Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (born October 14, 1906, Hannover, Germany—died December 4, 1975, New York, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American political scientist and philosopher known for her critical writing on Jewish affairs and her study of totalitarianism.

Arendt grew up in Hannover, Germany, and in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Beginning in 1924 she studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and the University of Heidelberg; she received a doctoral degree in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1928. At Marburg she began a romantic relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger, that lasted until 1928. In 1933, when Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and began implementing Nazi educational policies as rector of Freiburg, Arendt, who was Jewish, was forced to flee to Paris. She married Heinrich Blücher, a philosophy professor, in 1940. She again became a fugitive from the Nazis in 1941, when she and her husband immigrated to the United States.

Arendt settled in New York City and became research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations (1944–46), chief editor of Schocken Books (1946–48), and executive director (1949–52) of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., which sought to salvage Jewish writings dispersed by the Nazis. She was naturalized as an American citizen in 1951. She taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967 and thereafter at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

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Philosophy 101

Arendt’s reputation as a major political thinker was established by her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which also treated 19th-century antisemitism, imperialism, and racism. Arendt viewed the growth of totalitarianism as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. She argued that totalitarian regimes, through their pursuit of raw political power and their neglect of material or utilitarian considerations, had revolutionized the social structure and made contemporary politics nearly impossible to predict.

The Human Condition, published in 1958, was a wide-ranging and systematic treatment of what Arendt called the vita activa (Latin: “active life”). She defended the classical ideals of work, citizenship, and political action against what she considered a debased obsession with mere welfare. Like most of her work, it owed a great deal to the philosophical style of Heidegger.

In a highly controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), based on her reportage of the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Arendt argued that Eichmann’s crimes resulted not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer “thoughtlessness”: he was simply an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing. His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” that had spread across Europe at the time. Arendt’s refusal to recognize Eichmann as “inwardly” evil prompted fierce denunciations from both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. The controversy was revived some four decades after Arendt’s death with the publication of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann vor Jersualem: das unbehelligte Leben eines Massenmörders (2011; Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, 2014), which was based in part on sources not available to Arendt. It challenged the “banality of evil” characterization, arguing that Eichmann had long been a confirmed antisemite.

Arendt resumed contact with Heidegger in 1950, and in subsequent essays and lectures she defended him by claiming that his Nazi involvement had been the “mistake” of a great philosopher. In the late 20th century, following the publication of a volume of letters between Arendt and Heidegger written between 1925 and 1975, some scholars suggested that Arendt’s personal and intellectual attachment to her former teacher had led her to adopt a lenient assessment of him that was inconsistent with her condemnation of the collaboration of others and with her insistence in various writings that any act of compromise with evil is wholly immoral.

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Arendt’s other works include Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1970), and Crises of the Republic (1972). Her unfinished manuscript The Life of the Mind was edited by her friend and correspondent Mary McCarthy and published in 1978. Responsibility and Judgment, published in 2003, collects essays and lectures on moral topics from the years following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem.