Hannah Arendt

Life

• Early life
  • Born 1906 into a German-Jewish family in Hannover
  • Also lived in Konigsberg, Prussia
  • Expelled at the age of 15 after an argument with a teacher that she subsequently started a boycott against that teacher
  • In 1924, went to Marburg University
  • Studied with Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief love-affair, had a lasting influence
  • He became an important Nazi philosopher
  • After a year, she moved to Freiburg University and spent a semester attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl
  • Spring 1926: Went to Heidelburg University to study with Karl Jaspers
  • Completed her doctoral dissertation under his supervision in 1926
• Later life
  • Forced to leave Germany in 1933
  • Went to Prague, then Geneva, finally to settle in Paris for 8 years and working with a number of Jewish refugee organizations
  • Other jews wanted to flee or underestimated the danger, she wanted to actively oppose it
  • She was imprisoned’
  • Separated from her first husband and married again four years later
  • Forced to leave France because of French internment, successfully fled to New York
  • 1941: Immigrated to the US and became part of an intellectual circle in New York
  • Worked as a journalist and editor in a Jewish German newspaper
  • Authored several books
  • Lectured at Princeton, Berkeley, and Chicago but most closely associated with the New School for Social Research
  • Eichmann trial: Jerusalem, 1961 has profound effect on her thinking
  • Dies in 1975

Philosophy

• Overview
  • Philosophy based on her personal experience
  • No one unifying work
  • Phenomenological method: use of common experiences
  • More of an observer like traditional philosophers
  • Focused on nature of politics and political life
  • Freedom and justice important themes

Society

• Totalitarianism
  • Reconciliation with holocaust
  • It is an attempt of total domination over all areas of life, based on terror and ideological fiction
  • Typically imperialist with agenda of spreading ideas
  • Power held by autocrat
  • Destruction of western civilization
  • Caused by totalitarianism, imperialism, world wars
  • Degradation of western traditions
  • Totalitarianism is important in the 20th century
  • It is a “new and radical form of evil” that makes certain people unwanted
  • Wide liberal distinctions between war and peace in the West and the conflict in colonies was cognitive dissonance
  • Saw similarities between communism and fascism, J.P Faye comes up with horseshoe theory
• Political action and life
  • Cannot be controlled through philosophical thoughts
  • Politics is the accumulation of power
  • More power a state has the more its rulers dominate
  • Violence was the only method rulers could employ to gain power and dominate other rulers
  • Violence and power go hand in hand
  • She did not believe they were the same
• Society The Human Condition
  • Human plurality: we are equal and yet individual in being humans
  • We all have similar capacities but are unique with individual experiences
  • Place for communication is politics, must be preserved
  • Debate and speech is the lifeblood of politics
  • Compares it to the markets of Greek cities
  • Public spirit: responsible citizens should inform themselves of facts, form their own opinion, and then should be willing to communicate and debate (inspired by Socrates)
• Power
  • She believed it was the capacity of a group of people to act together and achieve their common goal
  • Exists between citizens as they engage in politics, from authority imposed it is violence
  • Peaceful politics is free of domination and hierarchy
  • Power does not need to be justified
  • Needs to be legitimate and conform to law
  • Believed WWII was necessary for political transformation
  • Truly human life needs the public dynamic, it is a defense against totalitarianism when there is no public debate
• Violence
  • Must be justified
  • Civil disobedience of injustice is the expression of the public reclaiming their space
• Politics
  • Not the act of violence and struggle between leaders
  • Politics is the ability for a state to sit be represented among equals and debate to determine the course of action for the common good
  • Leaders coming together is the formation of a public world
  • Leaders are able to find out more than they would have in the absence of such debates and speeches
  • Insists on speeches in the public word
  • They register some divergence of opinion
  • Christian principles should not concern political action
• Rights
  • Universal Declaration of Human Rights - she sees a paradox of these rights being protected by national governments
  • Argued against natural rights, they are independent of the national authority
  • Implies they need to be members of certain national governments
  • It then cannot protect the stateless

• Eichmann Lawsuit

  • Had a high paramilitary rank in the Nazi party
  • Put on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity
  • Stood in place for those that escaped and the atrocities committed against the jews
  • She reported on the lawsuit
  • She described it as the “banality of evil”, those that committed these atrocities were bureaucrats
  • Innocuous individuals blindly following orders or malicious capacity for evil behavior
  • Failure of sound thinking and judgement
  • She was critical of how Israel conducted the trial
  • “There is not a right to obey” - response to common objection or excuse

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Impact

• Legacy
  • One of the most influential and original political thinkers of the 20th century
  • Inspired many philosophers and the “New Left”
  • Concept of totalitarianism and reflections of modern democratic revolutions also impacted thought and social movements
• Women
  • Paved the way for female philosophers
  • First full professor at Princeton
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