Meeting Notes - Hannah Arendt

This is the 1st of 3 selected documents from our weekly Philosophy Club. These documents are meant to introduce our members to new thinkers and ideas in philosophy.

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 to a German-Jewish family. She was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after being briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism, and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. Arendt died in New York in 1975.

Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of the twentieth century. The power and originality of her thinking was evident in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution and The Life of the Mind. In these works, she grappled with the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasp their meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected our categories of moral and political judgment. What was required, in her view, was a new framework that could enable us to come to terms with the twin horrors of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. She provided such framework in her book on totalitarianism, and went on to develop a new set of philosophical categories that could illuminate the human condition and provide a fresh perspective on the nature of political life.

• Summary of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Hannah Arendt”

Here are some quotes from Arendt to initiate discussion:

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”