Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work analyzed totalitarianism, modern political action, and the conditions of human plurality from the standpoint of someone who lived through the twentieth century’s catastrophes as a stateless Jewish refugee. Trained in philosophy at Marburg and Heidelberg under Heidegger and Jaspers, she fled Germany in 1933, was interned in France in 1940, escaped to the United States in 1941, and built her career as one of the most important political thinkers of her century at the New School and the University of Chicago.

¶Core ideas

• Totalitarianism as a novel political form. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) argues that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia represented something genuinely new — not just intensified authoritarianism but a structural-political form that destroys the very conditions of political action. Built on the convergence of imperialism’s racial categories, mass society’s atomized loneliness, and ideology’s claim to know history’s necessary motion.
• Action, work, labor. Three modes of vita activa. Labor sustains biological life (the cyclical metabolism with nature). Work produces the durable artifacts of the human world. Action is the speech-and-deed by which humans appear to one another as distinct persons in public. Modern conditions, on Arendt’s reading, have collapsed action into laboring and consumption — the political register has been hollowed out.
• Plurality. The human condition that humans, plural — not Man in the singular — inhabit the earth and act in concert with and against one another. Plurality is the precondition for politics; collapsing plurality into uniformity destroys the conditions of free action.
• Natality. The capacity for the unprecedented to enter the world through new beings being born and through new actions beginning. The political-philosophical alternative to mortality-centered philosophies; the structural condition of action’s possibility.
• The banality of evil. Arendt’s controversial reading of Adolf Eichmann at his Jerusalem trial: the perpetrator of genocide who is not a monster but a thoughtless administrator, capable of immense evil through the failure to think — a condition the modern bureaucratic state systematically produces.

¶Key works

• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• The Human Condition (1958)
• Between Past and Future (1961)
• On Revolution (1963)
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
• On Violence (1970)
• The Life of the Mind (posthumous, 1978)

¶Where her work figures in this library

Arendt is upstream of fascist-grammar, anarchist-grammar, and the broader cybernetic-postliberal account of liberalism as fascist-grammar’s dialectical twin (Arendt’s analysis of how liberal proceduralism generates the isolation that totalitarianism exploits). Her concepts of plurality and natality figure in the anarchist-grammar account.