Johanna Arendt was a German-born American philosopher and political theorist.
Background
Johanna Arendt was born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany. She the only child of Paul and Martha Cohn Arendt, both of whom had grown up in Jewish families of Russian descent that had established themselves as entrepreneurs in Kenigsberg, the capital city of East Prussia. Paul Arendt, an engineer and amateur classical scholar, contracted syphilis before his marriage, and the disease recurred when his daughter was two and a half.
The family then returned to Kenigsberg, where Arendt's childhood was overshadowed by her father's deterioration and, finally, his death in 1913 by paresis (syphilitic insanity) when she was seven.
Martha Arendt was left to manage her grief and her precocious, energetic child through World War I, with episodic battles between the Germans and the Russians taking place on the nearby eastern front. Arendt's parents were Social Democratic in their politics, and Martha Arendt supported the Left in the post-World War I political turmoil, instilling in her daughter an admiration for socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg.
Her mother remarried in 1920, and Arendt gained two older stepsisters. At that time she cultivated literary and philosophical interests.
Education
Arendt enrolled in the Szittnich School, Kenigsberg in August 1913, but her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. She attended the Kenigin-Luise-Schule for her secondary education, a girl's gymnasium. Here her education ended in 1923 when she was expelled for boycotting a teacher who insulted her. Her mother arranged for her to audit classes at the University of Berlin (1922-1923), including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini, enabling her to successfully sit the entrance examination (Abitur) for the University of Marburg. There she studied classical languages, German literature, protestant theology with Rudolf Bultmann and philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger (1924-1926).
After finishing her diploma, she set out in the fall of that year to study theology with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg.
There she was drawn to the young philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had attracted a following with the lectures that eventually became Being and Time, the chief sourcebook for a mode of thought that had the name Existenzphilosophie in Germany and later existentialisme in France.
Arendt completed a dissertation on The Concept of Love in St. Augustine (1929) and received her Ph. D. , but soon turned her attention to the current scene.
Career
Her concern was with the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and also with the complex history of German-Jewish relations, which she approached by studying a famous late-eighteenth-century moment of cultural rapprochement when Jewish salon hostesses dominated literary life in Berlin. She wrote a biographical study of one such hostess, Rahel Varnhagen, that focused on how Varnhagen repudiated her Jewishness only to find her way back to it near the end of her life; the book was not published until 1958.
Arendt began to associate with Kurt Blumenfeld, leader of the German Zionist Organization, and, after Hitler came to power in 1933, she worked actively for the Zionists, harboring fugitives and doing research to help Blumenfeld publicize abroad the plight of Hitler's enemies and victims. She was arrested by the Gestapo, and, after she was questioned and released, set out for the safety of Paris and the many opportunities there to work for the Zionist cause.
In a number of administrative capacities with organizations like Youth Aliyah, she helped secure passage for Jewish children to Palestine. While she was in Paris, Arendt also developed friendships with German émigré critics, poets, and artists who were Marxists.
In 1936 she met a vigorous, self-educated working-class Berliner named Heinrich Bluecher, a former associate of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Group and a Communist activist. On January 16, 1940, after both were divorced, they married. Both she and Bluecher became close to Walter Benjamin, a friend of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the most talented literary critic of their generation. Benjamin had a profound influence on Arendt's sense of history, particularly of how the deep currents of the nineteenth century had contributed to the storm of war they all knew was coming. When the German army smashed into France in 1940, Arendt and Bluecher were separated and sent with the other German exiles in Paris to an internment camp in the south of France. They escaped, were reunited with each other, and set out on a dangerous journey via Portugal to America, which they reached safely in May 1941 and where Arendt's mother later joined them.
While they were living in New York City during the war, struggling to learn English and to make ends meet with journalistic and publishing jobs, Arendt and Bluecher also envisioned the work that eventually resulted in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the book that would establish Arendt's American reputation as a political analyst and historian of major importance.
