Politics
1906 to 1975, Germany / United States
Totalitarianism, the banality of evil, and the dignity of political action.
Start learning Hannah →Sent to report on a monster, Arendt found a clerk. Her most explosive idea: that the greatest evils of the modern age were committed not by sadists or fanatics but by ordinary, thoughtless men who simply did their jobs.
In her great work of philosophy, Arendt asks what human beings actually do - and divides the active life into three: the labor that keeps us alive, the work that builds a lasting world, and the action by which we appear…
Arendt’s first great book asked how a wholly new form of tyranny - Nazism and Stalinism - became possible. Her answer: total terror, an ideology that explains everything, and the weaponizing of human loneliness.
Against the long tradition that equates power with force, Arendt argues that power and violence are not the same thing but opposites - power is what arises when people act together, while violence is the instrument of t…
Watching millions of refugees stripped of citizenship and rendered rightless, Arendt exposed a flaw at the heart of human rights: a person who belongs to no political community has no one to guarantee his ‘inalien…
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