Hannah Arendt
Trained in German phenomenology, she refuses the title of philosopher and starts from the need to understand her century's catastrophes to rethink action among equals.
German-born American · 1906 – 1975
Born in 1906 near Hanover into a secular Jewish family, she grew up in Königsberg, then studied at Marburg with , at Freiburg with , and in 1928 defended at Heidelberg, under , a dissertation published the following year, . Briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris, where she helped Jewish children emigrate to Palestine; interned in the Gurs camp in 1940, she escaped and reached New York in 1941. Stripped of her German nationality in 1937, she remained stateless until her American naturalization in 1951. That same year she published , followed by (1958), the essays of (1961) and (1963). Her report for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, (1963), set off a lasting controversy and a break with several friends, among them Gershom Scholem; her "Reflections on Little Rock" (1959), hostile to school desegregation imposed by the federal government, also drew sharp criticism. She taught in Chicago and then at the New School in New York, where she died in 1975, leaving unfinished. Her thinking on the public realm, power and judgment fed into , , contemporary republicanism and theories of deliberative democracy.
Freedom is not an attribute of the will but a reality of the world: one is free only in acting with others, in a public realm where each person, because they were born, can begin something new.
Laboring, working and acting are three distinct activities: labor sustains life, work builds a durable world, action reveals who we are; a society that reduces everything to labor and consumption loses both the world and freedom.
The most extreme evil can be committed without wickedness or depth, by people who do not think about what they are doing; this banality of evil excuses nothing, for in politics obeying is supporting.
Power and violence are opposites, not degrees of one thing: power springs from those who act together, violence can destroy it, never create it.
The rights of man do not protect the bare human being: there is only one first right, that of belonging to a political community, the right to have rights.
Forgiveness and the promise are political faculties: one releases from the irreversible past, the other binds an unpredictable future, and without them no one could act without remaining a prisoner of their deeds.
Justification
"Truth and Politics" (1967) distinguishes the philosopher's rational truth from factual truth, more fragile and politically indispensable: facts are the ground that opinion cannot replace. The traditional political lie hid secrets; the modern lie rewrites what everyone knows, and it does not make people believe falsehoods, it ruins the very sense of reality. How can a city that lives on opinions protect facts? Yet she does not want truth to rule: in the realm of opinion it has something despotic about it, since it demands assent without debate. Nor does she idealize candor: lying belongs to our capacity to act, to change what is, and truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues.
Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.Between Past and Future, "Truth and Politics"
Between Past and Future, "Truth and Politics" (1967) · Crises of the Republic, "Lying in Politics" (1971)
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Justification
She refuses to be called a philosopher, philosophy having looked down on politics ever since Plato. What she wants is to understand: not to excuse, but to face reality without preconceived ideas. Thinking is an activity without results, which dissolves frozen opinions, in the manner of the gadfly, the midwife, the electric ray; it is of direct use only in the moments when everyone is swept along. Neither contemplation of an eternal order, nor transformation of the world in 's sense: understanding and Socratic examination, which also transforms the one who thinks, are the two sides of her practice.
What is important for me is to understand.Interview with Günter Gaus (1964)
"What Remains? The Language Remains", interview with Günter Gaus (1964), in Essays in Understanding · Responsibility and Judgment, "Thinking and Moral Considerations" (1971)
Justification
Who someone is shows itself in their words and deeds, to others, and stays hidden from them, like the Greek daimōn that rides on one's shoulder and that only others can see. Introspection yields only the processes of consciousness, not an identity. Yet she refuses to reduce the life of the mind to action: thinking, the silent dialogue of oneself with oneself, the Socratic two-in-one, withdraws from the world, and can, in extreme situations, hold one back from taking part in evil, without ever guaranteeing it. The tension between the active life and the life of the mind runs through her work: the primacy of action holds for her only against introspection.
The Human Condition, §24 (1958) · Responsibility and Judgment, "Thinking and Moral Considerations" (1971)
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Justification
The common world is what we enter at birth and leave at death: it outlasts a single life and survives only if it is handed on. Yet the thread of tradition is broken: her preface to starts from René Char's line, "Our inheritance was left to us by no testament", and describes a thinking lodged in the gap between past and future. How can one hand anything on when no tradition says any longer what is worth keeping? In "The Crisis in Education" she asks that we be conservative toward the world in order to protect what is new in the child. Its orientation toward what is to come derives from : every birth is a beginning.
