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A German-born Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, was for a time interned in France, and became a United States citizen in 1950. Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the modern conditions, statelessness, mass society, and the reduction of individuals to interchangeable functionaries, that made twentieth century totalitarian rule possible, and The Human Condition (1958) distinguished labor, work and action as three fundamentally different kinds of human activity, prizing the public, plural space of political action. Reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, published as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt introduced the phrase the banality of evil to describe what she saw in the defendant: not a fanatical monster but an unthinking bureaucrat, and the book provoked lasting controversy, both for that thesis and for its criticism of the wartime conduct of some Jewish council leaders.
Facts
TraditionTwentieth century political philosophy, phenomenology-influenced 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Arendt studied under Heidegger at Marburg in the 1920s. Their relationship, and its long and complicated aftermath through his 1933 Nazi Party membership and her own postwar response to it, has been extensively documented and debated by biographers and philosophers.
In Branch
Sources
1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informations.v. Hannah ArendtQuote, s.v. Hannah Arendt
In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Associated With: Martin Heidegger
Most mainstream scholarship treats Heidegger's philosophical work, including the analysis of Dasein that shaped Arendt's own thinking, as separable in principle from his 1933 Nazi Party membership and his postwar refusal to disavow it clearly. French philosopher Emmanuel Faye argued the opposite in a widely debated 2005 study, translated into English in 2009 as Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, contending that Nazi ideology is embedded in the philosophy itself, not merely in the biography beside it, and that Heidegger's work should be reclassified and read accordingly. The dispute bears directly on how to read Arendt's own complicated postwar relationship with her former teacher, which her biographers and critics have argued about on similar terms.
A dissenting reading, from Emmanuel Faye and the case that Heidegger's philosophy cannot be read apart from his politicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information
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