Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born to a Jewish family in Hanover and studied with Heidegger and Husserl in Marburg and Freiburg and with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. Soon after Hitler took power she was arrested in Berlin in 1933 and held by the Gestapo for eight days; released, she fled to Paris and in 1941 to New York. Her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism was the first major work to analyse Stalinism and Nazism as a single structural category, and it placed her at the centre of the émigré intelligentsia. The University of Chicago's Walgreen Lectures soon followed, and those lectures became the core of The Human Condition.

The book's central move is to split the vita activa into three distinct human activities. Labor is tied to the biological cycle of the body — feeding, producing, being consumed again; it leaves no trace. Work makes durable things; the table, the book, the building give the world a structure in which humans can dwell. Action happens only among other people; through speech and deed a person discloses who they are and starts something unexpected. For Arendt, only action is the domain of politics, and only action is freedom.

Her benchmark is the Greek polis, where the private realm (oikos) was governed by necessity and the public realm by speech and action among equals. Modernity dissolves the distinction. With the 'rise of the social', economy, household management, and the problems of subsistence flood the public realm; politics turns into a technology of administration, and genuine appearance becomes impossible. Arendt does not simply lament this — she opens the question: when there is no room for action, the human being is estranged from herself.

The Human Condition lays the ground for the 'banality of evil' she would propose after the 1963 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: the pathology of the bureaucratic functionary who stops thinking and merely does his duty is precisely the product of action's absence. Together with Beauvoir she is the most powerful female voice in twentieth-century philosophy, and she fed directly into Habermas's theory of communicative action, Agamben's analysis of bare life, and Rancière's politics of equality; almost any present-day debate about the public sphere still moves under the shadow of this book.