Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist, philosopher, and political commentator. Considered to be one of the most original and influential philosophers of the 20th century, Arendt became known for her application of phenomenological methods to her study of politics and for her analyses of totalitarianism, the public sphere, political action, freedom, and revolution.

Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, and reared in Köningsberg. She studied theology and classics, as well as philosophy with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. In 1929, she completed her doctoral dissertation on Saint Augustine's concept of love under the supervision of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University. In 1933, she was arrested for her work for the Zionist movement (a project on the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda). On her release, she moved to France where she worked with Youth Aliyah, a Jewish children's refugee organization. In 1941, Arendt managed to emigrate to America, where she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, the University of Chicago, 1963–1967, Wesleyan University and the New School for Social Research in New York, 1967–1975; cooperated with the journals Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Frontier, Aufbau and Partisan Review; and worked as an editor for the publishing house Schocken Books. During the years 1949–1951, she worked as an executive director of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. She was a recipient of numerous academic distinctions and awards, such as the Lessing Prize in 1959, the Sigmund Freud Prize of the German Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in 1967, and the Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilization in 1975.

In 1951, Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she analyzed the emergence of totalitarianism and investigated its relationship to the modern forms of anti-Semitism and 19th-century imperialism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was one of the first political analysts to emphasize the analogy between Nazism and Soviet communism in (a) their annulment of the distinction between the private and the public arenas; (b) their bureaucratic socialization of citizens into loyal, powerless, and thoughtless dependents; (c) their ideological justifications; and (d) the accompanying terror and collapse of moral standards. Arendt suggested that modern totalitarianism proved the traditional understandings of evil inadequate. She therefore introduced the concept of “radical evil,” understood as a systematic eradication [Page 190]of the conditions of humanity, such as plurality, autonomy, and individuality. For Arendt, the radical evil entailed the effect of making humanity superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt also discussed the issue of human rights and statelessness. She claimed that if human rights were derived solely from the concept of humanity and natural equality of people, they would be ineffective and unenforceable. She stated famously that people as rights-recipients were not born equal but became equal through their political agency. She also argued that human rights needed to be linked to the institution of citizenship in a sovereign state.

In 1958, Arendt published what is considered her major work in political theory, The Human Condition. In it, she dealt with the concerns of political life and the distinction between the public and private. She proposed that human activities could be categorized as labor (the biological necessities of human existence), work (the construction and fabrication of the non-natural world), or action (the liberating political engagement of people). She argued that characteristic of modern times was the expansion of the realms of labor and work at the expense of action. She also claimed that the conceptual distinction between the private and the public realms was inadequate, and argued instead for the recognition of the social realm, which she understood as an encroachment of the economic matters into public activities, and the subsequent commodification of political and moral values.

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