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Johanna[1] "Hannah" Arendt (/ˈɛərənt/ or /ˈɑrənt/; German: [ˈaːʀənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."[2] Her works deal with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. The Hannah Arendt Prizeis named in her honour.
Life and career
Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (present-dayHanover), the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt.[3] She grew up inKönigsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger.
According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she later was criticized due to Heidegger's support for the Nazi Partywhen he was rector at the University of Freiburg.
In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders; they divorced in 1937. The dissertation was published in 1929. Although an agnostic,[4]Arendt was prevented from "habilitating" – a prerequisite for teaching in German universities–because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being interrogated[when?] by the Gestapo.
In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for Paris, where she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, a former member of the Communist Party. Later that year, after the German military occupation of northern France, the Vichy regime began deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps in the unoccupied south of France, and she was interned in Camp Gurs as an "enemy alien". Arendt was able to escape after a few weeks and left France in 1941 with her husband and her mother to the United States. They relied on visas illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham, who aided roughly 2,500 Jewish refugees in this way. Varian Fry, another American humanitarian, paid for their travel and helped obtain the visas. Upon arriving in New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941–45, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity.[5]
After World War II, she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization, which saved thousands of children from the Holocaust and settled them in the British Mandate of Palestine.[6] She became a close friend of Karl Jaspers and his wife, developing a deep intellectual friendship with him.[7] She began corresponding with American author Mary McCarthy around this time.[8]
In 1950, Arendt became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[9] She served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Northwestern University. In 1959, she was named the first female lecturer at Princeton. She also taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought; The New School in Manhattan; Yale University, where she was a fellow; and, the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–62, 1962–63).[10]
She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.[11][12]
Arendt was instrumental in the creation in 1974 of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.[13]
Death
Arendt died in New York City on 4 December 1975, at age 69, of a heart attack. She was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt's first major book was titled The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was opposed by the Left on the grounds that it presented the two movements as equally tyrannical. She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy. Totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about megalomania and consistency, not eradicating Jews.
The Human Condition
Arguably her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between the concepts of political and social, labor and work, various forms of action, and explores implications of those distinctions. Her theory of political action, corresponding to the existence of a public realm, is extensively developed in this work. Arendt argues that, while human life always evolves within societies, the social-being part of human nature, political life, was intentionally constructed by only a few of these societies as a space for individuals to achieve freedom through the construction of a common world. These categories, which attempt to bridge the gap between ontological and sociological structures, are sharply delineated. While Arendt relegates labor and work to the realm of the "social", she favors the human condition of action as the "political" that is both existential and aesthetic.[14]
Men in Dark Times
Her collection of essays, Men in Dark Times, presents intellectual biographies of some creative and moral figures of the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.
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