Hannah Arendt
1906-1975 · German-American (Jewish) · Political Theory, Phenomenology, Ethics, Philosophy of History
Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.
Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany after a brief Gestapo arrest, was interned in the French camp at Gurs, escaped, and reached New York in 1941 as a stateless refugee. The catastrophe of 1933 had broken open the quiet philosophical world she came from — she had studied under Heidegger and Jaspers and written her dissertation on love in Augustine — and it fixed her lifelong question: how does ordinary political life collapse into terror?
Topics Hannah Arendt addresses
- totalitarianism
- the banality of evil
- the origins of totalitarianism
- ideology and terror
- the human condition
- labor, work, and action
- vita activa
- natality
- plurality
- the public realm and the private realm
- the social realm
- action and speech
- the right to have rights
- statelessness
- radical evil
- thoughtlessness
- world-alienation
- the Eichmann trial
- modern antisemitism
- imperialism and race-thinking
- the camps
- pariah and parvenu
- power and violence
- revolution and the social question
Questions to put to Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism and the Camps
- What made totalitarianism a new form of government, different from tyranny or dictatorship?
- How did the camps demonstrate that everything is possible?
- What do you mean when you say totalitarianism destroys human plurality?
- Were Nazism and Stalinism really the same kind of thing?
- How did modern antisemitism differ from traditional religious Jew-hatred?
- What role did statelessness play in making the camps possible?
Labor, Work, and Action
- What's the difference between labor, work, and action?
- Why does it matter that men, not Man, live on the earth?
- What do you mean by natality, and why is it so important?
- How is action different from making things or getting work done?
- What is the in-between that lies between people?
- Why do you say the philosophical tradition misread plurality from Plato onward?
The Public, the Private, and the Social
- What do you mean by the social realm, and why do you see it as a problem?
- How does the rise of mass economic concerns destroy the space for politics?
- Is your critique of the social just nostalgia for the Greek polis?
- What's the difference between the public realm and the private realm?
- How did totalitarianism produce worldlessness?
- Why do you say modern society substitutes behavior for action?
Revolution and the Social Question
- Why did the French Revolution fail where the American Revolution succeeded?
- How did the politics of poverty pull the French Revolution away from freedom?
- What's wrong with making the relief of suffering a political principle?
- How do you see the shadow of slavery on the American founding?
- What was the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition?
- What's the difference between solidarity and pity?
Eichmann and the Banality of Evil
- What did you mean by the banality of evil?
- How could someone organize mass murder without being demonic?
- What is thoughtlessness in the precise sense you're using it?
- Does your thesis survive the evidence that Eichmann was more ideological than you reported?
- What's the difference between radical evil and banal evil?
- Why was the shock of the trial that Eichmann was a clown?
Thinking, Willing, and Judging
- What is the two-in-one dialogue that thinking is?
- How does thinking prevent evil?
- Why do you treat compassion and conscience as politically suspect?
- What role does judgment play in political life?
- How did you plan to complete the third volume on judging?
- What's at stake for you in recovering the vita contemplativa after writing about the vita activa?
Converse with Hannah Arendt on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Hannah Arendt's own writing, cited to the page.