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Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Arendt [16] [17] in 1906, in the Wilhelmine period. Her secular and educated Jewish family lived comfortably in Linden , Prussia (now a part of Hanover ). They were merchants of Russian extraction from Königsberg .
The first sentence of the preface is a citation of French poet and résistant René Char: "Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament," translated by Arendt herself as "our inheritance was left to us by no testament." For Arendt, this sentence perfectly illustrates the situation in which European peoples are left after the Second World ...
Arendt says that political freedom is historically opposed to sovereignty or will-power since in ancient Greece and Rome the concept of freedom was inseparable from performance and did not arise as a conflict between the will and the self. Similarly, the idea of freedom as freedom from politics is a notion that developed in modern times.
However, Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men was later lost and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate institution to regain it. [4] In an earlier book, The Human Condition, Arendt argued that there were three states of human activity: labor, work, and action. "Labor" is, essentially, a state of subsistence: doing what ...
Arendt begins the book with an analysis of the rise of antisemitism in Europe and particularly focused on the Dreyfus affair. [10] In particular, Arendt traces the social movement of the Jewry in Europe since their emancipation by the French edict of 1792, their special role in supporting and maintaining the nation-state and their failure to assimilate into the European class society. [14]
Hannah Arendt was a philosopher accustomed to using metaphors. Among other things, she advocated for their use in philosophical reflection in her Journal of Thoughts. [1] In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt explored the question of totalitarianism – how these types of regimes form, evolve, exist, and perish. [2]
The Human Condition, [1] first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt's account of how "human activities" should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the ...
Crises of the Republic was the third of Arendt's anthologies, and as the subtitle Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution indicates, consists of four interconnected essays on contemporary American politics and the crises it faced in the 1960s and 1970s.