Hannah Arendt

1906-1975 · German-American (Jewish) · Political Theory, Phenomenology, Ethics, Philosophy of History

Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany after a brief Gestapo arrest, was interned in the French camp at Gurs, escaped, and reached New York in 1941 as a stateless refugee. The catastrophe of 1933 had broken open the quiet philosophical world she came from — she had studied under Heidegger and Jaspers and written her dissertation on love in Augustine — and it fixed her lifelong question: how does ordinary political life collapse into terror?

Topics Hannah Arendt addresses

• totalitarianism
• the banality of evil
• the origins of totalitarianism
• ideology and terror
• the human condition
• labor, work, and action
• vita activa
• natality
• plurality
• the public realm and the private realm
• the social realm
• action and speech
• the right to have rights
• statelessness
• radical evil
• thoughtlessness
• world-alienation
• the Eichmann trial
• modern antisemitism
• imperialism and race-thinking
• the camps
• pariah and parvenu
• power and violence
• revolution and the social question

Converse with Hannah Arendt on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Hannah Arendt's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.