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Portrait of Hannah Arendt

Philosophy

Hannah Arendt

1906–1975 · German-American

Political theory; phenomenology

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist who fled Nazi Germany and became one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century in the United States. Her works analyse totalitarianism, the nature of political action and the life of the mind, and her report on the Eichmann trial gave the world the controversial phrase "the banality of evil". She preferred to call herself a political theorist rather than a philosopher.

How to spot them

  • ▸"The banality of evil"; Eichmann in Jerusalem; The Origins of Totalitarianism
  • ▸Labour, work and action; the vita activa; natality and plurality
  • ▸"The right to have rights"; statelessness; the public realm
  • ▸Student and lover of Heidegger; doctorate under Karl Jaspers; the New Yorker; the New School

Key works

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Traces Nazism and Stalinism to antisemitism, imperialism and the atomised mass society exploited by terror and ideology

The Human Condition (1958)

Analyses the vita activa as labour, work and action, and the modern loss of a shared public realm

Between Past and Future (1961)

Essays in political thought on authority, freedom, culture, truth and politics

Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

Subtitled "A Report on the Banality of Evil"; grew out of her New Yorker coverage of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann

On Revolution (1963)

Contrasts the American Revolution's founding of freedom with the French Revolution's derailment by the social question

The Life of the Mind (1978)

Posthumous, unfinished work on thinking, willing and (planned) judging

Key ideas

  • Totalitarianism is a novel form of government, distinct from tyranny, that uses ideology and terror to dominate isolated masses and make human beings superfluous
  • The banality of evil: great evil can be done by ordinary, thoughtless functionaries like Eichmann rather than by demonic monsters
  • The vita activa has three activities: labour (meeting biological needs), work (making a durable world of things) and action (speech and deeds among plural equals), the highest
  • Natality: each birth brings a new beginning into the world, grounding the human capacity to act and start something new
  • Plurality is the condition of politics: politics exists because people are many and distinct, appearing to one another in a public space
  • "The right to have rights": the stateless refugee shows that human rights mean little without membership of a political community

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Linden, now part of Hanover, and raised in Königsberg
  • •Studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg, with whom she had an affair, then wrote her doctorate on the concept of love in Augustine under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg
  • •Briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris; she was interned at the Gurs camp in 1940 before escaping to the United States in 1941
  • •Was stateless from 1937 until she became a US citizen in 1951
  • •Covered the 1961 Eichmann trial for The New Yorker; her book provoked fierce controversy, especially over her remarks on the Jewish Councils
  • •Taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Chicago
  • •In a famous 1964 television interview with Günter Gaus she said her profession was political theory, not philosophy

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources