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Thinker · TH-0024

Hannah Arendt

German-born political theorist who studied with Heidegger and Jaspers, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the United States. She wrote on totalitarianism,…

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Also known as Arendt, Johanna Arendt

1906 – 1975 · Linden (Hanover), Königsberg, Heidelberg, Paris, New York

Traditions: Continental

German-born political theorist who studied with Heidegger and Jaspers, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the United States. She wrote on totalitarianism, the nature of political action, and the moral failures she observed at the Eichmann trial.

Key ideas

  • Totalitarianism as a new form of rule based on terror and ideology
  • Labour, work and action as distinct human activities
  • Plurality and natality as conditions of politics
  • The 'banality of evil' and the moral importance of thinking

Major works

  • The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
  • The Human Condition (1958)
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
  • The Life of the Mind (1978, posthumous)

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