Arendt, Hannah

Arendt, Hannah (hän`ä är`ənt), 1906–75, German-American political theorist, b. Hanover, Germany, B.A. Königsberg, 1924, Ph.D. Heidelberg, 1928. She emigrated (1941) to the United States and was naturalized in 1950. Arendt was a lecturer and Guggenheim fellow, 1952–53; visiting professor at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1955; the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton, 1959; and visiting professor of government at Columbia, 1960. From 1963 to 1967 she was professor at the Univ. of Chicago, and in 1967 she became university professor at the New School for Social Research.

With the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) her status as a major political thinker was firmly established. In this book she examined the major forms of 20th-century totalitarianism—National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism—and attempted to trace their origins in the anti-Semitism and imperialism of the 19th cent. Her second major American publication, The Human Condition (1958), likewise received wide acclaim. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), her analysis of the Nazi war crimes based on observation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, stirred considerable controversy and became known particularly for her concept of "the banality of evil."

Arendt also served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations (1944–46) and executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, New York City (1949–52). Her other writings include On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1969), and Crises of the Republic (1972).

Bibliography

See L. Kohler and H. Saner, ed., Hannah Arendt–Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969 (tr. by R. and R. Kimber, 1992), C. Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975 (1995), E. Ettinger, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger (1995), D. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (1995), and R. Wolin, Heidegger's Children (2001); studies by S. J. Whitfield (1980) and L. Bradshaw (1989).

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Arendt, Hannah

(born Oct. 14, 1906, Hannover, Ger.—died Dec. 4, 1975, New York, N.Y., U.S.) German-born U.S. political philosopher. She studied philosophy at the Universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, receiving a doctorate from the latter in 1928. While at Marburg she began a romantic relationship with her teacher Martin Heidegger. Following the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, Arendt, who was Jewish, fled to Paris, where she became a social worker, and then to New York City in 1941. Her major work, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), traced totalitarianism to 19th-century anti-Semitism, imperialism, and the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. Her highly controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) argued that the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was not inwardly wicked or depraved but merely “thoughtless”; his role in the extermination of the Jews thus epitomized the fearsome “banality of evil” that had swept across Europe at the time. Resuming contact with Heidegger in 1950, she claimed that his involvement with the Nazis had been the “mistake” of a great philosopher. She taught at the University of Chicago (1963–67) and thereafter at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

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Arendt, Hannah (1906–75) historian, political philosopher; born in Hanover, Germany. Of Jewish ancestry, she received her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg (1929) and fled Hitler's Germany for France (1933) and the United States (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-century 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 stints at Princeton (1953, 1959), Berkeley, the University of Chicago (1963–67), Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the New School for Social Research (1967–75). 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; she maintained that other Germans, Western countries, and even the Jews had consented actively or passively to evil as well.