ARENDT, Hannah

Born 14 October 1906, Hanover, Germany; died 4 December 1975

Daughter of Paul and Martha Cohn Arendt; married HeinrichBleucher, 1940

The only child of nonreligious, German-Jewish parents, Hannah Arendt received her formal education in Germany. She studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg and took her doctorate in 1928, after completing a dissertation on St. Augustine. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fled to France then emigrated to the United States. Arendt made her greatest mark on the American academic community; an innovative and forceful political theorist, she taught at various universities across the country.

Arendt's best known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1958), deals with the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia. It offers a description of the fundamental structure of a totalitarian regime and presents an account of social and political conditions—such as the growth of imperialism and anti-Semitism—on which they were built. Above all, Arendt attributed the success of totalitarian movements to what she termed "organized loneliness." Loneliness, for Arendt, is not merely solitude; it is a condition in which individuals have lost contact with the world as well as with one another. Worldless people do not understand themselves as belonging to the world because they no longer have the ability to add anything of their own to that world. Without a world shared between them, such people lack a "common sense"—they cannot differentiate between reality and fiction—and are easily manipulated by the logic of totalitarian ideology. To Arendt, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism epitomized the crisis of the modern age. She treated totalitarianism as a radically new form of government, a form that was the outgrowth of experiences peculiar to modernity. Such experiences must be countered by a "new political principle" capable of upholding human dignity.

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt drew a picture of the classical polis, arguing that Periclean Athens made a sharp distinction between the public and the private realms: the private realm of the household was dominated by necessity, whereas human beings could be free in public. The separation of these two spheres signified to Arendt that certain activities thrive on concealment, while others demand a public audience. Delineating three basic modes of human activity—labor, work, and action—she suggested that only the last is a truly political activity. (In Between Past and Future, 1954, she held that "the raison d'être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.") Only action is free, for it is the "spontaneous beginning of something new," the capacity to initiate.

In contrast, neither work nor labor belong in the public realm. Work—the creation of durable objects as opposed to articles of consumption—is dominated by a politically destructive meansends mentality. Labor—the ceaseless process in which we engage in order to insure our physical survival—is an activity to which we are driven by necessity. Arendt criticized the modern state that, in its preoccupation with matters such as the allocation of economic goods, gives public status to labor. This failure to distinguish between public and private has permitted the political sphere to be conquered by the forces of necessity and has deprived citizens of a public realm in which action is possible. Action requires an audience, for only through the presence—and the memory—of other people can individuals leave their personal marks in the world. To Arendt, only by appearing in the world in this manner can human beings guarantee the reality of their identities as separate and unique individuals. Thus human dignity is secured through the creation and maintenance of a public space.

In On Revolution (1963), Arendt analyzed the character of revolutionary movements of the modern age. She was attracted to the American Revolution because she believed it had to do not just with liberation from oppression but with the foundation of political freedom. Limited government, Arendt insisted, was not the aim of the American founders: in order to forge a unity between 13 separate states, they had to create new power. In guaranteeing the space in which action could take place, the Constitution became the "foundation of freedom." Arendt considered it unfortunate that revolutionary thought of the 19th and 20th centuries addressed the French Revolution rather than the American. The French Revolution was dominated by the need to alleviate mass poverty; it failed because no true political entity can be built where the citizenry lives in such destitution. While applauding the American Revolution as a political movement, Arendt deplored modern revolutions focusing on the amelioration of social ills rather than on the creation of a public realm.

Although the concept of action plays a major role in Arendt's work, she does not ignore the relationship between thought and action. Toward the end of her life, Arendt turned her attention increasingly to the phenomenon of thought. The New Yorker sent her to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her report, which appeared first as a series of articles and then as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), aroused considerable and bitter controversy. Arendt shocked her readers by asserting that while Eichmann's behavior had been monstrous, his character was not. What struck Arendt most about the Nazi war criminal was his banality. The Life of the Mind (1977), suggests that Eichmann's ability to commit monstrous crimes was related to his lack of thought. The capacity to judge between good and evil, in other words, is related to thought. In Thinking, the first volume of this two-part posthumously published work, Arendt maintained a distinction between reason and intellect, thinking and knowing. It is through thinking that human beings attempt to satisfy their quest for meaning.

To some, Arendt was an elitist who cared little about the suffering masses around the world. To others, her sensitive writings on political action and the public arena, authority, tradition, violence, and truth provide insight into some of the most perplexing dilemmas of the modern era. It is in the nature of political theory to challenge old ways of thinking and to force its audience to think about political things from a new perspective. In the spirit of this tradition, Arendt may be controversial and frustrating, but she is never dull.

Other Works:

Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1930). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1947). Men in Dark Times (1968). On Violence (1969). Crises of the Republic (1969). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1974).

Bibliography:

Barnouw, D., Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (1990). Benhabib, S., The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996). Bergen, B. J., The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and "The Final Solution" (1998). Bowen-Moore, P., Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Natality (1989). Burks, V. C., A Speculative History of Freedom: Thoughts Inspired by a Reading of Hannah Arendt's Theory (dissertation, 1994). Canovan, M., Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (1992). Canovan, M., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1977). Clarke, J. P., Hannah Arendt: Revisioning a Politics of Action Through a Politics of Judgement (dissertation, 1993). Corvo, A., The World In-between: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Education (dissertation, 1989). Curtis, K., Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (1999). Disch, L. J., Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994, 1996). Dossa, S., The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt (1989). Ettinger, E., Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Gottsegen, M. G., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1994). Hansen, P. B., Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (1993). Hinchman, L. P. and S. Hinchman, eds., Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (1994). Honig, B., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995). Kateb, G., Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984). Kielmansegg, P. et al, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought After World War II (1997). Kuracina, S. J., Hannah Arendt's Phenomenology of Politics (dissertation, 1983). Lloyd, M. J., Liberalism and Republicanism and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1993). May, D., Hannah Arendt (1986). May, L. and J. Kohn, eds., Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (1996). McGowan, J., Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (1998). McGowan, J. P. and C. J. Calhoun, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (1997). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (1989). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (II): A Bibliography (1997). Parekh, B. C., Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981). Passerin d'Entreves, M., The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (1994). Pateman, C. and M. L. Shanley, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (1991). Ring, J., The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (1997). Stone-Mediatore, S. R., Hannah Arendt, Experience, and Political Thinking: Storytelling as Critical Praxis (1997). Villa, D. R., Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (1999). Washington, J., Hannah Arendt's Conception ofthe Political Realm (dissertation, 1978). Waterman, R. D., Political Action: Dialogues with Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1983). Watson, D., Arendt (1992). Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982).

Other reference:

NR (15 June 1963). NYTBR (19 May 1963, 28 May 1978). Political Theory 5 (May 1977). Review of Politics (Jan. 1953). Prins, B., Hannah Arendt: Totalitarianism, Domination, and Personal Responsibility (video, 1988). The Holocaust: Judgment in Jerusalem (video, 1987, 1998).

—LAURA GREYSON