The Books
The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Who fled Nazi Germany, was stateless for eighteen years, and built a philosophy of human action rooted in the conviction that what people do together in public can always begin something genuinely new.
The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.Hannah Arendt — The Human Condition, 1958
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906 to a secular Jewish family. She studied philosophy at Marburg under Martin Heidegger — with whom she had an affair that ended badly and whose later Nazism she spent decades grappling with — and completed her doctorate at Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo, released, and fled Germany, first to Paris where she worked with Zionist youth organizations helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and then, after the fall of France and a brief internment in a French concentration camp from which she escaped, to the United States in 1941.
She arrived in New York with almost nothing, stateless — her German citizenship had been revoked by the Nazis in 1937 — and spent the next eighteen years without a passport or a country. She worked as an editor, taught at various universities, and wrote. She acquired American citizenship in 1951, the same year she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book that established her as one of the most important political thinkers of the century.
She covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for The New Yorker in 1961 and published her report as Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Her phrase the banality of evil — her description of Eichmann not as a monster but as a thoughtless bureaucrat — generated enormous controversy that lasted for decades and still has not entirely settled.
Arendt's central philosophical contribution is her analysis of what it means to act — not to work, not to labor, but to act in the full political sense: to appear in public, to speak and do things in concert with others, to begin something new that would not have happened without you. Action, for Arendt, is the highest human capacity because it is irreducibly unpredictable: no one can fully control what they set in motion when they act in the company of other free people. Every act creates a web of relationships and consequences that extend beyond any single actor's intention or control.
This is why she insists that the capacity to forgive is as important as the capacity to act. Without forgiveness — the release from the irreversible consequences of past actions — the past would paralyze the present. Without the ability to make and keep promises — to create islands of predictability in the sea of uncertainty — no cooperative action would be possible. Forgiveness and promise-making are, for Arendt, the two remedies that humans have developed against the irreversibility and unpredictability of action.
Her analysis of totalitarianism — the attempt to make human beings superfluous, to replace the web of human relationships with a single will, to eliminate precisely the unpredictability that makes human action human — is the most comprehensive philosophical account of twentieth-century tyranny ever written. And her response to it is not pessimism but a fierce insistence on the possibility of beginning: that no matter how complete the destruction of the human world, the capacity to start something new is ineradicable as long as people are born, because natality — the fact that new people always arrive in the world — is the guarantee that something genuinely new is always possible.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.Hannah Arendt — as attributed
The most comprehensive philosophical analysis of how totalitarian systems arise and function. Demanding but essential for understanding the 20th century.
Her analysis of labor, work, and action — and her account of why action in public is the highest human capacity. Begin with the Prologue and Part V.
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