Born: 10/14/1906   Died: 12/4/1975

Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist and philosopher who studied with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Arendt's first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, analyzed the totalitarian movements in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, locating their roots in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. Arendt also wrote an account of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann still famous for its controversial thesis of the banality of evil. In her best known work, The Human Condition, Arendt distinguished between and offered a phenomenological analysis of three forms of activity central to the human condition: labor, work, and action. Her Life of the Mind, left unfinished at her death, explores human mental activity, emphasizing the way in which thinking, willing, and judging are conditions for moral responsibility.