Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German-American political thinker whose work examined totalitarianism, political action, and the conditions of human life. Her ideas about plurality and public action shaped modern political theory.

The Human Condition: Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book distinguishes labor, work, and action as dimensions of the active life. This book develops the distinctions that organize Arendt’s account of human activity.
Action (philosophy): In Arendt’s political thought, action is the activity through which people initiate deeds and disclose who they are among others. Action is her distinctive account of political freedom, unlike labor or the making of objects.
Weimar Republic: Germany’s democratic state from 1918 to 1933, marked by political instability and cultural change. Arendt’s early intellectual life unfolded amid the republic’s crises and collapse.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt’s 1963 report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, later published as a book. The report made her analysis of judgment and the banality of evil widely contested.
Totalitarianism: A form of rule seeking comprehensive control over society and individuals through ideology, terror, and mass organization. Arendt’s account remains a major interpretation of how totalitarian regimes differ from ordinary dictatorships.
Plurality: The condition in which distinct people share a world and act together without becoming identical. For Arendt, political action exists because people are equal yet irreducibly different.
Power (politics): The capacity that arises when people act together and persists while their association continues. Arendt distinguishes power produced by collective support from violence imposed by force.
Martin Heidegger: A German philosopher whose work on existence and being influenced twentieth-century continental philosophy. Arendt studied with Heidegger and later engaged critically with his philosophical legacy.
Adolf Eichmann: A senior Nazi official who organized deportations of Jews and was tried in Jerusalem in 1961. Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s trial became the central case behind her controversial formulation.
Statelessness: The condition of lacking citizenship or effective membership in any political community. Arendt showed how losing political membership can strip people of enforceable rights.

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