Hannah Arendt

Arendt was born near Hanover to a secular Jewish family and grew up in Königsberg, reading Kant at fourteen. At eighteen she went to Marburg to study with Heidegger, and the two had a secret affair. She moved to Heidelberg and wrote her dissertation on Augustine under Jaspers, graduating in 1929. In 1933 the Gestapo arrested her for collecting antisemitic propaganda for a Jewish organisation; released, she fled to Paris and worked for a body helping Jewish children emigrate to Palestine. In 1940 she was interned at Gurs in France, escaped in the confusion, and reached New York via Lisbon in 1941.

In New York she wrote a column for a German-Jewish paper, worked as an editor and directed the recovery of Jewish cultural property in Europe. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) analysed antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism as one line of development, arguing that Nazism and Stalinism were a wholly new form of rule that used terror and ideology to destroy human spontaneity and render people superfluous. The book made her one of America's best-known political thinkers, and she taught at Princeton, Chicago, Berkeley and the New School.

The Human Condition (1958) distinguished labour, work and action: labour sustains life, work builds a durable world, and action begins something new before others and reveals who one is; only action is political. Modern society has swallowed the public realm in labour and consumption. Her central concept is 'natality': every birth is a new beginning, and human beings can perform miracles, that is, do the unforeseeable. In 1961 she covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker; the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled 'a report on the banality of evil', argued that Eichmann was no demon but a thoughtless bureaucrat, and that evil can come from sheer absence of thought. That judgement, and her criticism of the Jewish councils' cooperation, provoked a bitter controversy that lasted years.

She went on to write On Revolution, contrasting the American founding of freedom with the French Revolution's absorption by the social question; Men in Dark Times, portraits of Benjamin, Jaspers, Brecht and others; and On Violence, distinguishing power, which arises from acting together, from violence, which can destroy power but never create it. In her last years she returned to philosophy with The Life of the Mind, planned in three volumes on thinking, willing and judging; she had written only the title page of the third when she died of a heart attack. She refused all her life to be called a philosopher, saying philosophers despised politics, and politics was what she meant to understand.