Key Arguments

• Automation 'will empty the factories and liberate mankind' from labor’s 'burden,' an ancient wish now technologically realizable.
• The modern age has instituted both a 'theoretical glorification of labor' and the transformation into 'a laboring society.'
• With labor as the only recognized activity, liberation from it leaves society without the activities for which freedom would be meaningful.
• Egalitarian leveling characteristic of laboring together leaves no aristocracy (political or spiritual) to restore higher capacities.
• Arendt concludes the prospect is dire: 'Surely, nothing could be worse.'

Source Quotes

Closer at hand and perhaps equally decisive is another no less threatening event. This is the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity. Here, too, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is at stake, but the rebellion against it, the wish to be liberated from labor’s “toil and trouble,” is not modern but as old as recorded history.

However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating.

The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew.

What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer.

Key Concepts

• the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.
• The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society.
• a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor
• no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
• Surely, nothing could be worse.

Context

Prologue: Arendt connects automation to the modern social elevation of labor, forecasting a crisis of purposeless freedom.