Hannah Arendt (/ˈɛərənt, ˈɑːr-/, US also /əˈrɛnt/, German: [ˈaːʁənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was born in Linden, which later became a district of Hanover, in 1906, to a Jewish family. When she was three, her family moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, so that her father's syphilis could be treated. Paul Arendt had contracted the disease in his youth, and it was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family; her mother was an ardent supporter of the Social Democrats. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy writing on Love and Saint Augustine at the University of Heidelberg in 1929 under the direction of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of works followed. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names and schools, amongst other things.

Hannah Arendt, née Johanna Arendt le 14 octobre 1906 à Hanovre et décédée le 4 décembre 1975 à New York, est une politologue, philosophe et journaliste allemande naturalisée américaine, connue pour ses travaux sur l’activité politique, le totalitarisme, la modernité et la philosophie de l'histoire. Elle soulignait toutefois que sa vocation n'était pas la philosophie mais la théorie politique (« Mein Beruf ist politische Theorie »). C'est pourquoi elle se disait « politologue » (« political scientist ») plutôt que philosophe. Son refus de la philosophie est notamment évoqué dans Condition de l'homme moderne où elle considère que « la majeure partie de la philosophie politique depuis Platon s'interpréterait aisément comme une série d'essais en vue de découvrir les fondements théoriques et les moyens pratiques d'une évasion définitive de la politique ». Ses ouvrages sur le phénomène totalitaire sont étudiés dans le monde entier et sa pensée politique et philosophique occupe une place importante dans la réflexion contemporaine. Ses livres les plus célèbres sont Les Origines du totalitarisme (1951 ; titre original : The Origins of Totalitarianism), Condition de l'homme moderne (1958) et La Crise de la culture (1961). Le mot totalitarianism exprime l'idée que la dictature ne s'exerce pas seulement dans la sphère politique, mais dans toutes, y compris les sphères privée et intime, quadrillant toute la société et tout le territoire. Son livre Eichmann à Jérusalem, publié en 1963 à la suite du procès d'Adolf Eichmann en 1961, où elle développe le concept de la banalité du mal, a fait l'objet d'une controverse internationale.