Hannah Arendt Short Intro
Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, to a Jewish family in Linden, Germany. She is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Hannah is best known for 2 works, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and ‘The Human Condition.’ Much of her work revolved around political theory, as well as some works focusing on revolution, freedom, authority, tradition, and the modern age.
Arendt’s family was a politically progressive and secular family. Her father died when she was seven whilst her mother was a social democrat. She finished her secondary education in Berlin and then went on to study at the University of Marburg. There, she studied under Martin Heidegger, with whom she engaged in a 4-year relationship. He would prove to influence some of her philosophy. One year later, Hannah left to go to the University of Heidelberg where she met Karl Jaspers who became one of her close friends. She completed her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 by writing her dissertation, titled ‘Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin.’
In 1929, Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in Germany but due to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, she was forced to flee Germany and stayed in Prague and Geneva for a brief period of time, before moving to Paris where she would stay for 6 years. There, she worked for some Jewish refugee organizations. In 1936, she divorced Günther and started a relationship with Heinrich Blücher, eventually marrying him in 1940. In 1941 due to the German invasion, Hannah again had to flee so she moved to New York with her husband and mother. There, she wrote and edited for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, as well as lectured for several American universities, including Princeton and Berkeley. Though she mostly worked as a professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
It was in 1951 that she published ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ which was a study that dealt with Nazi and Stalinist regimes. In this work, Arendt puts forth the argument that totalitarian governments are different from other oppressive political systems as it works to oppress whole populations instead of just the leader’s political opposition. Additionally, Arendt argues that in Nazism, Jews were not the sole reason behind the Holocaust, but instead, it was a ploy that the Nazis used to enforce terror across the whole population. 1958 was the year in which she published ‘The Human Condition,’ perhaps her most important work. Here, she deals with the differences between political and social concepts, labor and work, and different types of actions, known as her ‘theory of action.’ In ‘The Human Condition,’ Arendt set forth a new philosophy, where she divides the human condition into the 3 categories of labor, work, and action. Labor has to do with its ability to sustain human life; Work has to do with its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use; Action has to do with realizing our different freedoms and the reality of the world. In this work, Arendt argues that the potential for humans to achieve freedom through political life has only been realized in a few societies, though the quality of human life progresses within all societies.
For the rest of her life, Hannah continued to publish articles, one of the more notable and controversial ones being ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’ in which she criticized how the Israelis conducted the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In 1975, Hannah Ardent passed away at the age of 69 due to a heart attack.
As seen throughout her works, Hannah dealt with the political state of her time and tried to work out an explanation for how the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Stalinism came to be. Her work, however, remains difficult to classify; but according to ‘Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,’ her philosophy can be identified as civic republicanism, in which ‘politics finds it authentic expression whenever citizens gather together in a public space to deliberate and decide about matters of collective concern.’ This is in line with her advocacy for civic engagement, where each citizen has the right to exercise their power to vote. One of her core beliefs was that the government, no matter how bad, could never eliminate individual freedoms. Many say that the legacy she has left behind is her defense of freedom when we seem to be living in a world becoming less free.
When discussing her thoughts on modernity, Arendt has quite a negative view. She described modernity as the era where people have lost their traditional values, the public sphere of action and speech has been restricted, and homogeneity and conformity prevail, leading to the surfacing of totalitarian governments. Such a negative view could largely be due to her experiences in life, including the impacts of the Nazi regime.
Overall, Hannah Arendt has proved to be such an influential force due to the originality of her philosophies.