While Arendt was preparing The Origins of Totalitarianism, she published preliminary essays and studies in Jewish journals of opinion and in leftist liberal magazines like the Partisan Review, and through this connection she began to make American friends. She found American Jewish colleagues who supported her ideas that the Jews should have an army to fight Hitler and that the Jews living in Palestine should work toward a post-war state in conjunction with the Arabs of Palestine. She also found American colleagues who were, as she was, not easily located on the conventional left-to-right spectrum of political beliefs.
The poet Randall Jarrell helped her find work from 1946 to 1948 as an editor at Schocken Books, where she produced an important edition of Franz Kafka's diaries, and it was during this time that she met the novelist Mary McCarthy who became a steadfast friend for the rest of Arendt's life. Dwight Macdonald brought Arendt to the editorial board of his magazine, politics, and Salo Baron of Columbia University affiliated her with various projects for postwar Jewish cultural reconstruction. These relationships gave Arendt an American intellectual context in which to tell the story of European totalitarianism.
In the three densely woven parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt tracked the histories of European anti-Semitism, overseas and continental imperialism, and totalitarianism, showing how nineteenth-century race theory turned into lethal racist ideology, how modern bureaucracies lent themselves to police-state operations, how nation-states disintegrated and class structures dissolved to produce masses of people characterized by their bitter resentment of economic chaos and their absence of any sense of political life or political freedom. But she also formulated many of the theoretical distinctions that undergirded her later work.
She distinguished, for example, between social oppression and political discrimination; between socioeconomic forces and political action, a distinction that later grew into a triptych--labor, work, action; between nationalism and supranationalism; between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, which Arendt argued was a completely novel form of government. Her claim that Stalin's regime resembled Hitler's as a totalitarian form was controversial. In the context of the Cold War, her book appeared to support American anti-Communism; but Arendt herself was a courageous critic of McCarthyism and the fascistic forms American anti-Communism took.
She was grateful to receive her citizenship the year her book was published, 1951, and she always praised America's republican traditions, but she was never hesitant to hold her new country to the high political standards she outlined in her subsequent books. The Human Condition (1958), an essay collection entitled Between Past and Future (1961, expanded 1968), and On Revolution (1963) might all be described as antidotes to totalitarianism.
Arendt had focused in her first book on the social and political factors that crystallized in Nazism and Stalinism, but in these subsequent books she emphasized how political spaces are founded and preserved, how political action is distinguished from labor and work, and how revolutions can prepare the way for constitutional protections.
She was working to create what she once called "a new science of politics, " one in which the best of the European, and especially Greco-Roman, political thought was recuperated, but in forms fit for modern conditions of nation-state political life. Arendt never sought a science of politics that could be laid down, gridlike, on events.
She looked, rather, for large patterns in political life--such as the shift away from valuation of action to valuation of labor, which she thought marked the twentieth century--in the light of which particular events could be considered. Her technique was to explore the broad concepts that she felt defined "the human condition, " such as life itself, existence with others or plurality, natality, mortality, existence in a cultural world and on the earth. She then analyzed these concepts in their interactions through history until the present day.
Then Arendt invoked different dimensions of the dynamic network of her concepts and distinctions each time she felt compelled to comment on an event in Europe, like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or on America's internal political life. She was particularly active in commenting on American politics in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when she published the influential essays entitled "On Violence, " "Civil Disobedience, " and "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers, " which were collected in Crises of the Republic (1972).
The worldwide student revolt and anti-Vietnam War movement that exploded in 1968 seemed to Arendt a continuation of the ambiguous--freedom-loving and freedom-destroying--revolutionary traditions she had considered in On Revolution, just as the corruption and mendacity of American governmental structures in that period seemed to her ominously reminiscent of midcentury proto-totalitarian phenomena. She both celebrated the joy in political action she saw among the idealistic young and wrote cautionary tales for those making righteous claims for the necessity of revolutionary violence.
She both celebrated the strength of American constitutionalism and rebuked the leaders who scorned the First Amendment and indulged dreams of American imperialism. As her books were published one by one through the late 1950's, 1960's, and early 1970's, Arendt was offered many university appointments and lectureships, and she spent time at many colleges, including Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago (1963 - 1967), and the New School for Social Research (1967 - 1975) in New York City, which she and Bluecher always called home and from which he commuted to a teaching post at Bard College.
