Understand the first sentence:
"Human plurality, the basic conditions of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction."

To act, in this most general sense means to take the initiate, to begin, to set something into motion. [p.177]
    - it's starting something new that can't be predicted.

"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical probability."

In acting and speaking, we show WHO we are [as opposed to WHAT we are].

Action is the key human virtue for Arendt.  She says,

"A life without speech and without action, on the other hand -- and this is the only way of life that in earnest has renounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the word -- is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men."

Recall that she says many people DO live lives that have no action [p.19], this is her complaint about the rise of the social, that a system that is designed to best suit the pieces of the world that were historically purely private, that have been since turned into the public concern, steals from mankind the very element of the human condition that gives us meaning.  First and foremost, Arendt is a theorist of human ACTION, of what makes life meaningful, and what how we go about accounting for the events in history that happen outside of the predicted 'statistical' norm.

There are two fundametal aspects of action:
    1) Plurality
    2) Unpredicatability.

Plurality
Human plurality has the twofold character of equality and distinction. She links this to language, saying,
     (1) if men were not equal they couldn't understand (in the most meaningful sense of this term) each other. and
     (2) if they weren't distinct, they wouldn't NEEDlanguage to make themselves understood.

The importance of equality and distinction are laid out on p. 179:

     "In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of body and sound of the voice.  This disclosure of 'who' in contradistinction to 'what' somebody is ... is implicit in everything somebody says and does."

The 'web' serves a dual metaphor: one is that is is intangible, fragile, 'light' and easy to tear asunder.  The second is that it covers and connects many different points.

The web of relations looks at people as subjects, collections of 'who's, not classes of 'whats'.  This is a critical distinction for Arendt.

be sure you understand the top paragraph on page 184.  That the web of human relations gives rise to stories, and why strictly speaking no one is the author of their own stories, without at the same time being the coauthor.  Know also why ambiguity, 'perplexity' in her words, follows from plurality and the web.

The key aspects are (a) ambiguity and coauthorship, (b) resulting from the flux of human affairs

{26} The frailty of Human Affairs.

Action is impossible in isolation.

Action has two components: A beginning, which might be initiated by an individual, and an achievement, which is always collective.

Action is UNPREDICTABLE and the full meaning of an event is unknown to the people who initiate it. [READ p. 190 closely]

"Action reveals itself only to the backward glance of the historian, who always knows better what it was all about than the participants." (p.192)

meaning is only understood ex post. [which, though she doesn't say this, also implies that any series of events, looked at from a slightly different point in time, can have a different possible meaning.  This, too, will come up in Liefer].

The 'frailty of human affairs' then, refers to the twofold distinction of action: that it is unpredictable, and that what it means is (almost) always up for grabs.

{27} The Greek solution.
The contribution of the Greeks was that they, through the invention of the polis, attempted to create a space where the problems of action could be mitigated, but at the same time maintain the importance of action.

The polis served 2 functions:
     (1) it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under some restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their home.

    The polis created a permanent space for action, by instituting the conditions of plurality: equality and freedom, and the coming together to participate in interaction of a political nature.

     (2) The second function it served was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech: for the chances that a deed deserving of fame would be forgotten where good.  The polis instituted a process of history: recorded stories of great deeds.

The space of appearance, the equality characterized by the polis, is rare.

"This space does not always exists, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them -- like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world -- do not live in it." [p.199]

[FYI if anyone is interested in Arendt's view of power more directly, see her essay: On Violence.  It's published as a short book, or I can get you a photo-copy, it was originally a New Yorker article].

The space of appearance only exists as long as people bring it together.

Power:
     1) Power cannot be stored up.  It exists only in the in-between space of people.  Power exists only in its actualization.
     2) Power is what keeps the public realm together.
     3) Power is power potential.

     The best examples of power in an Arendtian sense that I can think of are examples of popular resistance, social movements and the like. The marches of King, the success of Ghandi, the destruction of mob rule.  All of these activities take their power from the interaction of people.  A more subtle, but equally powerful example, would be the Vietnam resistance.  Here is a good example of power in the face of overwhelming force.  The Vietnamese people recognized each
other, (and there are dangers to this - nationalism can be powerful) but not the U.S. imposed government.  This meant that the US was attempting to subjugate a people and prop up a government using only FORCE -- and lots of it.  It's failure is understandable in Arendtian terms.  So too is the fact that critics of that war's strategy -- those who said we didn't use ENOUGH force are probably 'right'.  I.e. Arendt says we can always use force to crush power -- but it really takes ALOT of force.

"The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people." (p.201)

"What keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed and what at the same time they keep through remaining together is power." (p.201)
Re-read p. 201

The current bumper-sticker philosophy that says Leaders cannot lead unless we follow is almost exactly what Arendt has in mind.  Power, political power, the power to do things in the world of mutual association, comes from the agreement, the voluntary coming-together for a given purpose of free individuals.

The best way to get a handle on the kind of thing Arendt means by power is to look at what she contrasts it with.

Strength is individual, singular.  Strength comes out of the barrel of a gun, through implements, human creations, any individual can be strong (think of the great action movie plots about some lone psycho with an atom bomb getting ready to destroy the earth).

Under the conditions of human life the only alternative to power is force, which indeed one man can exert against his fellows. [p.202]

Violence can destroy power, but it can never substitute for it.

Tyranny is the destruction of power, and the replacement of Force.

Power is not only good.
"Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together ... to ruin the strong." [p.203]

p.204 explains how the three activities fit together.  Make sure you understand this section!

[for those of you with a little philosophy background, this
comment is related to Nietzche as well.]

{29} Homo faber and the space of appearance.

Common sense for Arendt is not what Bob Dole or Ross Perot talk about -- its not the body of folk knowledge.  Its what we all share in common.  It's probably closer in meaning to Durkheim's common collective consciousness.

World alienation comes when the set of things we share -- the common world, our common sense -- is destroyed.  This happens either when we are isolated (say through tyranny) or all made un-equal (through bureaucratic sorting) or unfree (through the needs of necessity).  It also happens when the world only brings us together and doesn't allow us to be distinct -- when the world of diversity is lost: i.e. in mass society.

[the section from p.209 to 211 is good for anyone comparing marx to Arendt].

{30} The labor movement.
     The key to take from this section is that to the extent that the labor movement made the formally subjugated worker and equal political citizen, the labor movement was a positive force for the world of action.  To the extent, however that it has become only another special interest, with it's worries in the life world, it has lost it's potential.

     "The chief difference between slave labor and modern, free labor is not that the laborer possesses personal freedom - freedom of movement, economic activity, and person visibility -- but that he is admitted to the political realm and fully emancipated as a citizen." [p.217]

[see footnote 53, p.218 for the piece on visibility and group recognition]

{31} The traditional substitution of making for acting.

The three fundamental frustrations of action are:
     1) Unpredictability
     2) Irriversabilty
     3) Anonymity of the authors.

This section talks about forms of government, and how we substitute the making of a stable order for the disorder and potential chaos of action.   I think Arendt says this is a sad, and often dangerous set of affairs.

{33} The reversibilty and the Power to Forgive.  & {34} The promise.

If actions are irreversible, and boundless, we need a way to 'undo' them, or in some sense, we would never rid ourselves of the un-foreseeable consequences of action.  Arendt argues that Forgiveness provides us with this power.  She credits Christ with coming up with the notion of inter-personal forgiveness.
     Promises serve to set up islands of certainty in a world of uncertainty.  Thus,

     "The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make an keep promises.  The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, who's 'sins' hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation; and the other, binding neself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let along durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men." [p.237]