Early life and career Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, Germany, the only child of middle-class Jewish parents of Russian descent. Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. This investigation spans the rest of Arendt’s life and works. If labor relates to the natural and biologically necessitated dimension of human existence, then work is “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life-cycle.” Work (as both technê andpoiesis) corresponds to the fabrication of an artificial world of things, artifactual constructions which endure temporally beyond the act of creation itself. Because the activity of labor is commanded by necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave; labor is characterized by unfreedom. They make claims about the world that are immune from falsification by either experience or logic. Hannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. It follows from this equation of freedom, action and beginning that freedom is “an accessory of doing and acting;” “Men are free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” This capacity for initiation gives actions the character of singularity and uniqueness, as “it is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever happened before.” So, intrinsic to the human capacity for action is the introduction of genuine novelty, the unexpected, unanticipated and unpredictable into the world: The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. Against liberals, the disputes the claim that these revolutions were primarily concerned with the establishment of a limited government that would make space for individual liberty beyond the reach of the state. Arendt eschews “determinate judgement,” judgement that subsumes particulars under a universal or rule that already exists. The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. Humanity in this mode of its activity Arendt names homo faber; he/she is the builder of walls (both physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of nature and provide a stable context (a “common world”) of spaces and institutions within which human life can unfold. from conduct which has an habituated, regulated, automated character; behavior falls under the determinations ofprocess, is thoroughly conditioned by causal antecedents, and so is essentially unfree. Hannah Arendts Analyse der totalen Herrschaft ist … Inspiring college students to discover, embrace, and advance the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous. Volumes 1 and 2 (on “Thinking” and “Willing”) were published posthumously. The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. Labor and its effects are inherently impermanent and perishable, exhausted as they are consumed, and so do not possess the qualities of quasi-permanence which are necessary for a shared environment and common heritage which endures between people and across time. Politics and the exercise of freedom-as-action are one and the same: …freedom…is actually the reason that men live together in political organisations at all. Open-mindedness is the sine qua non of the academic life. Herein lies the basis of Arendt’s quarrel with Hegel and Marx, for to define politics or the unfolding of history in terms of any teleology or immanent or objective process is to deny what is central to authentic human action, namely, its capacity to initiate the wholly new, unanticipated, unexpected, unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect. In 1925 she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger, but broke this off the following year. Firstly, whereas labor is bound to the demands of animality, biology and nature, work violates the realm of nature by shaping and transforming it according to the plans and needs of humans; this makes work a distinctly human (i.e. For example, Jürgen Habermas admits the formative influence of Arendt upon his own theory of communicative reason and discourse ethics. She led a very interesting life, and the events in her life had a lot to do with her philosophy. forms of life. All these, and other criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt remains one of the most original, challenging and influential political thinkers of the 20th century, and her work will no doubt continue to provide inspiration for political philosophy as we enter the 21st. Bad ideas need to be refuted with better ideas and better evidence, not by shutting down speech. Hannah Arendt is critic of ideology. She never wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy, a philosophy in which a single central argument is expounded and expanded upon in a sequence of works. For central to the mission of the university is the idea that a community of scholars, joined by a commitment to reason and the pursuit of truth, must be free to consider, confront, and critique all ideas. Als Schlüsselbegriffe gelten Masse und Ideologie. The allegory of The Cave in The Republic begins the tradition of political philosophy; here Plato describes the world of human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs those who aspire to truth to turn away from it in favor of the “clear sky of eternal ideas.” This metaphysical hierarchy, theôria is placed above praxis and epistêmê over mere doxa. Arendt has also come under criticism for her overly enthusiastic endorsement of the Athenian polis as an exemplar of political freedom, to the detriment of modern political regimes and institutions. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. From Augustine’s political philosophy she takes the theme of human action as beginning: To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule’ indicates), to set something in motion. After a year of study in Marburg, she moved to Freiburg University. In 1929, she met Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher, with whom she became romantically involved, and subsequently married (1930). This connection between the complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking and judgement inspired the last phase of Arendt’s work, which sought to explicate the nature of these faculties and their constitutive role for politically and morally responsible choices. In this year, she also published On Revolution. Arendt thought that the best inoculation against totalitarian thinking is a citizenry capable of seeing through the false promises, deceits, and illusions of ideologies ready to foist upon us unassailable “truths” about the world. It was precisely the failure of this capacity that characterized the “banality” of Eichmann’s propensity to participate in political evil. Likewise, the emphasis she places upon direct citizen deliberation as synonymous with the exercise of political freedom excludes representative models, and might be seen as unworkable in the context of modern mass societies, with the delegation, specialization, expertise and extensive divisions of labor needed to deal with their complexity. Patrick Keeney is  the author of Liberalism, Communitarianism and Education: Reclaiming Liberal Education. Hannah Arendt Intellectually, she was an independent thinker, a loner not a "joiner", separating herself from schools of thought or ideology. . The bland assumption that totalitarianism