|Name: Hannah Arendt|
|Birth: October 14, 1906 (Linden, Germany)|
|Death: December 4, 1975 (New York, United States)|
|Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Greek philosophy, technology, Ontology, modernity, philosophy of history|
|Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Russell, Jaspers, Benjamin||Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Maurice_Merleau-Ponty, Giorgio Agamben , Seyla Benhabib|
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a Jewish-American political theorist of German descent and one of the most original, challenging, and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. A student and associate of such German thinkers as Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers, she earned her doctorate in 1933 but was not permitted to teach because she was Jewish. Forced to flee Germany and then France, she arrived in the United States with her husband in 1941. The publication in 1951 of The Origins of Totalitarianism made her an intellectual celebrity. Her books deal with themes such as the nature of freedom and authority, totalitarianism, revolution, the faculties of 'thinking' and 'judging,' the history of political thought, and the interpretation of politics and human activity.
Rejecting much of the Western philosophical tradition, Arendt maintained that political theory and philosophy had inhibited a correct understanding of political activity, and emphasized the active life as the apex of human achievement. In short, people have a responsibility to use their intellect and to engage in constructive public discourse, while horrific atrocities such as genocide came about because of the failure of individuals in positions of authority to exercise judgment and will. Although often described as a philosopher, Arendt refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with man in the abstract, while she as a self-described "political theorist" centered on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."
Hannah Arendt was born October 14, 1906 in the then-independent city of Linden in Lower Saxony (now part of Hanover), Germany, the only child of Paul and Martha (Cohn) Arendt, both of whom were secular Jews and had grown up in Russian-Jewish homes. When Hannah was seven, her father died of paresis (syphilitic insanity), and not much later, battles between Russian and German armies were fought near her home. She was raised in Königsberg (the hometown of her admired precursor Immanuel Kant) and Berlin. In 1920, her mother married Martin Beerwald.
Hannah graduated from high school in 1924, and that fall she began to study theology with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg. She went on to the University of Heidelberg, where she wrote a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the direction of the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers. In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Stern, a Jewish philosopher whose pen name was Günther Anders. She also completed her dissertation that year and earned her doctorate, but was prevented from habilitating (and thus from teaching in German universities) in 1933 because she was Jewish. When the National Socialists began to take power, Arendt became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped the German Zionist Organization and its leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She was arrested by the Gestapo for doing research on anti-Semitic propaganda, but won the sympathy of a Berlin jailer, was released and escaped to Paris, where she remained for the rest of the decade. Arendt worked with Youth Aliyah and helped rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich and bring them to Palestine.
In Paris, she befriended Raymond Aron and the literary critic and Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. She also met Heinrich Blücher, a poet and communist with no formal education who had been a member of Rosa Luxemburg's defeated Spartacus League, and a gentile. In 1937, Arendt divorced, a