Seyla Benhabib discusses

Hannah Arendt’s reading of Marx

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Columbia University, New York City

Seminar readings here.

In her chapter on “Labor” in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt developed a critique of Marx for not differentiating properly between the concepts of “labor” and “work.” This distinction and Arendt’s reading of Marx played a significant role in late twentieth-century debates in political theory. As Seyla Benhabib notes in her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2003), “the aspect of Arendt’s theory of human activity that has been most criticized and discussed … is the distinction between labor and work.” (130)

In this keynote lecture by Professor Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy emeritus at Yale University, senior research scholar at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT), professor at Columbia Law School, and a foremost authority on Arendt, we will explore the controversy over Arendt’s reading of Marx.