She’s very original
Grew up in germany, was sent to an internment camp, then escaped to the US.
Two main books:
the origins of totalitarianism (1951) → herein argues that communism and nazism are both totalitarianisms.
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) → <>
The arguably most important one is The Human Condition, this is where Labor, Work, Action are from. → her last, unpublished The Life of the Mind connects to the vita contemplativa, as described in the human condition.
Radical evil makes human beings superfluous; modernity has created the totalitarian age by making human beings superfluous, random, as it were. One can be replaced by another, anonymity and loneliness of contemporary society contributes.
In totalitarian systems, human beings and their individuality become superfluous - the system makes people into living corpses without spontaneity or freedom.
Eichmann is the perfect case study; her analysis became hugely controversial, because her subtitle was ‘the banality of evil.’ She calls Eichmann banal - he speaks in stock phrases, unable to stand apart from the system within which he is submerged.
He is thoroughly a bureaucrat, switching from the Third Reich’s, to the Israeli cliches. He is not a diabolical evil, merely a ‘victim’ of totalitarianism, unable to form his own thoughts even right before his hanging.
Modernity - bad. Because mass society brings anonymity brings homogeneity brings totalitarianism brings evil.
World alienation → the dialogically constituted world is evaporating, in favor of a retreat to our own private sphere.
rise of the social → everything becomes part of the cycle of production and consumption; selling and reselling on the market, acquisition, sale… this cycle comes to dominate everything. This is not a positive evolution.
The public and private should be kept apart; the retreat into the private is regrettable, but the two spheres must be kept separate.
The rise of the social blurs the private and political(=public) sphere. Social here could mean the welfare (social) state intruding on private life with pensions or whatever.
earth alienation → escaping the confines of the earth (f.e. with space exploration, recreating life in labs, extending lifespan)
Plato turns philosophy into a desk job. Socrates, f.e., practiced politics by discussing it with people and his students.
There are 3 ways of being in the world (vita activa):
labor, work, and action
labor is what you need to keep living,
work is to fashion the world for yourself,
action to social
be unexpected
Action and speech are linked. They allow us to escape our physical nature. They are how we appear as people, rather than physical objects.