Hannah Arendt

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.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.