In the largely hagiographical literature that surrounds Hannah Arendt’s work, the ‘social weightlessness’ of her account of the political is customarily singled out as at least potentially problematic, the distinction she stubbornly draws between the ‘political and the social’ sometimes taken to be ‘untenable’.1 Such qualifying moves misread Arendt. The distinction is all too tenable and it subtends Arendt’s construction of the public sphere; the ‘social question’ of meeting social needs is introduced by her as a key counterpoint to the conceptualisation of what is properly political. Related, relentless, if less criticised, are the sets of distinctions that organise her account of social praxis, the stark partitions between labour and work on the one hand, and of action as distinguished from both on the other. Importantly, for much of this secondary literature, the first problem can be excised from the body of her thought and set aside without compromising it; in the second case conceptual analysis may be tempered as to the starkness of the dichotomies it deploys. But neither of these qualifications to Arendt’s line of argument take her position seriously. Both gestures are intrinsic to her phenomenological method as constitutive of how Arendt gives meaning to the political. As framing conditions, both ‘moments’ run through the political to the root.