Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was one of the most original political thinkers of the twentieth century. A German Jew who studied philosophy with Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, she fled Nazi Germany in 1933, lived as a stateless refugee in France, and from 1941 made her home in New York. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced Nazism and Stalinism to antisemitism, imperialism and the collapse of the nation-state, and analysed totalitarianism as an unprecedented form of rule through ideology and terror. The Human Condition (1958) distinguished labour, work and action, and defended the dignity of political action against its eclipse in modern society. Her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” and provoked one of the fiercest controversies of the post-war era. She wrote on revolution, violence, authority, freedom, lying in politics and the life of the mind, always insisting on thinking “without banisters”.

Life

Arendt was born on 14 October 1906 in Linden, near Hanover, into a secular, assimilated Jewish family, and grew up in Königsberg, the city of Kant. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven; her mother, a Social Democrat, raised her to answer antisemitic insults herself. A brilliant, independent student, she read Kant and Kierkegaard as a teenager. In 1924 she went to Marburg to study with Martin Heidegger, then writing Being and Time; the eighteen-year-old student and the thirty-five-year-old married professor began a secret love affair. She moved to Freiburg to study with Husserl and then to Heidelberg, where Karl Jaspers supervised her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine (1929). She married the philosopher Günther Stern (later Anders).

As Nazism rose, she turned to politics and Jewish questions, writing a biography of the Romantic salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen. In 1933 she helped the Zionist Organisation collect evidence of Nazi antisemitism, was arrested by the Gestapo, released after eight days, and fled through Prague and Geneva to Paris. There she worked for Jewish refugee organisations, helping Jewish children emigrate to Palestine, befriended Walter Benjamin, and married Heinrich Blücher, a self-taught former communist. In May 1940 she was interned as an “enemy alien” in the camp of Gurs; in the chaos after France’s defeat she walked out, rejoined Blücher, and in 1941 escaped via Lisbon to New York, carrying Benjamin’s manuscript “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin had killed himself at the Spanish border).

In New York she wrote for German-Jewish and American journals, directed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which recovered Jewish books and artefacts looted by the Nazis, and became an American citizen in 1951, ending fourteen years of statelessness. The Origins of Totalitarianism made her famous. She taught at Princeton (its first woman full professor, 1959), Chicago, and the New School for Social Research. In 1950 she resumed contact with Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi party in 1933, and championed his work in America, to the dismay of many friends. She died of a heart attack in her apartment on Riverside Drive on 4 December 1975.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Origins is in three parts. Antisemitism traces the position of Jews in Europe — as financiers to states, as a people without a state, as the “pariah” or “parvenu” — and how political antisemitism arose as the nation-state decayed; the Dreyfus Affair is its dress rehearsal. Imperialism argues that European imperialism in Africa and Asia, driven by the bourgeoisie’s need to export surplus capital and “superfluous” men, brought racism and bureaucracy home; the “pan-movements” of Central and Eastern Europe; and the collapse of the nation-state after 1918, which created millions of stateless refugees — people who, deprived of citizenship, lost not particular rights but “the right to have rights”, and found that the “rights of man” were unenforceable for those who were merely human.

The third part, Totalitarianism, analyses Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as a novel form of government, distinct from tyranny or dictatorship. Totalitarian movements mobilise the masses — isolated, atomised individuals uprooted by modern society — through ideology, the “logic of an idea” (of race, or of history) that claims to explain everything and deduces reality from a single premise, and through terror, which makes the ideology come true. Its central institution is the concentration camp, the laboratory in which it is proved that “everything is possible” — where human beings are reduced to “bundles of reactions”, their individuality, spontaneity and moral personality destroyed. Totalitarianism aims at the “total domination” that makes human beings superfluous. Its precondition is loneliness: “the experience of not belonging to the world at all”.

The Human Condition

In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt distinguished three fundamental human activities — the vita activa:

• Labour is the activity that corresponds to the biological processes of the body: producing and consuming what is needed to sustain life, endlessly repeated, leaving nothing behind. The labourer is animal laborans.
• Work is the fabrication of durable things — tools, buildings, works of art — that make up a human world, more permanent than any individual life. The worker is homo faber.
• Action is the only activity that goes on directly between people, without the intermediary of things: speech and deed in the presence of others. Through action, people reveal who they are (not merely what they are), begin new things, and create the space of politics.

Action rests on two human conditions. Plurality: “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” — each person is unique and yet equal, and we can only act together. Natality: each birth brings into the world a newcomer capable of beginning something new. Quoting Augustine — “that a beginning be made, man was created” — Arendt saw natality as the source of freedom and of hope. Because action is free, it is unpredictable and irreversible; its remedies are the faculties of promising, which binds the future, and forgiving, which releases the past — a political discovery she credited to Jesus of Nazareth.

Arendt argued that the Greek polis honoured action as the highest human activity, while the private household was the realm of necessity and labour. Modernity reversed the hierarchy: in “the rise of the social”, economic concerns invaded the public realm, and modern society became a “society of labourers” in which everything is judged by its contribution to the life process. The result is “world alienation” and the loss of the public space in which freedom appears. Marx, she argued, glorified labour while dreaming of its abolition.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

In 1961 Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organised the deportation of Jews to the death camps, for The New Yorker; her report appeared as a book in 1963. She expected a monster and found a bureaucrat — vain, ambitious, a speaker of clichés and officialese, who had never thought about what he was doing and who repeated that he had only obeyed orders and the law. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” His evil was not demonic but “banal” — rooted in “sheer thoughtlessness”, an inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else”. She criticised the prosecution’s attempt to make the trial a lesson in history, and — in passages that caused uproar — the role of the Jewish Councils in the deportations. Many Jewish readers and former friends, including Gershom Scholem, accused her of lacking “love of the Jewish people” and of blaming the victims; she replied that she had never in her life “loved” any people or collective, only persons.

Thinking, willing, judging

The Eichmann trial led Arendt back to philosophy. If evil can come from thoughtlessness, could thinking itself — the silent dialogue of “me with myself”, as practised by Socrates — prevent us from doing evil? The Life of the Mind (1978) was planned in three parts: Thinking, Willing and Judging. She completed the first two; for the third, her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy suggest that she found in Kant‘s theory of aesthetic judgment — judging particulars without universal rules, with an “enlarged mentality” that takes others’ standpoints into account — the faculty most essential to politics.

Power and violence

In On Violence (1970) she distinguished power, which “corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” and which belongs to a group, from violence, which is instrumental and relies on implements. They are opposites: “where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent”. “Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.” In On Revolution (1963) she contrasted the American Revolution, which founded a space of freedom, with the French, which was overwhelmed by “the social question” of poverty.

In conversation

• The banality of evil — thoughtlessness, not monstrosity.
• Natality — every birth a new beginning.
• “The right to have rights” — the lesson of the stateless.