(p.18) As the unity of human subjects who reproduce the life of the species through their labor, things come into being within society objectively, independent of reflection, without regard to the specific qualities of those who labor or the products of labor. The principle of the equivalence of social labour makes society in Its modern bourgeois sense both something abstract and the most real thing of all, just what Hegel says of the emphatic notion of the concept.

(p.21) Even before Hegel, the expressions through which spirit was defined as original production in idealist systems were all without exception derived from the sphere of labor. No other expressions could be found, because in terms of its own meaning, what the transcendental synthesis was after could not be separated from its connection with labor.

(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...