Hannah Arendt

Arendt, Hannah (1906–75), German-born U.S. political philosopher. In 1959 she became the first woman appointed a full professor at Princeton University; she later taught at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she traced Nazism and Communism back to 19th-century anti-Semitism and imperialism. Her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), with its theory of the “banality of evil,” analyzed Nazi war crimes and the 1960 trial of Adolph Eichmann by the Israeli government.