have all become animal laborans in our attitude to our work and in our relationship to the public world. 

• "On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note" (1979)

  (p.524) What is unique about the modern age, according to Arendt, is that mere life has itself been elevated to the highest good and consequently, labouring which sustains that life has become the dominant activity. All "the ancient distinctions and articulations within the vita active"; the distinctions between labour, work, and action has been levelled out or obliterated. They have disappeared because only those activities which contribute to the biological life process are seen as having value. This means that labouring, which sustains that process, has been "elevated to the highest rank of man’s capacities," an elevation that has had fateful...

• "On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note" (1979)

  (p.526) By its very nature then labour is condemned to never leave anything lasting behind. Yet what justifies life for Arendt and makes "life’s burden" bearable is precisely that which defies and transcends the mortality of individual life and the natural cyclical processes which surround it. Arendt’s denigration of labouring (or animal laborans) can now be seen for what it is. It is rooted in her profound "repugnance to futility" a futility to which labour, by its very nature, is consigned. Hence Arendt’s opposition is not even to labouring or animal laborans as such (as it certainly is not to the...

• "On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note" (1979)

• Lewicki, James
• "The problem of idleness: An Arendtian justification of Universal Basic Income in the face of mass automation" (2019)

• Lima, Elizabeth Maria Freire de Araújo
• "Activities, common world, and forms of life: contributions of Hannah Arendt's thought to occupational therapy" (2020)

• Major, Robert W
• "A reading of Hannah arendt's 'unusual' distinction between labor and work" (1979)

• Malabed, Rizalino Noble
• "Leaving Politics behind: An Arendtian and Hegelian Reading of Hobbes" (2012)

  (p.10) What define the human condition for Arendt are labor, work, and action co-existing but delimited to their proper realms. Hegel, meanwhile, sees the authentic human being in the synthesis of working and fighting in the slave who finally rebels. Labor, work, action, fight—these are consist the human condition of being in the world and being with others. Both theorists see the transcending of mere life (or slavish life) in the quest for human becoming, coupling it or resolving the quest through politics defined by action or fighting. This is the ideal story of becoming human for both theorists, a movement...

• "Leaving Politics behind: An Arendtian and Hegelian Reading of Hobbes" (2012)

• Manning, Susan
• "The social worker as moral citizen: ethics in action" (1997)

• Pageau-St-Hilaire, Antoine
• "Qu’est-ce qu’être humain? Heidegger et Arendt autour de la praxis aristotélicienne" (2018)

• Piore, Michael J
• "Work, labor, and action: work experience in a system" (1992)

• Rendtorff, Jacob Dahl
• "Risk Management, Banality of Evil and Moral Blindness in Organizations and Corporations" (2014)

• Schroeder, Jared
• "Hannah Arendt’s machines: Re-Evaluating marketplace theory in the AI era" (2020)

  (p.40) [Arendt's] concerns regarding the role tools have played in damaging the public realm are instructive in considering the growing influence of AI on public discourse in the twenty-first century. Arendt communicated two overlapping concerns regarding the tools homo faber creates. First, that they will ultimately come to condition human life in ways that are destructive to society. She explained, for example, “the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement.”  Second, they are a destructive force because, in easing the labor of animal laborans, they create a more...

• "Hannah Arendt’s machines: Re-Evaluating marketplace theory in the AI era" (2020)

• Shymko, Yuliya; Frémeaux, Sandrine
• "Escaping the Fantasy Land of Freedom in Organizations: The Contribution of Hannah Arendt" (2021)

  (p.10) Arendt’s work contributes to the business ethics literature by explaining how and why individuals abandon civic behavior and moral agency in the workplace. First, individuals renounce their singularity—and endorse the organizational notion of professional success—by taking a survival perspective in the function of laboring. Second, individuals renounce solidarity by prioritizing visible and objective achievement and succumbing to the imperative of hyper-competitiveness. Third, individuals are deprived of spontaneity by constantly monitoring the pace and quantity of their own labor and by taking on new responsibilities—thereby zealously participating in the production of expected results. 

