Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
born in Hannover, Germany, attended the uni versities
of Marburg, Freiburg, and H eidelberg, where she r eceived
her doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jasper s.
In 1933 she fl ed Germany and went to France, where
she was a social worker and headed the French section
of Youth Aliyah, an orga nization to aid immigration of
J ewish refugee children into Palestine. Dr. Arendt has
lived in the United States since 1941; she became an
American citizen in 1951.
She h as been Research Director oE the Conference
on J ewish Relations, chief ed itor of Schocken Bo?ks,
Executive Director of J ewish Cultural R eco nstructIOn,
the successor orga nization for heirless J ewish cultural
property in postwar Germany. During the fi~ties. s~e
lectured and was visiting professor at su ch U11lVerSItieS
as Berkeley, Princeton , Columbia, Chicago, and, in the
early sixties, she accepted a professorship at Chicag?
University in th.e Committee on Soci al Thought. She IS
now University Professor at the Graduate Faculty of
the New School for Social R esearch. She is a member
of the Ameri can Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the German
Akademie fUr Sprache und Dichtung, whose Sigmund
Freud Prize for "scholarly prose" she received in 1967.
In 1969 she rece ived the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of
the Am~rica n Academy of Arts and Sciences and in
1971 Bryn Mawr College'S M. Car ey Thomas Prize for
eminent achi evement by an Ameri can woman.
Hannah Arendt has written The Origins of Totalitarianism,
The Human Condition, On R evolution, Betw
een Past and Future, Eichmann in J erusalem, and
Men in Dark T imes. She edited two volumes of Karl
J aspers' The Great Philosophen, two volumes of essa~s by
H ermann Broch, and Walter Ben jamin's lllumtnatzons.
Today is a time when politi ca l platitudes ca n be
dangerous. The crises of the last decade are viewed
here as challenges to the republic, the American form
of government. Dr. Arendt, from the standpoint of a
political philosopher, examines, defin es, and clarifies
in this coll ection of essays the current concerns of the
American citizen.
For example: the oppressed do not lead revolutions
and the revolutionaries do not "make" them; ra ther,
they pick up power that is left " lying in the street";
capitalism and communism are systems that are both
based on expropriation, and neither is the remedy for
the other ; American student radi calism has been of
worldwide importance primarily because it was momlly
motivated, but if students destroy the universities by
politicizing them they destroy the base of their rebellion
; civil disobedience is actually an organized activity,
and civil disobedients are neither conscientious objectors
nor common lawbreakers but members of "voluntary
associations," bound by common opinion, not
common interest; the obligation to obey laws r es ts in
our society on the origin al uni versal co nsensus that is
embodied in the Constitution, and the fact that American
blacks and Indians were not included in this consensus
when the republic was founded underlies their
disaffection.
This stimulating book presents three studies new to
book form and the noted essay "On Violence." It opens
with "Lying in Politics," a penetrating analysis of the
Pentago n papers tha t deals with the relation between
the role of image-making and public relations in
politics, and the defactualized world of Washington's
a nalysts, advisers, and decision-makers. "Civil Disobedience"
examines the various opposition movements from
the Freedom Riders to the war resisters and the segregationists.
"Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,"
cast in the form of an interview, contains a commentary
to the author's theses in "On Violence."