Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt studied with Heidegger and Jaspers, fled Germany in 1933 and France in 1941, and became in New York the century’s most searching political thinker. The Origins of Totalitarianism traced Nazism and Stalinism to antisemitism, imperialism and the collapse of the nation-state; Eichmann in Jerusalem coined the banality of evil and cost her friends; The Human Condition set action against labour and work. The essays in Crises of the Republic and Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship apply the thinking to Vietnam, civil disobedience and the question of what an individual owes under a criminal regime.