• "Escaping the Fantasy Land of Freedom in Organizations: The Contribution of Hannah Arendt" (2021)

  (p.2) We argue that an Arendtian perspective on individual freedom and the conditions for its actualization is helpful in explaining a paradoxical freedom fantasy that permeates life in organizations. Arendt’s analysis of the human condition offers invaluable insights on the mechanisms that foster the erosion of genuine freedom amidst an accelerating marketization of society. Deprived of their capacity for singularity, solidarity, and spontaneity, individuals are reduced to animals laborans, ensnared in an endless cycle of production and consumption—no longer capable “to live in the world” . As a result, the freedom to act is replaced by the freedom to perform, and the...

• "Escaping the Fantasy Land of Freedom in Organizations: The Contribution of Hannah Arendt" (2021)

  (p.7) In the milieu of organizing, the neoliberal idea that the empowerment of workers is nothing more than a conversion from animal laborans to homo faber (e.g., entrepreneurial subjects or responsibility takers) is yet another manifestation of the freedom fantasy. Such conversion does not liberate individuals from the imperative of participating in the relations of economic production under strictly defined terms of performance evaluation and utility . Instead, true freedom of action is substituted with controllable freedom of performance—work is transformed into an unescapable form of oppression. The conditions for action—that is, the possibility to transcend the confines of prescribed organizational...

• "Escaping the Fantasy Land of Freedom in Organizations: The Contribution of Hannah Arendt" (2021)

• Smith, Nicholas H
• "Arendt’s Anti-humanism of Labour" (2017)

• Sousa, Yanna Gomes de; Medeiros, Soraya Maria de; Santos, Viviane Euzébia Pereira; Temoteo, Rayrla Cristina de Abreu; Carvalho, Jovanka Bittencourt Leite de
• "The human condition of the nursing worker from the perspective of Hannah Arendt" (2020)

• Staudinger, Alison Kathryn
• "Work under democracy: Labor, gender and arendtian citizenship" (2013)

• Suuronen, Ville
• "Resisting Biopolitics: Hannah Arendt as a Thinker of Automation, Social Rights, and Basic Income" (2018)

  (p.48)  Arendt certainly was no naive technophile. Nothing could be further from the truth. While being skeptically hopeful, Arendt always remained aware of the potentially Pyrrhic nature of a potential “liberation of man from labor” in a world dominated by the animal laborans. So should we. The prospect of a “society of laborers without labor” could also potentially end up in a dangerous cul-de-sac, making “large sections of the people superfluous, even in terms of labor.” As Arendt highlights in a 1966 paper, entitled “On the Human Condition,” if human beings are deprived of the “life cycle of the simple things”...

• "Resisting Biopolitics: Hannah Arendt as a Thinker of Automation, Social Rights, and Basic Income" (2018)

• Tchir, Trevor
• "Labor and 'World Alienation': Arendt's Critique of Marx" (2017)

• Turnbull, David
• "Regarding Hannah Arendt’s valuable contribution to occupational science: Some tensions with her approach to philosophy, politics and science" (2018)

• Veltman, Andrea
• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)

  (p.57) The writings of Beauvoir and Arendt provide a key resource for a feminist philosophical shift away from celebrating reproductive labor, for both thinkers develop typologies of human activities that illuminate the inability of reproductive labor to provide an evaluative measure or justification for human life. Whereas Arendt writes that labor cannot express human freedom or reveal the unique living essence of the person, Beauvoir argues similarly that a justification for living requires transcending the maintenance of life through self expressive creative activity or through the production of something durable. Despite working within divergent phenomenological frameworks, both develop the insight that...

• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)

  (p.62) Arendt never explicitly acknowledges that labor is deeply invested in the female body—borne out in childbearing, child-rearing, and daily caretaking performed by women—or that the purest form of labor, housework, has structured womanhood throughout history. Nor does she comment upon the fundamental injustice involved in women’s relegation to the lowliest category of human activity. This lack of comment may reflect Arendt’s desire to distance herself from women’s liberation movements, or perhaps her determination to separate social and economic issues from politics, on the presupposition that questions of economic justice destroy genuinely political dialogue. Regardless of why Arendt remains conspicuously silent...

• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)

• van Diest, Han; Dankbaar, Ben
• "Managing Freely Acting People: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action and Modern Management and Organisation Theory" (2008)