Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt was a German-American political philosopher whose The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) offered a landmark analysis of Nazi and Stalinist regimes as novel forms of absolute domination. Her report on the Adolf Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), introduced the concept of the "banality of evil" — the idea that atrocities can be carried out by ordinary, thoughtless bureaucrats rather than monsters. Her theoretical works on the nature of political action, the public realm, and the human condition continue to shape political philosophy, ethics, and Holocaust studies.