Dr Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a political theorist and philosopher whose work explored totalitarianism, authority, and the conditions of modernity. Her scholarship profoundly shaped twentieth-century political and social thought.
Arendt was born to a secular, progressive Jewish family in Linden, Germany, and studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg, She earned her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1929 under Karl Jaspers, writing her dissertation on love in Saint Augustine. In the late 1920s, her work on German Romanticism led her to Jewish salons, in particular that of Rahel Varnhagen, and questions of assimilation and Jewish identity. Interested in political theory, she read and wrote widely about it, especially concerning the rights of women.
In 1933, the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her for researching evidence of antisemitism in Germany. She fled to Paris, aided young Jews emigrating to Palestine, and after being detained in France, escaped to the United States in 1941, becoming a citizen in 1950. Her reputation was established by The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), followed by The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem, and On Revolution (1963).
Her work explored power, authority, totalitarianism, and evil, coining “the banality of evil.” She died of a heart attack in 1975, leaving The Life of the Mind unfinished.