Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906 CE–1975 CE) was a German-born Jewish political theorist whose work examined totalitarianism, political action, plurality, authority, freedom, judgment, and the conditions of human political existence. Her first major political study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951 CE), analysed antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarian domination while distinguishing totalitarianism from conventional forms of tyranny through its combination of ideological explanation, mass mobilisation, terror, and the destruction of spontaneous political association; the work treated Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as historically distinct manifestations of a novel form of political domination. In The Human Condition (1958 CE), Arendt reconstructed the vita activa through the activities of labor, work, and action, assigning particular political significance to action because it occurs among plural human beings and discloses individual distinctness within a shared public world; her concepts of natality and plurality consequently place new beginnings and interhuman disclosure at the centre of political existence. Her analysis of action was complemented by a distinction between the social and the political, and by an account of the public realm as a space in which speech and deeds can acquire durable worldly significance. In 1961 CE she attended Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker, subsequently publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963 CE, where her controversial formulation of the 'banality of evil' concerned the possibility that grave wrongdoing can be enacted through ordinary bureaucratic thoughtlessness rather than through an exceptional demonic psychology. Her later writings, including On Revolution (1963 CE), Between Past and Future (1961–1968 CE), and The Life of the Mind, published posthumously in 1978 CE, continued her investigation of political judgment, thinking, willing, authority, and the relationship between philosophical reflection and political action.

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