Property is the privately owned share in a common world—the basic political condition of worldliness… — Hannah Arendt

Property is the privately owned share in a common world—the basic political condition of worldliness—so expropriation coincides with world alienation; the modern age began by alienating groups from the world.

By Hannah Arendt, from The Human Condition

Key Arguments

Property, distinct from wealth and appropriation, anchors an individual in the common world.
Expropriation removes this anchor, aligning deprivation of property with alienation from the world.
The modern age’s unintended beginning involved alienating certain strata from the world.

Source Quotes

Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold. We saw before that property, as distinguished from wealth and appropriation, indicates the privately owned share of a common world and therefore is the most elementary political condition for man’s worldliness. By the same token, expropriation and world alienation coincide, and the modern age, very much against the intentions of all the actors in the play, began by alienating certain strata of the population from the world.

We saw before that property, as distinguished from wealth and appropriation, indicates the privately owned share of a common world and therefore is the most elementary political condition for man’s worldliness. By the same token, expropriation and world alienation coincide, and the modern age, very much against the intentions of all the actors in the play, began by alienating certain strata of the population from the world. We tend to overlook the central importance of this alienation for the modern age because we usually stress its secular character and identify the term secularity with worldliness.

Key Concepts

property, as distinguished from wealth and appropriation, indicates the privately owned share of a common world and therefore is the most elementary political condition for man’s worldliness.
By the same token, expropriation and world alienation coincide, and the modern age, very much against the intentions of all the actors in the play, began by alienating certain strata of the population from the world.

Context

Section 35, WORLD ALIENATION; normative claim linking property to worldliness and diagnosing expropriation as world-alienating.