- Lived:
- 1906–1975 · Hannover and Königsberg, then Berlin, Paris, and New York
- Tradition:
- Political thought forged in phenomenology and exile; the theorist of totalitarianism, action, and judgment
- The Big Idea:
- Politics is not administration or violence — it is what happens when plural, unequal-in-everything-else human beings act and speak together as equals; totalitarianism is the systematic destruction of exactly that capacity.
- In their words:
- "Thinking without a banister."
- If you remember one thing:
- The woman who wrote the century's anatomy of totalitarian terror also insisted that every newborn human being is a fresh beginning the world cannot predict — and that this, not death, is the basic fact of the human condition.