Hannah Arendt Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish middle-class family. Dedicated to study early on, Arendt completed a doctoral dissertation in 1929 at Heidelberg University. During this same period, Arendt became increasingly preoccupied with the issue of German Jewish identity in response to rising anti-Semitism. She began writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, who was a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s. Although the work was not published until 1958, it marked the start of Arendt’s lifelong career as a political thinker who showed a unique gift of blending historical analysis with philosophical reflection. In 1933, with the Nazis’ rise to power, Arendt fled to Paris and worked in a number of Jewish refugee organizations. In 1940, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Blüche, left Paris as it fell under German control. They eventually made their way to New York in 1941, and Arendt became an American citizen in 1951. By then her academic career was taking off, and she became one of the most influential but controversial thinkers of the twentieth century.

Arendt’s first major publication in English was The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. This large volume, which is divided into three parts, traces the historical conditions that set the stage for the rise of totalitarianism under the broad themes of anti-Semitism and imperialism. What made the book controversial at the time was the third part, which paints Nazism and Stalinism with the same stroke, which was totalitarianism. On this important point, Arendt based her argument on philosophical rather than historical grounds. Totalitarianism as such is characterized by “ideological thinking,” which in essence is a form of radical idealism that is sustained by a closed system of logic. It is the mind working in singularity rather than in plurality. Hence totalitarianism can only thrive in societies where individuals are completely isolated from one another. This observation led her to write what many consider to be her most original contribution to political thought, The Human Condition, in 1958. In it Arendt put forth a concept of action as direct interaction between individuals without any intermediary. Speech is thus the quintessential action and is what makes us distinctly human. Freedom and human plurality are realized through action.

Yet it was Arendt’s later analysis of a related subject that proved to be even more controversial. This was the question of individual responsibility in totalitarian movements and the occasion was the Eichmann trial in 1961. As its firsthand observer, Arendt concluded that the former Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann was no Mephistopheles nor Faust. Rather, Arendt observed in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, “he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing . . . It was sheer thoughtlessness . . . that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (1964, 287–288). To some, this pronouncement understated the magnitude of Eichmann’s crime. However, in Arendt’s last but incomplete major work, which was published posthumously in 1978 as Life of the Mind, thinking is identified as an internal dialogue that everyone can and should have with oneself at all times and as such, it is a moral obligation that no one can evade. Eichmann’s defense that he was a “mere functionary” following orders from above was therefore inexcusable.

Since the late 1980s, scholarship on Arendt has flourished significantly on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Her continued appeal may be related to the fact in her lifetime, she had never lent herself to the political cause of either the liberal or the communist camp. Arendt is thus seen by many to be particularly pertinent to the post–cold war world of our time, including a vision of participatory democracy that is not right-based.

Bibliography:

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enl. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
“Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Social Research 38 (1971): 417–446.
“On Hannah Arendt.” In Hannah Arendt:The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvyn A. Hill, 301–339. New York: St. Marin’s, 1979.
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
d’Entreves, Maurizio Passerin. “Hannah Arendt.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2006, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt.
Honig, Bonnie, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Villa, Dana, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.