Historian and political philosopher, born in Hanover, NC Germany. Of Jewish ancestry, she studied philosophy at Heidelberg (1929 PhD), and fled Hitler's Germany for France (1933) and the USA (1940), where she was naturalized in 1951. Her reputation as a scholar and writer was firmly established with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which linked Nazism and Communism to 19th-c Imperialism and anti-Semitism. Internationally recognized as the best-known American political theorist of her generation, she was both a prominent member of America's literary and academic elite and a revered mentor. Her teaching career included posts at Princeton (1953, 1959), Berkeley, the University of Chicago (19637), Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell universities, and the New School for Social Research, New York City (196775). Her most controversial major work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), suggested that it was simplistic to pin all the guilt for Nazi genocide on functionaries such as Adolf Eichmann, maintaining that other Germans, Western countries, and even the Jews had consented actively or passively to evil also.
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Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy |
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| Hannah Arendt | |
| Name: | Hannah Arendt |
| Birth: | October 14, 1906 (Linden, Germany) |
| Death: | December 4, 1975 (New York, United States) |
| School/tradition: | Phenomenology |
| Main interests: | Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, technology, Ontology, modernity, philosophy of history |
| Influences: | Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Russell, Jaspers, Benjamin |
| Influenced: | Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Giorgio Agamben , Seyla Benhabib |
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist.
Biography
Arendt was born of secular Jewish parents in the then-independent city of Linden in Lower Saxony (which is now part of Hanover) and was raised in Königsberg (the hometown of her admired precursor Immanuel Kant) and Berlin.
She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg, and had a long, sporadic romantic relationship with him, something that has been criticised because of his later membership in and support for the Nazi party.
During one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg to write a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the direction of the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers.
The dissertation was published the same year, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating (and thus from teaching in German universities) in 1933 because she was Jewish, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris, where she met and befriended the literary critic and Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin.
However, with the German military occupation of parts of France following the French declaration of war during World War II, and the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, Arendt had to flee from France.
In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States with the assistance of the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued visas to her and around 2500 other Jewish refugees. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Northwestern University. She also served as a professor on The Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as well as at The New School in New York City, and served as a fellow at Yale University and Wesleyan University.
On her death at age 69 in 1975, Arendt was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.
Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University.
Works
Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.
Arendt theorizes freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek polis, American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960's (among others) to illustrate this conception of freedom.
Arguably, her most influential work was The Human Condition (1958) in which she distinguishes labor, work, and action, and teases out the implications of these distinctions.
| Academic Genealogy | |
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| Notable teachers | Notable students |
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Martin Heidegger Karl Jaspers |
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl |
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