Philosopher · Contemporary
Hannah Arendt
1906–1975 · Political theory; the vita activa
A secular Jew who wrote her doctorate on St. Augustine's concept of love and kept returning to him.
Arendt analyzed totalitarianism as a new form of rule founded on terror and ideology, distinguished labor, work and action in The Human Condition, and coined “the banality of evil” for Eichmann's thoughtlessness. She prized natality, plurality and the public realm of speech and action, and feared the swallowing of politics by “the social.”
Why he matters: Her diagnosis of totalitarianism stands beside Pius XI's and John Paul II's; her Augustinian themes of natality and love, her insistence that evil is not radical but shallow, and her defense of judgment are resources for Catholic political thought, which nonetheless cannot share her this-worldliness.
Where to be careful
Her politics has no place for God or the natural law as its ground, and she charges Christianity with fleeing the public realm (contrast Gaudium et Spes 36, 76 on the rightful autonomy of earthly affairs within God's order); her reading of Augustine is idiosyncratic, and the Eichmann book's judgments remain disputed.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.