w School in New York City, and served as a fellow at Yale University and Wesleyan University. In 1959, she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton.
In 1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, a book which she had begun years before in Germany. In 1959, she published Reflections on Little Rock, her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights movement. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker magazine.
In 1963 she published her reflections on the Eichmann trial, first in the New Yorker, and then in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this year, she also published On Revolution. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1968, she published Men in Dark Times.
In 1970, the year that Blücher died, Arendt gave a seminar on Kant's philosophy of judgment at the New School which was published posthumously as Reflections on Kant's Political Philosophy in 1982. In 1971 she published Thinking and Moral Considerations, and the following year Crisis of the Republic appeared. She then began a projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind. Volumes 1 and 2 (Thinking and Willing) were published posthumously. She died on December 4, 1975, having only just started work on the third and final volume, Judging. Arendt was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.
The writing of Hannah Arendt covered a wide variety of topics; she never elaborated a systematic political philosophy. She drew inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, and Jaspers, and wrote about 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. Much of her work focused on affirming a conception of freedom synonymous with collective political action among equals. She theorized freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek polis, American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960s.
Her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism to the devastation of the ordered and stable contexts in which people had once lived by massive disruptions including World War I, the Great Depression, the spread of revolutionary unrest and violent overthrow of traditional political systems. In such confused and desperate circumstances, she contended that people were open to the promulgation of a single, clear and unambiguous idea that would place the blame for human suffering on a particular group or institution, and indicate a clear path to a secure future against uncertainty and danger. The vulnerability of European populations to totalitarian ideas was the consequence of an accumulation of “pathologies” which had invaded the liberty and freedom of the public realm. These included imperialism, which legitimized colonial oppression as a business enterprise; and the bourgeois takeover of political institutions to further their own ends. Such conditions undermined the legitimacy of political institutions and weakened principles of citizenship and democratic consensus, and did not allow for the preservation of individual liberty within a viable political system.
Arendt insisted that Stalinist Communism and Nazism were distinct from older forms of tyranny, a completely 'novel form of government' based on terror and ideological fiction. Older tyrannies had used terror as a means of acquiring or maintaining power and authority, but these modern tyrannies regarded terror as an end in itself, rather than a rational political strategy. Modern tyranny justified terror with an ideology or a historical law, such as the inevitable supremacy of a ‘chosen race