Who was Hannah Arendt?
Hannah Arendt grew up in a secular Jewish family in Germany and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The Gestapo held her briefly in 1933, after which she left the country. She spent years in Paris, was held in a French camp in 1940 and reached New York in 1941. She had no citizenship for much of that time and became American in 1951. That year she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, followed by The Human Condition, On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her teaching posts included Chicago and the New School in New York. She died in 1975.
Political views
- Treated Nazi and Stalinist rule as something new, which she called totalitarianism, not just an old-style tyranny or dictatorship.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Held that real power appears when people act together in public, while violence is a sign that power has failed.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wrote that Adolf Eichmann did terrible things through a failure to think, and called this 'the banality of evil'.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wanted citizens to take part directly through local councils, which she thought could keep the spirit of revolution alive.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Before 1948 she argued against a state built for Jews alone and preferred a federation, or a shared state for Jews and Arabs.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Defended civil disobedience, and attacked official lying about the Vietnam War.Source: en.wikipedia.org
Legacy
Arendt is among the most read political thinkers of the last century. Her writing on statelessness and refugees, including her phrase about a right to have rights, comes up often in human rights debates. Liberals, republicans, conservatives and leftists all borrow from her, though she refused every one of those labels. Admirers prize her defence of a lively, plural public life and of thinking for oneself. Critics were fierce about Eichmann in Jerusalem, especially her comments on Jewish councils, and some historians say later evidence shows Eichmann was a firmer believer in Nazism than she allowed. Her Little Rock essay is often called insensitive on race, and her past link with Heidegger is still argued over.
In their own words
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”