Hannah arendt political philosophy
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The philosopher who warned us about loneliness and totalitarianism
If you asked me to name the most important political theorist of the 20th century, my answer would be Hannah Arendt.
You could man arguments for other philosophers — John Rawls comes to mind — but I always come back to Arendt. She’s probably best known for her reporting on the rättegång of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, and for coining the phrase “the banality of evil,” a controversial claim about how ordinary people can commit extraordinarily evil acts.
Like all the great thinkers from the past, Arendt understood her world better than most, and she remains an invaluable röst today. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in , and she lived in East Prussia until she was forced to flee the Nazis in She then lived in Paris for the next eight years until the Nazis invaded France, at which point she fled a second time to the United States, where she lived the rest of her life as a pr
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Author: David Antonini
Category: Social and Political Philosophy, Phenomenology and Existentialism
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Hannah Arendt (), born in Hanover, Germany, was a public intellectual, refugee, and observer of European and American politics. She is especially known for her interpretation of the events that led to the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.
Arendt studied under German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and set out to pursue a path as an academic, writing a dissertation on St. Augustine. However, Hitler, the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and the bloody Holocaust forever changed her life. Being Jewish, Arendt was forced to flee the country, seeking refuge in France and eventually the United States. After living through the outbreak of WWII, Arendt devoted the rest of her life to writing about politics, although less in a traditional philosophical sense and more in the vein of a political observer, interpreting events of the twentiet
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Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One. The Original Formulation
1. Action and Human Existence
The Contours of Action
The Polarities of Human Existence
Uniqueness and Uniformity
Lasting and Passing
Freedom and Necessity
Freedom: A Closer Look
Necessity: Biological and Rational
Willing: The Textual Evidence
Some Implications
Public and Private: Spaces and Objects
A Communal Space
On the Public Character of Public Objects
The Norms of Public Action
Isonomy
Humanitas and Public Discourse
Conclusion
Part Two. Beyond World Alienation
Prelude
2. Consitituting a Worldly Depth
The Ethos of Worldliness
Insuring the Primacy of the Origin
Of Storytelling and the Roots of Cultural Self-Understanding
Of Culture and Cultural Mediation
Of Civics and Education
The Roman Roots of Authority
On Revolution: A Moment of Synthesis
Creating a New Tradition Out of a Revolutionary Moment
Conclusion
3. The Rectification of