biography
pronunciation:
[arent]
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1906–75)
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| biography:
| Historian and political philosopher, born in Hanover, NC Germany. Of Jewish ancestry, she studied philosophy at Heidelberg (1929 PhD), and fled Hitler's Germany for France (1933) and the USA (1940), where she was naturalized in 1951. Her reputation as a scholar and writer was firmly established with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which linked Nazism and Communism to 19th-c Imperialism and anti-Semitism. Internationally recognized as the best-known American political theorist of her generation, she was both a prominent member of America's literary and academic elite and a revered mentor. Her teaching career included posts at Princeton (1953, 1959), Berkeley, the University of Chicago (1963–7), Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell universities, and the New School for Social Research, New York City (1967–75). Her most controversial major work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), suggested that it was simplistic to pin all the guilt for Nazi genocide on functionaries such as Adolf Eichmann, maintaining that other Germans, Western countries, and even the Jews had consented actively or passively to evil also. |
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