Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt , 1906-75, German-American political theorist, b. Hanover, Germany, B.A. Königsberg, 1924, Ph.D. Heidelberg, 1928. She emigrated (1941) to the United States and was naturalized in 1950. Arendt was a lecturer and Guggenheim fellow, 1952-53; visiting professor at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1955; the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton, 1959; and visiting professor of government at Columbia, 1960. From 1963 to 1967 she was professor at the Univ. of Chicago, and in 1967 she became university professor at the New School for Social Research.

With the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) her status as a major political thinker was firmly established. In this book she examined the major forms of 20th-century totalitarianism—National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism—and attempted to trace their origins in the anti-Semitism and imperialism of the 19th cent. Her second major American publication, The Human Condition (1958), likewise received wide acclaim. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), her analysis of the Nazi war crimes based on observation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann , stirred considerable controversy and became known particularly for her concept of "the banality of evil."

Arendt also served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations (1944-46) and executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, New York City (1949-52). Her other writings include On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1969), and Crises of the Republic (1972).

Bibliography: See L. Kohler and H. Saner, ed., Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969 (tr. by R. and R. Kimber, 1992), C. Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 (1995), E. Ettinger, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger (1995), D. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (1995), and R. Wolin, Heidegger's Children (2001); studies by S. J. Whitfield (1980) and L. Bradshaw (1989).

Arendt, Hannah (1906–75). Philosopher and political scientist, ending her career as Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. She was deeply concerned with the way in which the atomization, alienation, and anomie of mass society left it open to totalitarian take-over. In her view, freedom and thought depend on the separation of political life (the public realm) from social and economic life (the private realm)—as in the Greek polis or in the system envisaged in the American revolution. The modern world has seen the advent of the opposite, with public and private realms coerced together into the social and economic sphere, depriving thought of its necessary privacy and converting politics into economic administration. This allows totalitarian ideology to take over, and opens the way to ‘the banality of evil’. All this keeps pace with anti-semitism, since the stateless Jew cannot rely on any vague notion of human rights: rights are subordinated to ends.