Arendt theorizes freedom as public, performative and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek "polis", American townships, the Paris Commune, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 to illustrate this conception of freedom. Another key concept in her work is "natality", the capacity to bring something new into the world, such as the founding of a government that endures. Natality signs the contingent, indeterminate and so political future that we don't know anything about.
Arendt's first major book was
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was controversial because it suggested, arguably, that an essential identity existed between the two phenomena. She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy. Totalitarianism in Germany, in the end, was about megalomania and consistency, not eradicating Jews.
Arguably her most influential work,
The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between labour, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. These categories, which attempt to bridge the gap between ontological and sociological structures, are rigidly delineated. Her theory of political action, corresponding to the existence of a public realm, is extensively developed in this work. While Arendt concerns labour and work in the realm of "the social", she favors the human condition of action as "the political" that is both existential and aesthetic.
Another of Arendt's important books is the collection of essays
Men in Dark Times. These intellectual biographies provide insight into the lives of some of the creative and moral figures of the 20th century, among them Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.
In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for
The New Yorker, which evolved into
A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness...the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.
Arendt was extremely critical of the way that Israel conducted the trial. She was also critical of the way that many Jewish leaders (notably M. C. Rumkowski) acted during the Holocaust, which caused an enormous controversy and resulted in a great deal of animosity directed toward Arendt within the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish Mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah. Due to this lingering criticism, her book has only recently been translated into Hebrew. Arendt ended the book by endorsing the execution of Eichmann, writing:
Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations ... as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world ... we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
Arendt published another book in the same year that was controversial in its own right:
On Revolution, a study of the two most famous revolutions of the 18th century. Arendt went against the grain of Marxist and leftist thought by contending that the American Revolution was a successful revolution, whereas the French Revolution was not. When the masses of France gained the sympathy of revolutionaries, the French Revolution turned away from the legal stability of constitutional government and toward the lawless satisfaction of the constantly regenerating economic needs of these masses. Some saw in this argument a post-Holocaust anti-French sentiment. Nevertheless, it was inveterate in the history of political philosophy, echoing that of Edmund Burke.
Arendt also argued that the revolutionary spirit endemic to the founding had not been preserved in America because the majority of people had no role to play in politics other than voting. She admired Thomas Jefferson's idea of dividing counties into townships, similar to the soviets that appeared during the Russian Revolution. Arendt's interest in such a "council system", which she saw as the only alternative to the state, continued all her life.
Her posthumous book,
The Life of the Mind (1978, edited by Mary McCarthy), was incomplete at her death. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, this book focuses on the mental faculties of thinking and willing (in a sense moving beyond her previous work concerning the
vita activa). In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between me and myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self). In her volume on Willing, Arendt, relying heavily on Augustine's notion of the will, discusses the will as an absolutely free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible.
In the third volume, Arendt was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant's
Critique of Judgment ; however, she did not live to write it. Nevertheless, although we will never fully understand her notion of judging, Arendt did leave us with manuscripts ("Thinking and Moral Considerations", "Some Questions on Moral Philosophy,") and lectures (
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy ) concerning her thoughts on this mental faculty. The first two articles were edited and published by Jerome Kohn, who was an assistant of Arendt and is a director of Hannah Arendt Center at The New School, and the last was edited and published by Ronald Beiner, who is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
Her personal library was deposited at Bard College at the Stevenson Library in 1976, and includes approximately 4,000 books, ephemera, and pamphlets from Arendt's last apartment. The college has begun digitally archiving some of the collection, which is available at The Hannah Arendt Collection