Between Past and Future, preface "The Gap Between Past and Future" and "The Crisis in Education" (1961) · The Human Condition, §7 (1958)
Justification
She distinguishes what someone is (qualities, talents, shortcomings, shared with others) from who they are, a uniqueness that appears only in action and speech. What cannot be defined can be told: we know who someone was only by knowing the story of which they are the hero. That story is told by the storyteller, after the fact, not by the actor. Hence her taste for portraits () and for the tales of Isak Dinesen.
The Human Condition, §25 and §27 (1958) · Men in Dark Times, "Isak Dinesen" (1968)
Justification
opens with a refusal: to define a human nature would be like jumping over our own shadow, and only a god could know it. She therefore speaks of the human condition (life, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, the earth), which conditions without ever determining absolutely. The camps, on the contrary, sought to prove that "everything is possible" and to remake human nature. Yet she parts ways with : for her, someone is not defined by the project in which they choose themselves, they reveal themselves to others, in action and speech, without mastering what they show.
The Human Condition, §1 (1958) · The Origins of Totalitarianism, III, ch. 12 (1951)
Justification
is the "miracle" that saves the world from ruin: every birth brings the possibility of a beginning, and she reads in the announcement "a child has been born unto us" the expression of the faith and hope one can have in the world. This is not hope in progress, which she holds, together with doom, to be two sides of the same superstition (preface to ): hope rests on the fact of beginnings, not on a promised future.
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.The Human Condition, §34
The Human Condition, §34 (1958) · The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1950 preface
Justification
The second volume of , Willing, defends the reality of a will, "the organ of the future", able to affirm or deny without being compelled to. She defends it against philosophers who, since antiquity, have held contingency to be a mere appearance, and she sides with . But she sharply distinguishes this inner freedom from political freedom, which remains at the center of her work, and ends on the "abyss of freedom", a spontaneity that rests on nothing. She describes the experience of willing more than she refutes determinism: her concern is not a metaphysical thesis.
The Life of the Mind, II, Willing (1978)
Justification
Arendt starts from a historical shift: since the Stoics and , the tradition has lodged freedom in the will, making it an inner affair, compatible with servitude and with withdrawal from the world. She goes back to the experience of the polis: to be free is to be able to appear among one's peers, to speak and act in a space no one owns. Civil guarantees are only its condition, liberation; the ideal of sovereignty, mastery of oneself or of the state, is its negation, since no one acts alone. The positive-liberty pole comes closest through participation, not through the inner self-mastery she rejects; through her models (Rome, the revolutions), she also touches republican non-domination.
The raison d'être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.Between Past and Future, "What Is Freedom?"
Between Past and Future, "What Is Freedom?" (1961) · The Human Condition, ch. V (1958)
Justification
At the Jerusalem trial she believes she sees in Eichmann not a monster driven by hatred but a zealous functionary, speaking in clichés, unable to imagine anyone else's standpoint. The banality of evil names this thoughtlessness, which does not rule out ideological commitment and is in no way a mitigating circumstance. Against the cog theory invoked by the defense, she insists that a court judges a person, not a system, and that in politics an adult's obedience amounts to support. She distinguishes guilt, which is always individual (where all are guilty, no one is), from political responsibility, which falls collectively on the members of a community for what was done in their name. The thesis remains disputed: historians (David Cesarani, ) show an Eichmann who was a committed antisemite, and the phrase has been read, wrongly in her defenders' view, as a minimization.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.Eichmann in Jerusalem, epilogue
Eichmann in Jerusalem, epilogue (1963) and postscript to the revised edition (1964) · Responsibility and Judgment, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" (1964) and "Collective Responsibility" (1968)
Justification
Her starting point is the experience of the stateless between the wars, which she shared. As soon as a person lost membership in a political community, the rights supposed to be theirs by virtue of their humanity alone no longer protected them from anything: the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human turned out to be the greatest danger. Rights, then, are not given by nature: we are not born equal, we become equal as members of a group, through the decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. What comes first is the right to have rights: to belong to a community where one is judged by one's actions and opinions. The status of this first right, normative foundation or mere observation, remains debated ().
