s 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’ or triumph of a classless society.
The Origins of Totalitarianism examined a number of the recurrent themes that appeared throughout Arendt’s political writings, including an examination of the conditions necessary for a humane and democratic public life; the historical, social and economic forces that undermined these conditions; the conflict between private interests and the public good; and the impact of intensified economic cycles of production and consumption that derailed the traditional context of human life. The book aroused a controversy because Arendt equated anti-Semitism and imperialism in her examination of the destabilizing pathologies which had undermined the tenets of politics; a number of her critics maintained that these were separate in both origins and nature.
Arendt’s most influential work was The Human Condition (1958), in which she rejected the Western philosophical tradition from Plato through Marx, arguing that the apex of human achievement was not philosophical thought, but active life. She argued that Western philosophical tradition had elevated contemplation and ideas over actual appearances and the human activity which responds to appearances. She took a phenomenological approach to politics, attempting to uncover the true character of lived political experience which had, for the most part, been obscured and distorted by philosophical tradition, and hoping to reinstate the life of public and political action to the apex of human values and goals.
Arendt divided the active life into three areas: labor, which is repetitive but sustains life; work, which creates objects and the collective human world; and action, new activity, especially political, which involves shared enterprise. She placed these areas in an ascending hierarchy with action at the top. The fundamental defining quality of action was its freedom, its status as an end in itself, subordinate to nothing outside itself. Furthermore, this freedom was visible and not just a quality of inner contemplation. Freedom was first e