If you're looking for a mid twentieth century statement on human nature you can't really do better than Arendt's book The Human Condition. But first, you don't want to aggravate the 'precision in language' people by throwing around a phrase like human nature as if it was a roll of toilet paper in social crisis.
Human Nature can be defined as: ways of behaving, thinking and feeling that are shared by most people. Arendt's concerns, like so many before and after her, were with the whys, whats and hows of those ways of behaving. And like so many before and after her, Arendt made the distinction between the Active Life and the Contemplative Life.
The Active Life was beavering around climbing the slippery pole. The Contemplative Life was high on the hill contemplating. Of the two, in them old days before indoor plumbing, beavering was a little on the physical side, the preserve of the dullards or slaves. Contemplators sat nearer to the gods when they weren't cutting deals.
Then in the middle of the 19th Century, possibly because someone was a little upset and wanted to stick it to the classic liberals, a movement afoot turned the trickle down theory of the period, often called the Hegelian Dialectic, upside down. It was observed that Contemplators made nothing, they just sat there. Without beavers, contemplators had nothing to contemplate.
Hannah Arendt saw room in the heavens for both the Beaver and the Contemplator. She suggested that neither was better or worse than the other, something like a cultural revolution was simply counter productive, it was a waste of resource.
Arendt suggested that on a more personal level for us people, through the years there'd been another distinction made. This distinction was between Private and Public Life. In the old days the Private Realm wasn't the intimate setting it's supposed to be today, it was a servitude to biology, food, shelter and raising babies. Back then the Public Realm was freedom from that sort of hard labor, it was the place for "great words and great deeds." Having climbed the slippery pole, the Public Realm was a place free from labor, toil and sweat. It was the place to think high thoughts and earn high status.
As time moved on, numbers and complexity in societies increased, production techniques changed dramatically and there came a necessary third realm for us people. This was the Social Realm, characterized by biological needs becoming a public matter, a matter of national security and as a result the public realm started interfering with that former provider of food shelter and raising babies which had hitherto been thought of as the Private Realm. For Arendt this new Social Realm was a fundamentally corrupting influence on both the public and the private realms.
Go ahead, raise your hackles, spit and kiss a fat man. But know that by corruption of the Private and Public Realms, Hannah Arendt was inclined to see the dominance of a Social Realm that was creating a cycle of production and consumption that drew its strength from endless and continuous labor. She saw it as a servitude to a form of individual poverty. Rather than a society born of individual creativity with a chance to grow in a public space matched with the solitude and intimacy of a private space, she saw the advancing Social Realm as leading to a diminished human being whose existence was focused on survival and consumption.
Yes indeed Caesar's dogged legions, thick as planks, doing as they were told to win Gaul against the brilliance of the Celts in exchange for the pensions as craftsmen. A Celt or a Roman, whose freedom would you have preferred to belong to.
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