xperienced as a tangible reality in intercourse with other human beings, before it became a mental concept. To act was to take initiative, to set something in motion, and it was this capacity to initiate something new that gave action the qualities of novelty, uniqueness and unpredictabliity.
Men are free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same. The Human Condition
Arendt regarded action as a public category, a practice that is experienced through interaction with others. She maintained that actions could only be justified by their public recognition and the shared rules of a political community, not for their own sake. Action would have no meaning if there were no one present to see it and give meaning to it. Action only had meaning in the presence of others like ourselves who could both understand our actions and recognize our uniqueness. Arendt connected action to speech, since intercourse with others required communication.
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition - not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam [sufficient condition] - of all political life.
On Revolution (1961) was an application of Arendt’s political concepts to the modern era. She challenged both liberal and Marxist interpretations of modern political revolutions, disputing the liberal claim that revolutions such as the French and American were mostly concerned with establishing a limited government that allowed individual liberty, and the Marxist claim that they were an attempt by the suffering masses to overcome exclusion by the privileged few. Instead, she claimed that these revolutions were exercises of individuals acting together for a common purpose, the establishment of public spaces of civic freedom and participation, 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 p