Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German-born Jewish political thinker who became one of the most widely read theorists of the twentieth century. A refugee from Nazi Germany who settled in the United States, she wrote the first major study of totalitarianism, a searching account of political action and public life, and a report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann that gave the world the phrase "the banality of evil". She refused to call herself a philosopher, preferring "political theorist", but her work is now read as a central part of continental philosophy.

Arendt was born on 14 October 1906 in Linden, now part of Hanover, in Germany, into a secular, assimilated Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg, the East Prussian city of Immanuel Kant, today's Kaliningrad. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven, and she was raised by her mother, a social democrat who admired Rosa Luxemburg.

In 1924 she went to the University of Marburg to study with Martin Heidegger, then a young lecturer working on what became Being and Time. The two had a secret love affair, which she ended after about a year. She moved on to Freiburg, where she attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, and then to Heidelberg, where she wrote her doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in Augustine of Hippo, completed in 1928 and published in 1929. Jaspers became a lifelong friend and correspondent. In 1929 she married the philosopher Günther Stern, and began a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who ran a famous Berlin salon around 1800, which turned her attention to the place of Jews in German society.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Arendt helped the Zionist Organisation collect evidence of antisemitic propaganda. She was arrested by the Gestapo and held for about eight days, then fled with her mother through Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to Paris. There she worked for Jewish organisations, including Youth Aliyah, which helped Jewish children emigrate to Palestine, and befriended the critic Walter Benjamin. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Having divorced Stern, in 1940 she married Heinrich Blücher, a former communist and self-taught philosopher.

After Germany invaded France in May 1940, Arendt was interned as an "enemy alien" in the camp at Gurs in the south-west. In the confusion after the French surrender she walked out and found Blücher again. With visas obtained through the American rescuer Varian Fry's network, they crossed Spain to Lisbon and reached New York in May 1941. She remained stateless until she became an American citizen in 1951, an experience that shaped her later argument that people without a state had in practice lost "the right to have rights".

In New York Arendt wrote for German-language Jewish papers, worked for Jewish cultural reconstruction after the war and edited books for Schocken. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, which made her name. Its three parts trace modern antisemitism, nineteenth-century imperialism and the racial thinking it encouraged, and finally the totalitarian movements and regimes of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt argued that totalitarianism was a new form of government, not just a harsher tyranny. It rested on mass movements of isolated, uprooted individuals, used ideology and terror to remake reality, and found its purest expression in the concentration and extermination camps, where it tried to show that human beings themselves were superfluous. Placing Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union beside Hitler's Germany made the book important in the early Cold War, and also controversial among those who saw the comparison as too neat.

The Human Condition (1958) set out her most original ideas. Arendt distinguished three basic human activities: labour, the endless work of keeping the body alive; work, the making of lasting objects that form a shared world; and action, the speech and deeds by which free people appear before one another and begin something new. She believed modern societies had come to value labour and consumption above everything and had lost sight of action, which she saw best expressed in the Greek city and in moments of revolution. Central to her thinking was "natality", the fact that each birth brings a new beginner into the world, so that politics is the space where the unexpected can happen.

She developed these themes in Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), which contrasted the American Revolution's lasting institutions of freedom with the French Revolution's slide into terror, and On Violence (1970), which argued that power, the ability of people to act together, is the opposite of violence rather than its source.

In 1961 Arendt went to Jerusalem for The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organised the deportation of Jews to the death camps during the Holocaust. Her articles, published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), described Eichmann not as a fanatical monster but as a careerist who spoke in clichés and seemed unable to think from the standpoint of anyone else. The evil he served was monstrous, she argued, but the man was frighteningly ordinary. She also criticised some of the Jewish councils set up under Nazi rule for cooperating with the deportations. The book caused a bitter dispute; many readers, including old friends, accused her of coldness and of blaming the victims, and she lost several friendships. Historians have since argued that Eichmann was more ideologically committed than she allowed, but the question she raised, how ordinary people come to take part in mass crimes, has stayed central.

Arendt taught at the University of Chicago and from 1967 at the New School for Social Research in New York, and lectured widely. After Blücher died in 1970 she worked on The Life of the Mind, a study of thinking, willing and judging. She died of a heart attack in her New York apartment on 4 December 1975, leaving the third part unwritten; the first two volumes appeared in 1978. Her relationship with Heidegger, whom she saw again after the war despite his membership of the Nazi party, has been much debated since their letters became known.

Arendt's ideas about totalitarianism, statelessness, refugees, civil disobedience and the nature of political judgement are cited across political science, history and law, and her phrase about the banality of evil has entered everyday speech. Feminist thinkers have argued with her, since she said little about women as a group, and critics have questioned her views on race in the American South. Interest in her work has grown, not faded, since the end of the Cold War.