Hannah Arendt [Paperback]

Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After World War II, Arendt became one of the most prominent—and controversial—public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such asThe Origins of Totalitarianism,The Human Condition, andEichmann in Jerusalem. Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems, and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.Samantha Rose Hillis a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. For more information, visitsamantharosehill.com.In many ways Hannah Arendt’s work is about thinking. In her Denktagebuch (thinking journals) she asks: ‘Gibt es ein Denken das nicht Tyrannisches ist?’ (Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?) At the beginning of The Human Condition, she posits: ‘What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. When she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for the New Yorker, she found Eichmann lacked the capacity to engage in self-reflective thinking, to imagine the world from the perspective of another. Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind, begins with a treatise on ‘Thinking’.
 
In many respects Arendt became a writer by accidentlC¯