status than the private. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the church took over the role of the public realm (though its otherworldly orientation gave it a character distinct from the previous public realm), and the feudal lords ran their lands and holdings as private realms. The modern period saw the rise of a third realm, the social realm. The social realm is concerned with providing for biological needs, but it does so at the level of the state. Arendt views the social realm as a threat to both the private and the public realm. In order to provide for the needs of everyone, it must invade the private sphere, and because it makes biological needs a public matter, it corrupts the realm of free action: There is no longer a realm free from necessity. III – Labor Arendt claims that her distinction between labor and work has been disregarded by philosophers throughout history even though it has been preserved in many European languages. Labor is human activity directed at meeting biological (and perhaps other) necessities for self-preservation and the reproduction of the species. Because these needs cannot be satisfied once and for all, labor never really reaches an end. Its fruits do not last long; they are quickly consumed, and more must always be produced. Labor is thus a cyclical, repeated process that carries with it a sense of futility. In the ancient world, Arendt asserts, labor was contemptible not because it was what slaves did; rather, slaves were contemptible because they performed labor, a futile but necessary activity. In the modern world, not just slaves, but everyone has come to be defined by their labor: We are job-holders, and we must perform our jobs to meet our needs. Marx registers this modern idea in his assertion that man is animal laborans, a species that sets itself apart from the animals not by its thinking, but by its labor. But Marx then contradicts himself in foreseeing a day when production allows the proletariat to throw off the shackles of their oppressors and be free from labor entirely. By Marx's own lights, this would mean they cease to be human. Arendt worries that if automation were to allow us to free ourselves from labor, freedom would be meaningless to us without the contrast with futile necessity that labor provides. Because we define ourselves as job-holders and have relegated everything