Hannah Arendt – författare

"Nu finns 'Totalitarismens ursprung' äntligen i bragdöversättning av Jim Jakobsson. Att läsa den är som en olidlig vandring ner i en europeisk kolgruva; mörkret förtätas, syret tunnas ut, hettan från helvetet stiger." Per Wirtén i Expressen Hannah Arendt var en av det förra århundradets viktigaste politiska filosofer. Hennes banbrytande studie av nazismen och stalinismen som totalitära regimer publicerades 1951 och omarbetades sedan på 1960-talet. Den ger, med hennes egna ord, ”en historisk redogörelse för de element som kristalliserades i totalitarismen”.  I bokens första del studerar Arendt antisemitismens historia och i den andra 1800-talets imperialism, för att i den tredje delen ta sig an den helt nya form av statsstyre som hon kallar totalitarism, eftersom det eftersträvar ett totalt herravälde över individ och samhälle. Den totalitära visionen är att ”organisera människornas oändliga mångfald och skillnader som om hela mänskligheten bara vore en enda individ”, och ytterst att härska över hela världen. Detta herravälde förutsätter terrorn och i dess förlängning koncentrationslägret, som enligt Arendt är inbegreppet av totalitarismens logik.

Hannah Arendts bok "Människans villkor eller Vita Activa" föreligger nu på svenska. Den är ett av vår tids största politisk-filosofiska arbeten. Inte bara på grund av den enorma lärdom som boken innehåller både i själva texten och i de många fotnoterna. Utan framför allt för att den gör upp med den inskränkta föreställningen att samhällslivet är en allomfattande ekonomisk process som har värde för människan bara när hon arbetar, men inte skapar något varaktigt och inte lämnar utrymme för handling, samtal och tänkande. Peter Kemp, Sydsvenska Dagbladet Det finns tänkare för vilka tänkandet är en passion. ... Hannah Arendt är en sådan passionerad tänkare, en tänkare i Marx, Freuds och Nietzsches anda. Stellan Lindqvist, Göteborgs-Posten

Tredje reviderade tryckningen. Den banala ondskan är ett reportage som saknar motstycke i sitt slag, ett historiskt dokument över nazismens brott, den mänskliga moralen och våra svårigheter att göra upp med andra världskrigets brutalitet. Arendt är kontroversiell och hennes perspektiv från rättegången i Jerusalem bryter på en rad punkter mot den gängse bilden - både av Eichmann och de händelser som utgör bakgrunden till processen i Jerusalem ? Det Hannah Arendt gör är att hon med brännande intensitet beskriver hur denna onska kom att genomsyra allt. Inte ens det judiska samhället klarade sig helt undan den moraliska kollaps som gjorde Nazityskland möjligt. Jesper Bengtsson, Arena

'How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times' Washington PostHannah Arendt's chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a warning from history about the fragility of freedom, exploring how propaganda, scapegoats, terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards total domination. 'A non-fiction bookend to Nineteen Eighty-Four' The New York Times'The political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and the 'banality of evil' has become a surprise bestseller' Guardian

'Brilliant and disturbing' Stephen Spender, New York Review of BooksThe classic work on 'the banality of evil', and a journalistic masterpieceHannah Arendt's stunning and unnverving report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, this classic portrayal of the banality of evil is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century.'Deals with the greatest problem of our time ... the problem of the human being within a modern totalitarian system' Bruno Bettelheim

The past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the political thinker Hannah Arendt, “the theorist of beginnings,” whose work probes the logics underlying unexpected transformations—from totalitarianism to revolution.A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) var en av det förra århundradets centrala politiska tänkare. I denna essäsamling undersöker hon begreppen tradition och historia, auktoritet och frihet såväl som olika aspekter av den moderna kulturen som kännetecknas av att »man inte längre har tillgång till giltiga svar som överlämnats av traditionen». Essäerna griper tillbaka på hennes huvudverk Människans villkor (1958), med dess berömda åtskillnad mellan aktivitetsformerna arbete, tillverkning och handlande. De pekar också fram mot hennes ofullbordade reflektioner över omdömesförmågan – enligt Arendt den specifikt politiska mänskliga förmågan. Arendt beskriver sina essäer som övningar i politiskt tänkande. Deras enda syfte är, säger hon, »att ge erfarenhet i hur man ska tänka; de innehåller inga föreskrifter om vad man ska tänka eller vilka sanningar man ska omfatta? Eftersom övningarna rör sig mellan det förflutna och framtiden innehåller de kritik såväl som experiment, men experimenten är inte till för att utforma någon sorts utopisk framtid, och kritiken av det förgångna, av traditionella begrepp, har inte för avsikt att avslöja sanningen.»

From Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her influential essay examining the relationship between violence, power, war and politics'Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it'Why has violence played such a significant role in human history? Written in 1970, with the Holocaust and Hiroshima still fresh in recent memory, war in Vietnam raging and the streets of Europe and America exploding into student protest, Hannah Arendt's seminal work dissects violence in the twentieth century: its nature and causes, its relationship with politics and war, its role in the modern age. Arendt warns against the glamorization of violence by revolutionary causes, and argues that true, lasting power can never grow 'out of the barrel of a gun'.'Incisive, deeply probing, written with clarity and grace, it provides an ideal framework for understanding the turbulence of our times' The NationWith an introduction by Arendt expert, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.Inspired by the trial of a bureaucrat who helped cause the Holocaust, this radical work on the banality of evil stunned the world with its exploration of a regime's moral blindness and one man's insistence that he be absolved all guilt because he was 'only following orders'.

Although Hannah Arendt is considered one of the major contributors to social and political thought in the twentieth century, this is the first general anthology of her writings. This volume includes selections from her major works, including The Origins of Totalitarianism, Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, The Jew as Pariah, and The Human Condition, as well as many shorter writings and letters. Sections include extracts from her work on fascism, Marxism, and totalitarianism; her treatment of work and labour; her writings on politics and ethics; and a section on truth and the role of the intellectual.

The first volume of Arendt’s celebrated three-part study of the philosophical origins of the totalitarian mind. This volume focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Index.

A collection of studies in which Arendt, from the standpoint of a political philosopher, views the crises of the 1960s and early 1970s as challenges to the american form of government. Index.

This middle volume focuses on the curious and cruel epoch of declining European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Index.

Political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker Hannah Arendt's On Violence is an analysis of the nature, causes, and significance of violence in the second half of the twentieth century. The public revulsion against violence and nonviolent philosophies continues to diminish in the twenty-first century. In this classic and still all too resonant work, Hannah Arendt puts her theories about violence into historical perspective, examining the relationships between war and politics, violence and power. Questioning the nature of violent behavior, she reveals the causes of its many manifestations, and ulitmately argues against Mao Zedong's dictum "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," proposing instead that "power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent."“Incisive, deeply probing, written with clarity and grace, it provides an ideal framework for understanding the turbulence of our times.”—The Nation

Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism, an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history.

Taken from the Great Philosphers, Volume II.

Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The disseration became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change.In Love and Saint Augustine, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years.

Few people thought as deeply or incisively about Germany, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust as Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. And, as this landmark volume reveals, much of that thinking was developed in dialogue, through more than two decades of correspondence. Arendt and Scholem met in 1932 in Berlin and quickly bonded over their mutual admiration for and friendship with Walter Benjamin. They began exchanging letters in 1939, and their lively correspondence continued until 1963, when Scholem's vehement disagreement with Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem led to a rupture that would last until Arendt's death a dozen years later. The years of their friendship, however, yielded a remarkably rich bounty of letters: together, they try to come to terms with being both German and Jewish, the place and legacy of Germany before and after the Holocaust, the question of what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world, and more. Walter Benjamin is a constant presence, as his life and tragic death are emblematic of the very questions that preoccupied the pair.Like any collection of letters, however, the book also has its share of lighter moments: accounts of travels, gossipy dinner parties, and the quotidian details that make up life even in the shadow of war and loss. In a world that continues to struggle with questions of nationalism, identity, and difference, Arendt and Scholem remain crucial thinkers. This volume offers us a way to see them, and the development of their thought, anew.