Abstract

Labor, work, and action are the three activities which form vita activa for Hannah Arendt. Action is the activity on which she built her political thought, so literature has focused on it. Thus, labor and work have been relegated to the background, ignoring what both retain and illuminate. The article shows the difficulties of the slippery distinction between labor and work, especially when labor and work are understood as concepts, crystallizations of the phenomena Arendt intended to capture. Instead, it proposes that labor and work acquire their deepest meaning when understood as experiences, that is, the mentalities and ways of life of animal laborans and homo faber, always within Arendt’s effort to understand Modernity and totalitarianism.