, with mixed results. The French Revolution ended by reducing political institutions to administering the distribution of goods and resources; and the American, while protecting the average citizen from arbitrary exercise of authority by constitutional checks and balances, did not allow participation in “judgement and authority.”
Her reports on the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, concluded that Eichmann’s atrocities did not arise from a malevolent desire to do evil, but through a failure or absence of sound thinking and judgment. She introduced the idea of the banality of evil; the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction. The book sparked considerable opposition in the Jewish community, partially because she attributed some responsibility for the catastrophe to the councils (Judenräte), who complied with the German authorities. It inspired a number of historical investigations of the behavior of Jewish communities under Nazi occupation. The subsequent debate has often reinforced the picture of venality, delusion, fear, and selfishness that Arendt briefly presented.
This connection between complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking and judgment inspired the last phase of Arendt's work, which sought to examine the nature of the faculties of 'thinking,' willing' and judging, and their roles in making politically and morally responsible choices.
Arendt’s biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, was an attempt to illuminate the conflict between minority status and German nationalism through her subject's conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was begun when Arendt herself was experiencing oppression in Germany because she was Jewish, but was not published until 1958.
Arendt remains one of the most original, challenging, and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. Her books influenced the development of modern political theory, particularly in North America, Europe, and Australia, where scholarly conferences and subsequent anthologies have been devoted to her work (as well as a dozen other books and numerous dissertations). In 1975, the Danish government awarded Arendt its Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilization, which no American and no woman before her had received.
A variety of political thinkers with widely divergent positions have made use of Arendt’s thought, including participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber and Sheldon Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre, and neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Bernstein, and Seyla Benhabib.
Arendt was a pioneer in the academic world; she became the first woman to become a full professor (of politics) at Princeton University, and subsequently taught at the University of Chicago, Wesleyan University, and finally the New School for Social Research.
Arendt's emphasis on the plight of the Jews amid the decline of the Enlightenment ideal of human rights, and her insistence that the Third Reich was conducting a war against the Jewish people, have become common themes of Jewish historiography.
Although Arendt emphasized the examination of “appearances” of political action rather than philosophical theory, her own theory was detached enough from the everyday political reality to provoke a number of criticisms.
Her reliance upon a rigid distinction between the 'private' and 'public'—the oikos and the polis,—to delimit the specificity of the political realm, has raised criticisms from feminist and Marxist thinkers that her definition of the ‘public’ realm, as pertaining to human self-disclosure in speech and deed, excludes domestic matters and problems of the distribution of material resources, which are legitimate political concerns.
Her emphasis on direct citizen deliberation, as synonymous with the exercise of political freedom, exclude