Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Phenomenology
Main interests	Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, technology, Ontology, modernity, philosophy of history

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German Jewish political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular". She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."

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, with whom she had a lengthy but stormy romantic relationship that has been criticized because of his 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.

She married Günther Anders in 1929 in Berlin (they divorced in 1937).

The dissertation was published the same year, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating, a prerequisite for teaching in German universities, because she was Jewish. She worked for some time researching anti-Semitism before being interrogated by the Gestapo, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris. Here she met and befriended the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees.

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 Nazi concentration camps, Arendt was forced to flee France. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher.

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. She then became active in the German-Jewish community in New York and wrote for the weekly Aufbau. She worked as the Executive Secretary for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.

After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah. Later she resumed relations with Heidegger, and testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She became a close friend of Jaspers and his Jewish wife, developing a deep intellectual friendship with him and began corresponding with Mary McCarthy. In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. 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 on 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. In 1959, she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton.

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. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.

Works

Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of her work focuses on affirming a conception of freedom which is synonymous with collective political action among equals.

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.

Another key concept in her work is "natality," the capacity to bring something new into the world, such as the founding of a government that endures.

Arguably her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes labor, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. Her theory of political action is extensively developed in this work.

Her first major book was "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was controversial because it suggested an essential identity between the two phenomena, which some believe to be separate in both origins and nature.

In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for "The New Yorker," which evolved into the book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." She raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality - the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction. This work created a great deal of controversy and animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. The book was translated into Hebrew just recently, many decades after it was written.

Her final book, "The Life of the Mind," was incomplete when she died, but is still widely read in its current form.

Commemoration

• The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt is named in her honour.
• The German railway authority operates a Hannah Arendt Express between Karlsruhe and Hanover.
• The German postal authority has issued a Hannah Arendt commemorative stamp.

Selected works

• Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (1929)
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1958)
• The Human Condition (1958)
• Between Past and Future (1961)
• On Revolution (1963)
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
• Men in Dark Times (1968)
• Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (1969)
  "Civil Disobedience" originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker. Versions of the other essays originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.
• The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, (Edited by Ron H. Feldman, 1978)
• Life of the Mind (1978)
• Love and Saint Augustine. Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Scott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996/1998..

Commemoration

• The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt is named in her honour.
• The German railway authority operates a Hannah Arendt Express between Karlsruhe and Hannover.
• The German postal authority has issued a Hannah Arendt commemorative stamp.

Further reading

• Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982), Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-02660-9. (Paperback reprint edition, September 10, 1983, ISBN 0-300-03099-1; Second edition October 11, 2004 ISBN 0-300-10588-6.)

• Villa, Dana ed. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64198-5 (hb).

• Harms, Klaus: Hannah Arendt und Hans Jonas. Grundlagen einer philosophischen Theologie der Weltverantwortung. Berlin: WiKu-Verlag (2003). ISBN 3-936749-84-1. (de)

• Elzbieta Ettinger: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press (1997). ISBN 0-300-07254-6.

• Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0-300-12044-3).

• Dietz, Mary G. "Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics", Routledge (2002). ISBN 0-415-93244-0.

External links

• Crises of Our Republics, Hannah Arendt Centennary Conference at Yale University, September 29 - 30, 2006.
• Thinking In Dark Times:The Legacy of Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt Centennary Conference at Bard College, October 27 - 29, 2006.
• Hannah Arendt Organization, clearinghouse for information on and about Hannah Arendt
• Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The American Library of Congress has The Role of Experience in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Three Essays by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center,New School University. With link to Arendt's papers.
• International Hannah Arendt Newsletter

• European Graduate School - Hannah Arendt
• "Arendt's Judgment" by Mark Greif in Dissent (magazine).
• "Thinking Out Loud" Review of a book of essays on Arendt, in Lingua Franca.
• Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden
• The philosophical Madonna On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's death, Daniel Cohn-Bendit recalls his relationship with the great philosopher and reflects on her and on his generation at signandsight.com
• Hannah Arendt Thinking Space. Art Exhibtion Berlin 2006
• Hannah Arendt at Jewish Virtual Library
• Hannah Arendt: Biography at FemBio*Find-A-Grave profile for Hannah Arendt
• Snowblind: Martin Heidegger & Hannah Arendt
• Thinking with Body and Soul: Interview with the historian Joachim Fest about Hannah Arendt, by Volker Maria Neumann, February 2006.
• Dossier: Hannah Arendt(German Education Server)
• The Hannah Arendt Collection (From Stevenson Library at Bard College) - Catalog of ArchiveHannah Arendt’s personal library at Bard College
• Benjamin Balint, Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later, The Forward. On the occasion of the centenary of her birth
• Hannah Arendt and the Study of Evil, NPR audio interview with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on the centenary of Arendt's birth
• Jacoby, Russell. "Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation", The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 53, Issue 16, p. B13 (December 8, 2006).
• Warning against Menachem Begin, Letters to the Editor New York Times December 4, 1948.

Other Languages

• Template:Fr icon Article on Hannah Arendt
• Template:Pt icon Profile, collection of articles, and quotations on Hannah Arendt
• Template:Ru icon On Revolution. H. Arendt Portal

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