Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt in her early adulthood

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist. She had often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."

Born of secular Jewish parents in the then independent city Linden now Hanover and raised in Königsberg (the hometown of her admired precursor Immanuel Kant) and Berlin, Arendt studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg. She had a long, sporadic romantic relationship with Heidegger, something that has been criticised due to his Nazi sympathies. During one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg to write a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the direction of the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers.

The dissertation was published in 1929, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating (and thus from teaching in German universities) in 1933 because she was a Jew, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris, where she met and befriended the literary critic and Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. However, with the German military occupation of parts of France following the French declaration of war during World War II, and the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, Hannah Arendt had to flee from France. In 1940, she married the German poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher. In 1941, Hannah Arendt emigrated with her husband and her mother to the United States with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry. She then became active in the German-Jewish community in New York and wrote for the weekly Aufbau.

After World War II she resumed relations with Heidegger, and testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and in 1959 became the first female appointed a full professorship at Princeton.

Hannah Arendt late in life

Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of her work focuses on affirming a conception of freedom which is synonymous with collective political action. Arguing against the liberal assumption that "freedom begins where politics ends," Arendt theorizes freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek polis, American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960's (among others) to illustrate this conception of freedom. In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality -- the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.

She also wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, which traced the roots of communism and fascism and their link to anti-semitism. This book was controversial because it compared two subjects that some believed were irreconcilable.

On her death in 1975, Hannah Arendt was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.

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Selected Works

Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (1929)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1958)
The Human Condition (1958)
Between Past and Future (1961)
On Revolution (1963)
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
Men in Dark Times (1968)
Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (1969)
"Civil Disobedience" originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker. Versions of the other essays originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.
The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age; Edited by Ron H. Feldman (1978)
Life of the Mind (1978)