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Thinkers and political figures

Photograph of Hannah Arendt at a conference in 1958.

Portrait: Barbara Niggl Radloff, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab) · Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

Hannah Arendt

Country
Germany and the United States
Era
1906–1975
Tradition
Republicanism, political theory

Analysed how totalitarian movements destroy the space in which politics happens, and argued that the worst crimes are often committed by unremarkable people who have stopped thinking.

01

Documented positions

Documented positions come from the sources listed. Similarity is this project’s inference from those positions, and is a much weaker claim.

  • Totalitarianism is a novel form of rule that destroys plurality and private life (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951)
  • Politics is action among equals in public, not administration of things (The Human Condition, 1958)
  • "The banality of evil": atrocity carried out by ordinary functionaries who refuse to think
  • Statelessness strips people of "the right to have rights"
  • Defended council democracy and constitutional founding over mass party politics
02

Where it sits on each dimension

Personal liberty

84

Evidence: Well documented

Tradition and change

62

Evidence: Documented

Nation and the world

30

Evidence: Well documented

Power and its limits

90

Evidence: Well documented

Dimensions left unscored, for want of evidence: Wealth and inequality, The state in the economy, Environment and growth, Crime and punishment, Religion and the state

Sources

  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism · 1951
  • Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition · 1958
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem · 1963

Last verified: