Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-born Jewish political theorist and philosopher whose work shaped modern thinking about power, freedom, and responsibility. Educated in Germany, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. After fleeing Nazi persecution, she lived in France and later emigrated to the United States, where she became an influential public intellectual. Her major books include *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), *The Human Condition* (1958), and *Eichmann in Jerusalem* (1963), a report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann that introduced her controversial idea of the “banality of evil.” She taught at several American universities.