This is a dense text and a challenging read, so is much less well-known to general readers it is replete with the carefully defined systems of categorisation that became something of a trademark of Arendtian thinking. In 1958, Arendt published The Human Condition, in which she sets out her detailed analysis of the vita activa (the human “life of activity”, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the “life of the mind”). Though it is not without significant problems (as we will see below), the relevance of this work to the politics of the early twenty-first century has added to something of a popular revival of interest in Arendt in the present era. Immediately establishing her as a leading thinker on the political ructions of the twentieth century and the associated ideologies, this heavyweight work seeks to trace the origins of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in historical antisemitism and in European imperialism. The first major book published by Arendt is also one of her most famous: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A heavy smoker, Arendt died of a heart attack at the age of 69 in 1975. In the United States, Arendt worked for several years as a writer and editor, then from the early 1950s onwards taught at several of the leading universities in the country, including Princeton, Yale, the New School and UC Berkeley. This was to be her home for the rest of her life. Arendt arrived in New York (along with her husband) in May 1941. Eventually, she was able to obtain an American visa and papers allowing her to travel to Portugal, where she lived for a few months while awaiting passage across the Atlantic.
In the spring of 1940, in anticipation of a German invasion, the French government ordered Arendt into the internment camp at Gurs in the chaos following the fall of France to the German army, she managed to escape the camp in July and lived for a time as a fugitive.
On her release, she fled the country and travelled to Paris, where she remained for several years, working for Zionist organisations and assisting the emigration of many Jewish refugees to Palestine. Despite this strong background in philosophy, however, in later life she consistently refused the label “philosopher”, declaring herself to be a political theorist.įollowing the rise to power of the Nazi regime in January 1933, Arendt began researching German antisemitism, leading to her arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, as well as eight days in prison. In the 1920s she studied philosophy at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Heidelberg, including under the leading philosophers Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl in 1929 she submitted her doctoral thesis on the nature of love in the work of St Augustine. Born in 1906 to a middle class, secular Jewish family in Germany, Hannah Arendt excelled at school, though also demonstrated something of a rebellious streak.
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