CONCEPT
Amor Mundi
Hannah Arendt's foundational commitment—love of the world—the political and existential imperative that each generation bears responsibility not merely to itself but to the shared, durable human world that lies between persons and that must be maintained, repaired, and renewed if it is to be inherited by those who come after.
Amor mundi—
love of the world—is the phrase
Hannah Arendt once considered as a title for what became
The Human Condition. It names the commitment that organizes her entire philosophical project: the conviction that human beings bear a responsibility not merely to themselves or to one another but to the
world—the specifically human artifice of durable things, institutions, stories, laws, and works of art that outlast individual lives and furnish the context within which human life becomes more than biology. The world in this sense is not nature or the universe. It is what
homo faber—the human being as maker—has built and must maintain: the table that will be here after we die, the constitution that governs people who have not yet been born, the book that speaks to readers its author will never meet. Arendt's biographical encounter with worldlessness—with being stripped