• Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century.

• Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and moved to Paris for the next eight years, working for various Jewish refugee organizations.

• In 1941, she immigrated to the United States and became part of a vibrant intellectual circle in New York.

• Arendt held various academic positions at American universities until her death in 1975.

• She is best known for three major works:

  • The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) – a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, sparking debates on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon.

  • The Human Condition (1958) – an original philosophical study investigating the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action).

  • Eichmann in Jerusalem – reported on the trial of Nazi perpetrator Adolf Eichmann, coining the controversial term “banality of evil.”

• In addition to these major works, Arendt published influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition, and the modern age.

• At the time of her death, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Introduction

• Hannah Arendt was a seminal political thinker of the twentieth century, focused on human beings in the plural and the conditions of their shared lives, rather than the human being in the singular.

• Even in her dissertation, Arendt questions the conditions for the possibility of a human community.

• She criticizes the worldlessness of the philosophical tradition through an analysis of the Augustinian concept of love.

• Arendt explores how the world can be transformed from a natural kosmos, where people are initially strangers, into a polis shared by all.

• The central theme of Arendt’s work is how people can live together in a common world.

• In works like The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind, Arendt examined crucial political events of her time, grappling with their meaning and historical significance.

• Arendt claims that the phenomenon of totalitarianism has broken the continuity of Occidental history and rendered most moral and political categories meaningless.

• Arendt argued that we can no longer use traditional concepts and values to understand unprecedented events like the Holocaust and the Gulag.

• She suggested that we must face the burden of our time without the aid of tradition, “without a bannister,” and develop a new framework to deal with the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism.

• Her method of hermeneutics was influenced by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger.

• From Benjamin, Arendt adopted a fragmentary historiography, seeking moments of rupture and dislocation in history to recover lost potentials of the past.

• From Heidegger, Arendt adopted a deconstructive reading of Western philosophy, attempting to uncover the original meanings of categories and liberate them from the distortions of tradition.

• Arendt’s goal was to redeem the past’s “forgotten treasure”, recovering significant elements that could illuminate the present.

• She believed that after the collapse of tradition, the task was to redeem from oblivion those elements of the past that still have relevance for today.

• Arendt argued that the breakdown of tradition presents an opportunity to look at the past with eyes undistorted by tradition.

• Her return to the Greek polis symbolized an attempt to break free from a worn-out tradition and rediscover a past free from traditional claims.

• Arendt’s political philosophy resists easy classification, not aligning with conservatism, liberalism, or socialism.

• Her work cannot be assimilated to the revival of communitarian political thought found in thinkers like MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer.

• Critics have invoked Arendt as an opponent of key liberal principles due to her critiques of representative democracy, her emphasis on civic engagement and political deliberation, and her separation of morality from politics.

• However, Arendt was also a strong defender of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights, including the right to action and opinion.

• Arendt’s thought cannot be identified with the liberal tradition or its critics; she did not view politics as a means for satisfying individual preferences or integrating individuals around a shared conception of the good.

• Arendt conceived of politics as active citizenship, focusing on the value of civic engagement and collective deliberation on matters of collective concern.

• Arendt’s conception of politics aligns with the classical tradition of civic republicanism, represented by thinkers like Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Tocqueville.

• According to this tradition, political activity is valuable because it allows citizens to exercise their powers of agency, develop judgment, and achieve political efficacy through concerted action.

• Arendt’s philosophy can be reconstructed along five major themes: (1) totalitarianism, (2) modernity, (3) theory of action, (4) citizenship, and (5) thinking and judgment, particularly in relation to evil and autonomy.