Hannah Arendt (c. 1963)

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is regarded as one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century. She was a student of Martin Heidegger in Marburg and of Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. She left Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in the United States, where she became a significant figure among émigré intellectuals. She taught at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York among others. Her works, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem – in which she coined the term the “banality of evil” – had a broad impact both inside and outside of academia. She died before completing the third volume of her last major philosophical work, The Life of The Mind.

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