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Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

A political theorist with a flair for grand historical generalization, Hannah Arendt exhibited the conceptual trio of a cultivated intellectual, the conscientious learning of a German-trained scholar, and the undaunted spirit of an exile who had confronted some of the worst horrors of European tyranny. Although her books addressed a general audience from the standpoint of disinterested universalism, Jewishness was an irrepressible feature of her experience as well as a condition that she never sought to repudiate.

The rising anti-Semitism afflicting the German policy at that time compelled Arendt to face the historical dilemma of German Jews. She became a political activist and helped the German Zionist Organization to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She also did research on anti-Semitic propaganda, for which she was once arrested.

In 1963 Arendt published what proved to be the most controversial work of her career: Eichmann in Jerusalem. In 1960, Israeli security forces had captured the S.S. lieutenant colonel who had been responsible for transporting Jews to the death camps. The following year, he was tried in Israel, where Arendt covered the trial as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Her articles were then revised and expanded for Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Her portrayal of a bureaucrat, who did his duty and followed orders, rather than a raving ideologue animated by demonic anti-Semitism, was strikingly original. Far from embodying "radical evil," Eichmann exemplified "the banality of evil," Arendt argued. Eichmann had done evil not because he had a sadistic will to do so, nor because he had been deeply infected by the bacillus of anti-Semitism, but because he failed to think through what he was doing (his thoughtlessness). This theory led Arendt to conceptualize the neo-Kantian meditations on judgment in her posthumously published lecture collection The Life of the Mind (1978). While in Aberdeen, Scotland, to deliver these Gifford Lectures, she suffered a heart attack. A second coronary failure on December 4, 1975 proved fatal.

For well over two decades, Hannah Arendt was one of the nation’s most prominent intellectuals. While her work has not yet been given any major feminist readings, Arendt’s critical intelligence has enriched Jewish studies. She had an awareness of both the brilliance of Jewish achievement and the fragility of the Jewish status. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, Arendt noticed the strangeness of the familiar and sought to clarify the senselessness of modern history. But like very few others, Arendt managed to stamp with individual authority a body of work that is saturated with speculative daring.

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