Hannah Arendt
Political theorist and philosopher
Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and philosopher who wrote about politics, power and totalitarianism. She is best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.
2 summaries 35 min of listening
Born 1906 in Lindener Marktplatz 2, Hannover, Germany Died 1975
Influenced by Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche
About Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Linden, Germany, to a Jewish family. She studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger and earned her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1929. Her dissertation was titled Love and Saint Augustine. She left Germany in 1933 and settled in Paris, where she worked for Jewish refugee organizations. She reached the United States in 1941 and became an American citizen in 1950. She taught at many American universities, including The New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, examined the Nazi and Stalinist regimes and established her reputation. The Human Condition followed in 1958 and explored labor, work and action. She also wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution, and she left her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished when she died in 1975.