She was able to teach part-time most years, and was always able to go to Europe in the summers, where she carefully maintained her old friendships, particularly with Karl Jaspers (until his death in 1969). Even while she was itinerant, Arendt gave a great deal of her attention to the preservation of her friendships and her European past, and this habit also translated into her work in the form of a series of intellectual portraits of people with whom she carried on real or imaginary conversations.
Many of these portraits, including ones of Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Rosa Luxemburg, were collected in a volume called Men in Dark Times (1968).
Arendt's prolific "life of the mind" (her favorite phrase for thinking) brought her invitations and prizes from many directions in America and, even more frequently, in Europe, where she allowed herself to do radio and TV interviews because she did not, then, have to suffer the loss of privacy that comes with living in the countries where one is a celebrity. But she was also often the subject of intellectual controversies, particularly for a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), published first as a series of articles in the New Yorker.
Two dimensions in particular of Arendt's report on Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, which she attended, were debated in magazines and journals around the world. First, she had argued that the establishment by the Nazis of the "Jewish Councils" that participated in the Nazis' horrifying program of roundups and transportation to concentration camps had been crucial to the efficiency of the "Final Solution. " This argument, which was meant to show how invidious and morale-destroying the Nazis' methods had been, was interpreted as a kind of blaming of the victims for their fate. Second, she concluded from Eichmann's testimony that he was not a psychopath, not a demonic creature, but, on the contrary, a banal man, a man who either could not or would not think what he was doing. Arendt recanted an argument she had made in The Origins of Totalitarianism about the "radical evil" of the Nazi regime and emphasized "the banality of evil. "
Many of her critics, however, read this conclusion as a form of absolution or as a terrifying underestimation of the Nazis' mentality. For Hannah Arendt herself, the possibility that Eichmann was a man whose most important political characteristic was his thoughtlessness opened a line of inquiry that occupied her during the last decade of her life. She had often reflected on what relations can and ought to exist between thinking and action (or theory and praxis, to use more common technical terms), but she had not considered not-thinking and what behavior might flow from not-thinking. The inquiry, in turn, catalyzed an ambitious three-volume philosophical project that eventually was titled The Life of the Mind (1978).
The first volume of this work takes up the questions Eichmann's thoughtlessness had posed: Can thinking prevent evildoing? What is the difference between thinking and knowing or cognition, including the "knowing right from wrong" used to define mental competence legally? The general "what is thinking?" theme of the first volume then led to the obvious corollary, "what is acting?" or, in terms of action's source, "what is willing?"
Arendt had argued in the first volume that thinking does not directly determine or direct action, but that thinking does, on the other hand, have a by-product, judging, which gives action its guiding terms--pleasure or displeasure, rightness or wrongness. As was her intellectual custom, Arendt tracked the philosophical history of each mental faculty as she tried to compass it and find images for its interrelations, and she thus tried to present thinking, willing, and judging interactively, dynamically.
By the fall of 1975 Arendt had completed drafts of the first two volumes of The Life of the Mind, but she had only lecture notes and sketches for the third. Her work schedule had been somewhat curtailed by her mourning the death of her husband in 1970 and then by her own declining health.
She had had a heart attack while delivering parts of her book as the prestigious Gifford Lecturer in Aberdeen, Scotland, and this attack presaged the one from which she died in her New York City apartment; her ashes are buried at Bard College.
Three years later, her last book appeared incomplete, but edited by Mary McCarthy into a powerfully coherent statement. In the many obituaries and reflective articles that appeared after Arendt's death, as in the large shelf of studies published since then, her position in American and European intellectual life has been reaffirmed.
Among female philosophers born at the beginning of the century and living through three quarters of its tumultuous history, she and Simone de Beauvoir are the major figures, although Arendt's work was not adopted by feminist theorists until later.
Politics
Arendt’s political thought cannot be identified either with the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of its critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the satisfaction of individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate individuals around a shared conception of the good. Her conception of politics is based instead on the idea of active citizenship, that is, on the value and importance of civic engagement and collective deliberation about all matters affecting the political community.