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.The Origins of Totalitarianism, II, ch. 9
The Origins of Totalitarianism, II, ch. 9, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man" (1951)
Justification
Forgiveness answers a difficulty proper to action: it is irreversible and unpredictable. Forgiveness releases from the first, the promise from the second; no one can forgive or bind themselves alone, these are faculties of plurality. She credits Jesus of Nazareth with discovering forgiveness and frees it from its religious frame. She also narrows its range: it bears on everyday trespasses, it remits the deed for the sake of the person who committed it, the passage from Luke she comments on ties it to the wrongdoer's repentance, and it stops short of what she calls radical evil, which can be neither punished nor forgiven. It is this limit that sets against her: for him, forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable.
It is […] a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.The Human Condition, §33
The Human Condition, §33-34 (1958)
Justification
She reads political philosophy since as an attempt to replace action with making. The philosopher-king governs according to a model, like the craftsman, and truth, which compels, takes the place of , which is open to debate. Yet politics rests on plurality: equals, all different, who judge together. Hence her admiration for the councils born of revolutions (the Paris Commune, the soviets of 1905 and 1917, Hungary 1956). Yet she conceives them as a self-selected "elite": not the most knowledgeable, but those who have a taste for public life and take part in it.
On Revolution, ch. 6 (1963) · The Human Condition, §31 (1958)
Justification
The core of , in the chapter "Ideology and Terror", is that totalitarian regimes claim to know the law of movement, of history (class struggle) or of nature (race struggle), which states and terror carries out. Without making or the causes of totalitarianism, she criticizes the modern conception of history as a process, which turns actions into moments of an overall movement and history into something one makes. She holds, on the contrary, that action is unpredictable and the event irreducible to its causes: one can understand it after the fact, not deduce it.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, III, ch. 13, "Ideology and Terror" (1953, added in 1958) · Between Past and Future, "The Concept of History" (1961)
Justification
distinguishes two contracts. The vertical contract, by which each person surrenders their power to a sovereign (), isolates individuals. The horizontal contract, by which people bind themselves to one another through mutual promises, like the Mayflower Compact of 1620, generates power. She sides with the second. This is not an organic community: the bond is founded and kept up, not inherited from nature. Nor is it a pact for protecting private interests: it founds a common space.
On Revolution, ch. 4 (1963) · Crises of the Republic, "Civil Disobedience" (1970)
Justification
"Civil Disobedience" (1970), written during the civil rights struggles and the movement against the Vietnam War, sets the conscientious objector against the civil disobedient. The objector (, ) acts to keep their hands clean: their conscience is unpolitical. The civil disobedient belongs to an organized minority, acts in public on behalf of a shared opinion, and carries on the American tradition of voluntary associations described by ; she even proposes giving them a recognized status. Under dictatorship she praises those who refused to take part, and she defended Jewish armed resistance.
Crises of the Republic, "Civil Disobedience" (1970) · Responsibility and Judgment, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" (1964)
Justification
In the epilogue of she approves the death sentence, but observes that the modern justifications (protecting society, reforming, deterring) are worthless for such crimes. Only an ancient idea holds, one the moderns find barbaric: certain crimes call for retribution. She then rewrites the verdict, addressing the accused directly: the punishment answers what he willed, not to share the earth with other peoples.
