German political theorist and philosopher. Arendt was brought up in a
middle-class Jewish family. She fled Germany in 1933 to escape from
Nazism, and finally settled in the United States, where her major work was
produced.
Arendt’s wide-ranging, even idiosyncratic, writing was influenced by the
existentialism of Heidegger (see p. 8) and Jaspers (1883–1969); she described
it as ‘thinking without barriers’. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
which attempted to examine the nature of both Nazism and Stalinism, she
developed a critique of modern mass society, pointing out the link between
its tendency to alienation and atomization, caused by the breakdown of
traditional norms, and the rise of totalitarian movements. Her most
important philosophical work, The Human Condition (1958), develops
Aristotle (see p. 69) in arguing that political action is the central part of a
proper human life. She portrayed the public sphere as the realm in which
freedom and autonomy are expressed, and meaning is given to private
endeavours. She analysed the American and French revolutions in On
Revolution (1963), arguing that each had abandoned the ‘lost treasure’ of the
revolutionary tradition, the former by leaving the mass of citizens outside
the political arena, the latter by its concentration on the ‘social question’
rather than freedom. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt used the fate
of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as a basis for discussing the
‘banality of evil’.