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Hannah Arendt

1906–1975 · Political theorist

Portrait of Hannah Arendt
Barbara Niggl Radloff · Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bio

German-born American political theorist who fled Nazi Germany and later analysed totalitarian rule in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The Human Condition examined labour, work and political action. Her reporting on the Eichmann trial introduced the phrase the banality of evil and provoked lasting controversy, including over her account of Jewish councils under Nazi occupation.