ABSTRACT
The work of Hannah Arendt has now passed into the general canon of political philosophy, and unlike any of their preceding thinkers including Rosa Luxemburg there is no question about whether Arendt would or would not count as a political theorist. This chapter focuses on some issues taken from Arendt's The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem, with brief allusion to matters related to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's well-known tripartite division of human activity and the realm of human endeavour into labour, work and action is an excellent point of departure for an examination of the rest of her work. Some of the centrality of the concept of action for Arendt is given by her analysis of what it is that the human actor does in the relevant section of Condition. Dana Villa also goes on to remark that part of what Arendt accomplishes is to defend the life world from the encroachments of the system.
