A writer of great eloquence, Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political and ethical philosophers of the twentieth century. A German Jew, she was born Johanna Cohn Arendt on October 14, 1906, into a cultured commercial family in Linden, Prussia, where she was educated through high school before enrolling at Marburg University for study with Martin Heidegger, who made major contributions in the fields of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. Arendt had a brief love affair with Heidegger, who remained a great influence on her philosophical thought. Heidegger subsequently became a controversial figure among intellectuals because of his membership in the Nazi Party (joined on May 1, 1933). Irony may be found, perhaps, in the fact that Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), achieved her broadest renown among the general public for her intellectual reportage (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963) on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
In addition to Marburg, Arendt studied at the University of Freiburg (attending lectures by Edmund Husserl) and the University of Heidelberg, where in 1929, she completed her Ph.D. dissertation under Karl Jaspers on the subject of the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. Within five years, in 1933, she fled Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power. She stayed briefly in Prague and Geneva before settling in Paris, where she worked for several Jewish refugee organizations. She fled German-occupied France in 1941 and moved to New York with her mother and second husband, the Marxist philosopher and poet Heinrich Blücher.
Arendt’s reputation as an intellectual grew through work she published in the New York based Partisan Review, and, after World War II, she became a sought-after lecturer at Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, and other universities. She was on the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, where she served as professor of political philosophy. In 1951, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, a magisterial study of Nazism and Stalinism, which established her as the premier philosophical commentator on anti-democratic regimes. She located the root of modern tyranny in Immanuel Kant’s concept of “Radical Evil,” through which the regime’s victims were identified as “Superfluous People.”
The Human Condition, published in 1958, is widely considered Arendt’s most influential work of political philosophy. In it, she developed her important theory of “political action,” focusing on two beneficial acts she considered essential to society: forgiving past wrong and promising future benefit. The former “unfixes the fixed past,” while the latter “fixes the unfixed future.” For Arendt, the concept of action brings rationally justified hope. Although human beings must die, she argued, they are born not to die but “to begin”—that is, to act. In 1963, the same year she published her book on Eichmann, she published On Revolution, comparing the French and the American revolutions, arguing that the French Revolution brought disaster by abandoning the goal of liberty to instead embrace compassion for the masses, whereas the American Revolution succeeded by never abandoning the concept of liberty within constitutional law.
Arendt’s 1968 Men in Dark Times presents intellectual biographies of exemplary moral figures of the twentieth century, whereas Crises of the Republic (1972) is a rather darker view of then-recent shortcomings in American democracy. “On Violence,” one of four essays in the book, presents the provocative theory that power is not derived from violence (as is commonly assumed) but that violence is a property of groups that perceive themselves as powerful.
Arendt, a heavy smoker lifelong and grief-stricken by the sudden death of Blücher, succumbed to a heart attack on December 4, 1975. She left unfinished or incomplete a trove of works, many of which have been edited and posthumously published. The most important of these, The Life of the Mind (published in 1978), turns from political to moral philosophy and explores the relationship between the “active life” (life based on moral actions) and what Arendt believed to be the essentially solitary self-dialogue that is thought. The interaction between these two, she concluded, is what we call “conscience.”
