Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (Linden, 1906 - New York, 1975) was a German-born thinker, later an American citizen, who devoted her work to political theory and to the study of totalitarianism, power, freedom and human action. She preferred to be classed as a political theorist rather than a philosopher, yet she is now read as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century, partly because her work moves between philosophy, history and political science. Her writings remain a reference point in debates about democracy and collective responsibility.

She was born into a secular, prosperous Jewish family and grew up largely in Königsberg, in East Prussia, where the family moved when she was a small child. After her father, who suffered from syphilis, died in 1913, her mother, a social democrat, raised her with considerable freedom and a strong classical education. She studied at Marburg, where she began a relationship with Martin Heidegger, then her teacher, and later at Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers, who became a lasting friend. In 1928 she earned her doctorate with a dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine, in which she already departed from Heidegger's view of life as a movement toward death by stressing birth as a beginning.

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, she was briefly arrested by the Gestapo because of her secret research into antisemitism. After her release she left for Paris, where she helped young Jews emigrate to Palestine. When Germany invaded France, the French government held her as an enemy alien; she escaped and reached the United States in 1941. The German state had stripped her of citizenship in 1937, and she did not become an American citizen until 1951, so for years she was stateless. That experience shaped her thinking about human rights and the condition of the refugee.

Her major mature work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), examined antisemitism, imperialism and terror as roots of totalitarian regimes and established her reputation. It was followed by The Human Condition (1958), which distinguishes labor, work and action, and On Revolution (1963). Her reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, also published in 1963, made her a highly controversial figure. Through the phrase 'the banality of evil' she described an official who carried out orders without reflecting on them, and this view provoked fierce debate. Years earlier she had worked on a study of Rahel Varnhagen, an assimilated Jewish woman of German Romanticism.

At the heart of her thought is plurality: politics exists because people are different and must live together in a shared world. For Arendt, action is the capacity to begin something new, and power arises from people acting together, not from violence. She distrusted representative democracy and favored systems of councils or forms of direct democracy in which citizens participate actively. Her positions were also contested. She was critical of the American civil rights movement, as in the Little Rock debate, and she wrote about feminism with notable detachment.

Her influence reaches political theory, philosophy, history and journalism. Concepts such as the banality of evil, natality and plurality appear in discussions of responsibility, memory and democracy. Her figure still provokes argument, partly because of her controversies and partly because the questions she raised remain pressing.