Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)

The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. She was born in Hanover, Germany on October 14, 1906. She spent her childhood in Königsberg (the city of Immanuel Kant) and Berlin.

Her intellectual life began with her matriculation at the University of Marburg in 1924. There she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. The common intellectual attraction the professor and the student had for each other flared into a clandestine love affair. (Heiddeger was a married man.) The romantic relationship cooled when Arendt transferred to the University of Heidelberg (apparently at Heidegger’s insistence) to study with Karl Jaspers. The magnetism between Arendt and Heidegger remained strong, however and would continue intermittently through Heidegger’s death, despite the fact that Heidegger would join the Nazi party and Arendt as a jew would be persecuted. Heidegger’s phenomenology would remain a foundation of her thinking throughout her intellectual life.

At the University of Heidelberg in 1929 Arendt wrote a doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in the writings of St. Augustin, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. In the normal course of events she certainly would have completed a Habilitation and entered university teaching, but as a Jew that step was barred to her.

In 1933 she fled Germany to Paris in the face of the ascending Nazi party. She remained in France until 1941 before she was able to flee to the United States. After the war she returned to Germany and testified on his behalf at the denazification hearings of her former professor, Heidegger. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950 and entered a brilliant academic career in her new homeland.

Her academic career included work at the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Yale University and Wesleyan University. In 1959 she became the first woman ever appointed to a full professorship at Princeton University.

Hannah Arendt authored many books which were internationally influential. Among her works are: The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, The Human Condition, 1958, On Revolution, 1962, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963 (Arendt had traveled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial for New Yorker magazine.), On Violence, 1970, and posthumously The Life of the mind, 1978.