Arendt, Hannah (1906—75)
German-Jewish political philosopher best known for her thesis that evil is ultimately banal. Born in Hanover, she grew up in Königsberg (birthplace of Kant, Immanuel), and studied philosophy in Marburg under Heidegger, Martin, with whom she famously had an affair. After breaking up with him, she moved to Heidelberg and completed her doctorate under the supervision of Jaspers, Karl. She fled Germany in 1933, first to Paris where she met Benjamin, Walter, and then to the US. She returned to Germany after the war, but soon returned to the US. In 1959 she became the first woman to be appointed full professor at Princeton University. Her reputation was established with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which sought to set Nazism and Stalinism in historical context and show how genocidal political systems are able to gain traction in the public sphere. Her particular concern was to make apparent the fate of stateless peoples: she had in mind those people, like the Jews in Germany, who have had their citizenship revoked by the state; but also those displaced persons who find they cannot return to their state because it has been destroyed or somehow rendered closed to them. The Italian philosopher Agamben, Giorgio has developed this aspect of Arendt’s work in his analyses of what he calls the homo sacer. Probably her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) pursued the problems raised in the previous work by examining political action, specifically the establishment of rights. She gained public notoriety in 1963 when she reported on the Eichmann war crimes trials in Jerusalem for the New Yorker (later in the same year published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem). Eichmann was responsible for a large proportion of the logistical side of the Holocaust, such as the sourcing, routing, and timetabling of trains that transported millions of Jews to the death camps. Her observation that Eichmann was a perfectly ordinary man who perpetrated monstrous deeds via perfectly ordinary bureaucratic processes inspired her famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’. She followed this up with the books On Revolution (1963) and On Violence (1970). Further Reading: S. Swift Hannah Arendt (2008).