And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations […], we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.Eichmann in Jerusalem, epilogue
Eichmann in Jerusalem, epilogue (1963)
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Justification
Against a tradition that, from to C. Wright Mills, defines power by violence, pulls them apart. Power springs from concerted action and lasts as long as the group holds together. Violence is instrumental: it multiplies strength with implements, can annihilate power, never generate it. It can therefore be justified, in the short term and for a near end, never legitimate. Hence her rejection of the emancipatory violence exalted by in his preface to . She is no pacifist: as early as 1941, in the New York paper Aufbau, she argued for a Jewish army to fight Hitler. This is not just-war doctrine, but it is the closest pole: violence remains an exceptional means, bounded by its end. What she rejects is what defines the pole of force as the instrument of politics, the idea that every order ultimately rests on coercion.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.On Violence, II
On Violence (1970), reprinted in Crises of the Republic · Aufbau articles on a Jewish army (1941-1942), collected in The Jewish Writings
Justification
"What Is Authority?" distinguishes authority, which obtains obedience without coercion or persuasion, from violence and from argument alike, and records its modern disappearance along with the Roman triad of tradition, religion and authority. She rejects sovereignty, the single, indivisible power held since to be the condition of order. In she celebrates the American founding: power to the organized people, authority to the Constitution, the balance of powers after . Her taste for councils and federalism pulls her slightly beyond this constitutionalism.
Between Past and Future, "What Is Authority?" (1961) · On Revolution, ch. 4-5 (1963)
Justification
Eichmann invoked the , reduced to acting as the Führer would wish; more broadly, the moral collapse under Nazism showed that rules can be swapped overnight, and that the only ones who resisted were those who judged for themselves, with no rule to apply. She looks in 's Critique of Judgment for a reflective judgment, which starts from the particular case without subsuming it under a given rule and widens itself through the enlarged mentality: thinking by putting oneself in the place of others. This judgment was to form the third part of , left unfinished; it is reconstructed from the , and commentators debate whether it is the judgment of the actor or of the spectator. The axis says "phronesis", whereas she starts from Kant more than from Aristotle.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, ch. 8 (1963) · Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1970 lectures, published 1982) · Responsibility and Judgment, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" (1965-1966)
Justification
separates three activities. Labor answers the biological cycle and is consumed as soon as it is produced. Work fabricates durable objects and builds a world. , finally, puts human beings directly in relation with one another. She reproaches for making labor the essence of man while promising to free him from it: labor is a necessity, dignified but servile in the Greek sense, and it cannot carry the meaning of a life. The modern danger she diagnoses is a society of laborers, in which even work becomes a consumer good and automation threatens to free from labor people who no longer know any other activity. The axis merges labor and work, which her distinction pulls apart: whatever fulfillment there is belongs to work, not to labor.
The Human Condition, prologue and ch. III-IV (1958)
Justification
The prologue of starts from the launch of Sputnik (1957), hailed as a first step toward escaping the earth, and from automation. More deeply, she sees in it a world alienation: the sciences operate in a mathematical language that no longer translates into speech, and whatever cannot be spoken about escapes political judgment. She does not ask that we give up technology but that its uses remain matters for debate: her critique bears on language and judgment, not, as with , on the essence of technology.
The Human Condition, prologue (1958)
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ReinterpretsAristotleArendt takes from Aristotle the distinction between praxis and poiēsis, acting and making, and political life as a way of life of its own, but she frees action from the hierarchy that subordinated it to contemplation.Read
- ReinterpretsAugustineArendt devotes her dissertation to love in Augustine, where she draws the motif that will run through her work: the human being as a "beginning" who, in being born, introduces something new into the world.Read
- ReinterpretsKantArendt reads in Kant's Critique of Judgment the political philosophy he never wrote: the judgment of taste, which judges the particular without a rule and by putting oneself in the place of others, becomes the model o…Read
- Reacts againstMarxArendt engages Marx as the thinker who made labor the essence of man and history something one makes: her distinction of labor, work and action is largely built against him.Read
- ContinuesJaspersDoctoral supervisor, then lifelong friend and correspondent, Jaspers passed on to Arendt the idea that truth is sought in communication between persons, and a model of public thinking, answerable to the world.Read
- ReinterpretsHeideggerHeidegger's student, Arendt shifts his analysis of existence toward the political: against the primacy of death, she thinks natality, the capacity to begin, and concerted action among human beings as the proper site o…Read
↓ Influence exerted
- transmitted byPaul RicœurRicœur, who prefaced the 1983 French reissue of The Human Condition, retains from Arendt the link between action and narrative: who one is is told in a story, which he would develop into narrative identity.Read
- reinterpreted byHabermasHabermas takes up Arendt's definition of power as the capacity to act together and turns it into "communicative power", while faulting her for excluding economic and social questions from politics.Read