Thinkers

Hannah Arendt

Modern European · Europe · 1906 to 1975

German-born political thinker who studied regimes that try to control every part of life. She argued that freedom appears when people act and speak together.

What it is

Hannah Arendt (1906 to 1975) was a German-born political philosopher who studied how totalitarian regimes arise, described the human activities of labour, work and action, and held that political life depends on people acting together in public as equals who are different from one another. She is counted among the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work does not form one system but a set of connected investigations.

She was born into a German-Jewish family and was forced to leave Germany in 1933. She lived in Paris for eight years, working for organisations that helped Jewish refugees, and in 1941 she emigrated to America, where she held academic posts until she died in 1975. She had studied with Martin Heidegger and then with Karl Jaspers, and the experience of these two teachers shaped her way of describing human life from the inside.

The main ideas

• Politics is its own kind of activity. The question she returned to most often was what politics is, as distinct from other things people do. She set out to describe political life as a way of being in the world that has its own character.
• Totalitarianism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she studied the totalitarian regimes of her time and asked what in the history of the previous centuries had made them possible. The book set off a wide debate.
• Labour, work and action. In The Human Condition (1958) she distinguished three basic kinds of activity. Labour keeps life going, work builds a lasting world of things, and action is what people do together and in public when they begin something new. Politics belongs to action.
• The public realm. Action needs a shared space where people appear to one another as different but equal. She worried about forces that threaten such a space and about the conflict between private and public interests.
• Freedom. For her freedom was not a private feeling but something that exists when people act together.
• Thinking and judging. In her later work she examined the faculties of thinking and judging and asked what they do for a person who has to act.

What it looks like in practice

Picture a neighbourhood that has to decide what to do with an empty lot. For Arendt the interesting moment is not the vote but the meeting before it: people who differ in age, work and opinion appear in front of each other, speak, listen and find that something new comes out of the exchange. She would say that this is politics at its smallest, and that it can be lost when decisions are made behind closed doors or left to experts. This is an illustration of her idea, not an example she gave.

Books and moments

• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is her first major political book.
• The Human Condition (1958) is her most original philosophical study.
• On Revolution compares the American and French revolutions.
• Eichmann in Jerusalem reports on the trial of a Nazi perpetrator, and it introduced the phrase 'banality of evil', which has been much discussed ever since.

Questions and criticism

• Banality of evil. The phrase is controversial. It is fair to ask what it explains and what it leaves out.
• One system or many pieces? Her work spans several subjects, and readers disagree about how far it hangs together.
• Who counts as acting? Her view of politics puts a high value on public speech and action. It is fair to ask what it makes of people who have little chance to appear in public.

Close neighbours

Arendt's teachers Heidegger and Jaspers shaped her phenomenological approach, and the page on Heidegger shows one of her main starting points.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Where to start reading

Books by Hannah Arendt or about them, from the easiest way in to the harder ones.

All the books, by tradition

Who they connect to

Influenced

• Giorgio Agamben · He built on her account of people left without rights in the modern state.

Influenced by

• Aristotle · Arendt drew on Aristotle's distinction between action, making and labour.
• Augustine of Hippo · Arendt's doctoral work was on love in Augustine, and his idea of birth as a new beginning stayed with her.
• Immanuel Kant · Arendt's late lectures on judgement build on Kant's account of taste.
• Karl Jaspers · He supervised her doctoral work and stayed a close friend.
• Martin Heidegger · Arendt studied with Heidegger and kept parts of his thought while going her own way.

Reacted against

• Karl Marx · Arendt criticised Marx for making labour the centre of human life.

Other Modern European thinkers

• Arthur Schopenhauer · 1788 to 1860
• Alexis de Tocqueville · 1805 to 1859
• Thomas Henry Huxley · 1825 to 1895
• Wilhelm Dilthey · 1833 to 1911
• Friedrich Nietzsche · 1844 to 1900
• Sigmund Freud · 1856 to 1939
• Georg Simmel · 1858 to 1918
• Henri Bergson · 1859 to 1941
• Max Weber · 1864 to 1920
• Ernst Cassirer · 1874 to 1945

Sources we used

• Hannah Arendt · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
• Arendt, Hannah · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026