Hannah Arendt
1906–1975, Germany and the United States
Political theory
Enormous evil can be done by people who are not thinking.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
The life
Born near Hanover to a secular Jewish family and raised in Königsberg, Kant's city. She studied under Heidegger at Marburg (they had an affair when she was eighteen and he was her married professor, and his later Nazi party membership made their resumed contact after the war a permanent difficulty in her reputation) and completed a doctorate under Jaspers on the concept of love in Augustine.
She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for researching antisemitic propaganda, released, and fled to Paris, where she worked for organisations placing Jewish children in Palestine. In 1940 she was interned at Gurs; she escaped and reached New York in 1941 with her husband and mother. She was stateless for eighteen years.
The Origins of Totalitarianism made her reputation in 1951. She covered Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker in 1961, and the resulting book ended friendships and drew accusations she never fully escaped. She was the first woman appointed a full professor at Princeton. She died in 1975 with the third volume of The Life of the Mind unwritten; a sheet of paper in her typewriter carried its title, 'Judging'.
What shaped the ideas
Her work is an attempt to think about something for which the existing political vocabulary had no place. Tyranny, dictatorship and despotism all described regimes that wanted obedience; the camps were not explicable as instruments of any rational interest, and the concepts available made them look like an extreme of something familiar.
Her answer was that totalitarianism is a new form: it destroys the public space in which people appear to one another, isolates them, and replaces judgement with ideological necessity, so that terror falls on an already atomised population. The Eichmann report a decade later is in effect a case study of what such a system produces in a single individual.
Core arguments
- 01
The banality of evil
Great harm can be administered by an unremarkable person who is not thinking.
She expected a monster and found a careerist who spoke in clichés and was preoccupied with his rank. The deeds were monstrous; the doer was not demonic. The claim is about the perpetrator, and its disturbing consequence is that the precondition for enormous harm is ordinary and widespread rather than rare.
- 02
Thinking as a moral capacity
Thinking is a dialogue with oneself, and it is what makes conscience possible.
Taking the Socratic two-in-one, she argues that a thinking person has an internal interlocutor they must live with, which is why Socrates would rather be at odds with the world than with himself. Someone who cannot conduct that dialogue has no interior audience to object to what they do.
- 03
Totalitarianism as a novel form
It is not extreme tyranny but a different kind of regime.
Tyranny wants obedience and leaves private life alone. Totalitarian movements require total mobilisation, destroy the space between people in which politics happens, and pursue ideological consistency past the point of practical interest, running death trains during a military collapse. Loneliness, not fear, is its psychological ground.
- 04
Action and natality
The capacity to begin something new is the political capacity.
Labour sustains life and work makes durable objects, but action (speaking and acting among others, in public) is where a person appears as somebody rather than something. Because every birth introduces someone capable of an unprecedented beginning, the world is never simply determined by what came before. This is her one unequivocally hopeful claim.
Commonly got wrong
- 'Banality of evil' does not mean the evil was banal. It describes the perpetrator's ordinariness, not the scale or gravity of the crime.
- She did not blame the victims. Her pages on the Jewish Councils are a claim about how administrative cooperation was extracted, and they were and remain fiercely contested.
- Later archival work, particularly the Sassen interviews, suggests Eichmann was a more committed ideologue than he performed in court. That complicates her portrait of him without refuting her general claim about thoughtlessness.
- She rejected the label philosopher and insisted she was a political theorist, on the grounds that philosophy had never taken the plurality of human beings seriously.
Works
The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951
Antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism as one sequence.
The Human Condition 1958
Labour, work and action, and the disappearance of public life.
Eichmann in Jerusalem 1963
Subtitled 'A Report on the Banality of Evil'. The most controversial book she wrote.
The Life of the Mind 1978
Posthumous and unfinished. Thinking and Willing; Judging was never written.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, and then her essay 'Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship', which answers her critics better than the book does.
Why they still get taught
The vocabulary almost everyone now uses for thinking about institutional complicity, a still-unmatched account of what makes totalitarian rule different in kind, and a permanent warning that the decisive moral failure may be the refusal to judge rather than a wicked intention.
Chapters
- The Banality of Evil · Ethics at the Edges