Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is an important but hard-to-classify German Jewish political theorist (never "philosopher," a label she always refused).

Born of secular Jewish parents in Hanover and raised in Koenigsberg (the hometown of her admired precursor Immanuel Kant, now called Kaliningrad) and Berlin, Arendt studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at Marburg. She appears to have had a short romantic relationship with Heidegger, an entanglement that has occasioned much criticism. After breaking off the relationship, Arendt moved to Heidelberg to write a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of St. Augustine, under the direction of the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers.

The dissertation was published in 1929, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating (writing a second dissertation that would earn her permission to teach in German universities) in 1933 because she was a Jew, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris, where she met and befriended the literary critic and Marxian mystic Walter Benjamin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees, leaving for America only after the Third Republic had fallen to the Wehrmacht.

Arendt's work deals with subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. In her reporting of the Eichmann trial, she raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality - of the failure of good people to take risks.