Arendt, The Human Condition, Ch. 2 and 3

1. What is Arendt's distinction between private property and wealth?

2. How is Arendt understanding "privacy/privative"? 

3. How does Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor map on to Arendt's account of labor? Also, what is "labor-power" for Arendt? (pp. 87-89).

4. What kind of continuity or discontinuity do we get with Arendt's account of modernity? (e.g., the secularization of political concepts) (p. 64).

5. Dissolution of private space --> depth/hiddenness that is lost? What is the "darkness"? Is it normative? How do we square this with her method? (p. 71).

Private property not in the economic sense, but something more like "a space of one's own." Where one protects oneself from others. That's why Arendt is reluctant about the abolition of private property and maybe wants to disassociate the abolition of wealth (inequality?) with the abolition of private property (contra Marx?). 

Why does Arendt equivocate private property with hiddenness? In other words, why "hidden" and not something like "unavailable" or "un-regardable"? In the public realm, you're in this space of constant accountability; the private sphere is the way to hide away from that -- something which the public cannot penetrate. e.g., even slaves were not without property (pp. 61-62).

Private property was also tied to place, and place was identified with family (p. 61). Also tied to citizenship, if you were relinquished of your property then you'd be relinquished of your citizenship. Slaves still held "personal or private possessions" even if they did not private property in the sense of a place of their own. The working class is the craftsmen; the laboring class was the slave.

The point is that modernity/Marxism conflates property and wealth. There's also sacredness associated with private property, wealth was never concerned sacred in antiquity. It was considered bad to entirely expend one's private property in pursuit of wealth because you're giving up political freedom. Private property as the means of political freedom; making slaves do the labor for you.

Have y'all read Benjamin Constant's essay on the distinction between ancient liberty and modern liberty? For the ancients, freedom is the ability to act and speak in public; for the modern, liberty is the right to do what I want in their privacy.

Hiddenness in the sense of retreat vs. hiddenness in the sense of hidden-away (e.g., slaves and women). Slaves and women as living "laborious life," laborious because devoted to bodily functions (e.g., production and reproduction) (pp. 72-73).

For example, people nowadays talk about their domicile/homes as an investment, rather than as a place of existential significance (where one dwells and lives one life). 

Marx, Smith, Locke (e.g.,) are unable to make a distinction between property and wealth; private property as the basis of wealth accumulation, rather than as a place of hiddenness. 

Arendt's idiosyncratic vocabulary can make it hard to track her critiques of other authors (e.g., Locke, Smith, Marx) who don't use those concepts in the same way(?).