Hannah Arendt
Thinker · 1906-1975 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Treated political action as a distinct human activity, and studied how totalitarian movements destroy the conditions for it.
Overview
Hannah Arendt studied philosophy in Germany, fled after 1933, was interned in France, and reached the United States in 1941, where she wrote in English. The Origins of Totalitarianism argues that Nazi and Stalinist rule were not simply harsher tyrannies but a new form, resting on mass movements, on ideology carried to the point of contempt for evidence, on terror applied to the innocent, and on the isolation of individuals from one another. The Human Condition distinguishes labour, work and action, and treats action - appearing among equals and beginning something new - as the specifically political activity that both consumer society and bureaucratic administration erode. Her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its phrase about the banality of evil, provoked an argument that has not settled, both over her description of Eichmann himself and over what she wrote about Jewish leadership under Nazi rule. Her books remain in copyright, so they are read in print rather than from an archive.
Where to start reading
The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951
Traces antisemitism and imperialism into the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, and analyses what made that form of rule new.
The Human Condition 1958
Her distinction between labour, work and action, and the argument that modern life crowds out the last of the three.
On Revolution 1963
A comparison of the American and French revolutions, arguing that one founded lasting institutions where the other was consumed by necessity.
Part of
Sources
- Hannah Arendt Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Arendt, Hannah Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