can be safely confined to history is belied by zealots of various stripes, all of whom are convinced that their manifesto or holy book or prophet has revealed, at last, “the mysteries of the universe.” Such true believers are a danger to us all, in that they are willing to sacrifice their fellow man on the altar of one or another of the inexorable laws of history, nature, or God. He has written for both the academic and the popular press, and has contributed articles and reviews to journals and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, and the U.K. In short, humanity represents/articulates/embodies the faculty of beginning. From Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. When Hannah Arendt was herded into Gurs, a detention camp in south-west France in May 1940, she did one of the most sensible things you can do when you are trapped in a real-life nightmare: she read – Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Clausewitz’s On War and, compulsively, the detective stories of Georges Simenon. As Arendt demonstrated, a closed system of deductive logic proceeding from axiomatic first principles is a disastrous method for understanding the political realm. Early Life Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover and died in New York in 1975. Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government By Hannah Arendt I HE following considerations have grown out of a study of the origins, the elements and the functioning of that novel form of government and domination which we have come to call totali-tarian. In 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she fled to Paris, where she subsequently met and became friends with both Walter Benjamin and Raymond Aron. A thinker of heterodox and complicated argumentation, Arendt’s writings draw inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and others. More specifically, Arendt has decisively influenced critical and emancipatory attempts to theorize political reasoning and deliberation. This work marks a shift in her concerns from the nature of political action, to a concern with the faculties that underpin it – the interrelated activities of thinking and judging. This communicative and disclosive quality of action is clear in the way that Arendt connects action most centrally to speech. is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of natural development.” The unequivocal laws of nature determined that those of Aryan blood were the rightful rulers of the world. The value of thinking is not that it yields positive results that can be considered settled, but that it constantly returns to question again and again the meaning that we give to experiences, actions and circumstances. Taking these discussions as a starting point, this essay engages with violence in Arendt’s work from a different perspective. In 1970, Blücher died. Therefore, Arendt sees the conceptual core of traditional political philosophy as an impediment, because as it inserts presuppositions between the inquirer and the political phenomena in question. Tradition lies in shattered fragments around us and “the very framework within which understanding and judging could arise is gone.” The shared bases of understanding, handed down to us in our tradition, seem irretrievably lost. In these works and in numerous essays she grappledwith the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasptheir meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected ourcategories of moral and political judgment. In 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, after which she began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities and she attained American citizenship. What was require… Indeed, Arendt was a German philosopher and political theorist who saw the techniques and evil consequences of totalitarian regimes firsthand. ISI is a 501(c)(3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code, Apply for a Journalism Internship or Fellowship. She eventually majored in Classical Greek and Philosophy. Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of thetwentieth century. In the case of the French Revolution, the subordination of political freedom to matters of managing welfare (the “social question”) reduces political institutions to administering the distribution of goods and resources (matters that belong properly in the oikos, dealing as they do with the production and reproduction of human existence). Arendt’s work, if it can be said to do anything, can be said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and acting. That is, the world of common experience and interpretation (Lebenswelt) is taken to be primary and theoretical knowledge is dependent on that common experience in the form of a thematization or extrapolation from what is primordially and pre-reflectively present in everyday experience. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action. It is through action as speech that individuals come to disclose their distinctive identity: “Action is the public disclosure of the agent in the speech deed.” Action of this character requires a public space in which it can be realized, a context in which individuals can encounter one another as members of a community. This, for Arendt, is intrinsic to the exercise of political responsibility – the engagement of this faculty that seeks meaning through a relentless questioning (including self-questioning). Its necessity was now justified by recourse to supposed laws of history (such as the inevitable triumph of the classless society) or nature (such as the inevitability of a war between “chosen” and other “degenerate” races). After the outbreak of war, and following detention in a camp as an “enemy alien,” Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. For Arendt, the activity of work cannot be fully free insofar as it is not an end in itself, but is determined by prior causes and articulated ends. Although Arendt’s philosophy does not necessarily resemble Kantian rationalism, Hegelian idealism, or Marxian dialectical materialism, she developed a philosophy that … In the spring of 1926 she went to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers. Reason or thinking, on the other hand, drives us beyond knowledge, persistently posing questions that cannot be answered from the standpoint of knowledge, but which we nonetheless cannot refrain from asking. However, Arendt is at great pains to establish that the activity of homo faber does not equate with the realm of human freedom and so cannot occupy the privileged apex of the human condition. This is not easy to summarize, as many and varied scholars have sought inspiration from some part or other of Arendt’s work. The Human Condition is fundamentally concerned with the problem of reasserting the politics as a valuable ream of human action, praxis, and the world of appearances. Where older tyrannies had used terror as an instrument for attaining or sustaining power, modern totalitarian regimes exhibited little strategic rationality in their use of terror. Her theory of judgement has been used by Critical Theorists and Postmoderns alike. To combat such a dystopian scenario, students need to enjoy toleration, and tolerance begins with humility.