Who Was Hannah Arendt? A Political Thinker Who Refused Every Label

Born in 1906 near Hanover to a secular Jewish family, she studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg, with whom she had an affair as a student of eighteen, and completed a doctorate under Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in Augustine. Her relationship with Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party in 1933 and served as a university rector under it, was resumed as a correspondence after the war and has been a source of criticism ever since. Arrested in Berlin in 1933 for researching antisemitic propaganda for a Zionist organisation, she was released and fled to Paris, where she worked for eight years helping Jewish children emigrate to Palestine. Interned at Gurs after the German invasion, she escaped during the administrative chaos and reached the United States via Lisbon. She was stateless for eighteen years, became an American citizen in 1951, taught at several universities, and died in 1975.

Her first major book, published in 1951, argued that Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were not extreme versions of tyranny but a new form of rule with no precedent, and that treating them as ordinary dictatorships missed what was distinctive. The features she identified included total ideology claiming to explain the whole course of history, terror applied not to the guilty but to categories of person defined in advance, the destruction of every association standing between the individual and the state, and, crucially, an appeal to people she called atomised and lonely, cut adrift by the collapse of class structures and of the nineteenth-century order. Her account of how a stateless person has no rights at all, because rights turn out in practice to be guaranteed by a state rather than by humanity, produced the formulation that what such people lose is the right to have rights, and it remains the most cited passage in refugee law scholarship.

Her 1958 book The Human Condition sets out a distinction that runs through everything she wrote, dividing human activity into three kinds:

• •Labour, the cyclical work of sustaining biological life, which produces nothing lasting and must be repeated endlessly
• •Work, the fabrication of durable objects that build a world outlasting any individual, from a table to a cathedral
• •Action, meaning speech and deed among others in public, which is where a person discloses who they are rather than merely what they are, and which she regarded as the specifically political activity and the highest
• •Her complaint about modernity is that labour has swallowed the other two, so that a society of jobholders and consumers treats even art and politics as forms of making a living
• •She argued that action requires plurality, since it happens between people who are equal and distinct, and that its results are unpredictable and irreversible, which is why politics needs promising and forgiving as its two remedies

In 1961 she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for the New Yorker, and the resulting book caused an argument that has never really ended. What she reported was that the man in the glass booth was not a monster or a fanatic but strikingly ordinary, a mediocre official who spoke in cliches, took pride in doing his job well, and appeared unable to think from anyone else's point of view. Her phrase for this, the banality of evil, is routinely taken to mean that his crimes were banal, or that anyone would have done the same, and she meant neither. Her claim was about the perpetrator rather than the deed: that enormous evil can be committed by people with no evil motives at all, through thoughtlessness rather than malice, and that this is more frightening than a demonic explanation, not less. The book was fiercely attacked, partly for that argument and partly for several pages criticising the wartime Jewish councils, and the attacks cost her friendships permanently. Later historical work has shown Eichmann to have been considerably more ideologically committed than she judged from the trial, which complicates her reading of him without disposing of the general point.

She resists the usual categories: not a liberal, not a Marxist, not a conservative, hostile to the idea that political thought should produce a programme, and drawing on ancient Greek and Roman sources to criticise the present. The result is that her work is invoked from several directions at once. The analysis of statelessness is central to thinking about refugees and citizenship. The account of how lies function in politics, set out in essays on truth and on the Pentagon Papers, distinguishes the ordinary lie, which acknowledges the truth it conceals, from the systematic reconstruction of reality that leaves a population unable to judge anything, and that distinction has been quoted heavily in the last decade. Her insistence that thinking, meaning the internal dialogue in which a person questions themselves, is what prevents a person becoming an Eichmann, gives her a moral psychology that is unusual in political theory. And her defence of the public realm, as a space where people appear before each other and act in concert, is the part that most directly criticises a politics conducted through consumption and opinion polling.

A stateless refugee who reached New York in 1941 argued that Nazi and Soviet rule constituted a genuinely new form of government, built on total ideology, terror aimed at categories rather than acts, and the isolation of individuals, and that a stateless person loses the right to have rights. She divided human activity into labour, work and action, and held that modernity had let labour swallow the rest. Her phrase about the banality of evil described the perpetrator's thoughtlessness rather than the crime, and was widely misread.