- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 into a secular Jewish family in Germany and grew up in Königsberg. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and earned her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1928. After Hitler came to power she was briefly jailed by the Gestapo, fled to Paris, was interned in France in 1940 and reached the United States in 1941. There she became one of the twentieth century's most original political thinkers.
Her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism traced how antisemitism, imperialism and mass movements made Nazi and Soviet terror possible, and it established her reputation. She followed it with The Human Condition in 1958 and On Revolution in 1963, works on freedom, citizenship and public life that are still widely taught.
In 1960, on hearing that Adolf Eichmann, a chief organiser of the deportations to the death camps, had been captured, Arendt offered to cover his trial for The New Yorker. She attended six weeks of the trial in Jerusalem in 1961, keen to see first hand the kind of man she had written about. Instead of a monster, she found a bland, ordinary bureaucrat, driven less by hatred than by ambition, a need to belong and a habit of speaking in clichés. He was, she wrote, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Her report, published in 1963 and expanded into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, introduced the phrase "the banality of evil": her argument that great crimes can be carried out by ordinary people who obey orders and conform without thinking about what they are doing. The book provoked fierce debate, especially over her comments on the Jewish councils, and it cost her some friendships. Later, asked about Eichmann's claim to have followed Kant's idea of duty, she replied that according to Kant no one has the right to obey, because moral judgement rules out blind obedience.
The idea of the banality of evil entered everyday language. It has been linked to Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience, and it remains central to how scholars, judges and teachers discuss responsibility, conformity and the duty of each person to think for themselves, even inside a bureaucracy.
Why it matters
Arendt gave the world lasting tools for recognising totalitarianism and for understanding why personal judgement and responsibility matter, even inside a bureaucracy.
About Hannah Arendt
Political theorist; "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and the phrase "the banality of evil."
More about Hannah Arendt
- Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for exposing antisemitismIn 1933 Hannah Arendt secretly gathered evidence of Nazi antisemitism for the Zionist Federation of Germany. The Gestapo jailed her for eight days but could not read her coded notes.
- Arendt wrote the most widely read essay on refugeesHannah Arendt's chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, drawn from her own statelessness, has been called the most widely read essay on refugees ever.
- Arendt's Human Condition found hope in every new birthIn The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt argued that natality, the capacity of each newborn person to begin something new, is the miracle that saves the world.
- Institutes in America and Germany carry Arendt's nameHannah Arendt's legacy lives on in Hannah Arendt Centers at Bard College and the New School, an institute for totalitarianism research in Dresden, and an annual prize for political thinking.
- Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism explained NazismHannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism through antisemitism and imperialism, and established her as a major thinker.
- Hannah Arendt helped Jewish children escape to PalestineIn Paris from 1935 to 1939, Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and became its special agent for rescuing refugee children.
Sources
- Hannah Arendt Wikipedia
- Eichmann in Jerusalem Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.