1906–1975

Hannah Arendt

Arendt was born in 1906 in Linden, later part of Hanover, and died in 1975. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) are different books and should not be collapsed into one thesis. For this atlas, the relevant thought is that political life is action among equals who do not fuse into one will. She is not a communitarian in the late-twentieth-century academic sense, and she is not a partisan marker.

Also in the atlas

• Action and plurality
• The public world
• Judgment

Reading, not a syllabus ranking

• The Human Condition (1958) — Labor, work, and action, and the publicity of a world shared with others.
• Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) — A report on the trial, and a contested account of thoughtlessness.

Questions for reflection

• What is the difference between a common world and a single collective will?

Arendt belongs on the society pages as a thinker of plurality, not as the owner of either pole.

Six axes

• Social life
• Freedom

Traditions

• Communal priority

Also in the atlas

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hannah Arendt”