Hannah Arendt
The political thinker of totalitarianism, statelessness and 'the banality of evil' — thinking as the last defense against participating in horror.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Core ideas
- The banality of evil: harm done by thoughtlessness, not monsters
- Statelessness is the core political wound of the modern age
- Action and speech among plural people is what politics means
Historical context
Fled Nazi Germany, was interned in France, and rebuilt her life in New York — writing the century's clearest accounts of how politics fails.
Key works
The Origins of Totalitarianism · Eichmann in Jerusalem · The Human Condition
Questions they speak to
Minds in conversation
- Simone de BeauvoirParis
- Immanuel KantKönigsberg
- ThucydidesAthens
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Hannah Arendt