Arendt Hannah (1906–75), German-born American social and political theorist. She was educated in her native Germany, studying with Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 1933; and emigrated in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at various universities. Her major works are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), Crises of the Republic (1972), and The Life of the Mind (1978).
In Arendt’s view, for reasons established by Kant and deepened by Nietzsche, there is a breach between being and thinking, one that cannot be closed by thought. Understood as philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a form of egoism that isolates us from one another and our world. Despite Kant, modernity remains mired in egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a ‘mass’ that consists of bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and consuming and which demands governments that minister to these needs. In place of thinking, laboring, and the administration of things now called democracy, all of which are instrumental but futile as responses to the ‘thrown’ quality of our condition, Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being, political action, that she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and briefly but gloriously at the founding of the Roman and American republics. Political action is initiation, the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the presence of other political actors whose re-sponses – the telling of equally unpredictable stories concerning one another’s actions – determine what actions are taken and give character to the acting participants. In addition to the refined discernments already implied, political action requires the courage to initiate one knows not what. Its outcome is power; not over other people or things but mutual empowerment to continue acting in concert and thereby to overcome egoism and achieve (positive) freedom and humanity.
See also KANT, NIETZSCHE , POLITICAL THE- OR. R.E.F.