Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt is best known for her writings on political philosophy, most specifically her analysis of the 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Born in Hanover, Germany, Arendt studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, and later with Karl Jaspers. In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for Paris, surviving a brief internment en route. Although Arendt was neither religious nor a Zionist, the rise of the Nazi party and the rapid spread of anti-Semitism through Europe provoked in Arendt a strong consciousness of her Jewish identity. In her intellectual writings of the 1930s, she argued that conditions of freedom and citizenship should never require repudiation of one's ethnic or cultural identity.

Emigrating to New York in 1941, Arendt gained recognition among political theorists and philosophers as a bold and controversial intellectual. She ...