Hannah Arendt

(Paperback)

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Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of 23, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After the War, Arendt became one of the most prominent and controversial public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.

Reviews

Hill sparingly and undramatically chooses her details (without, thankfully, passing over the gossip) . . . She is evidently so used to explaining Arendts ideas to nervous freshmen that each chapter contains a SparkNotes-like summary of the major works written during the time period in question. They are concise and comprehensible . . . Hill was well situated to go diving for gems in Arendts papers, letters, and marginalia . . . Hill spares us the clichd, tabloid-ish critiques that make up a sizable chunk of Arendtian lore (she was a self-hating Jew; I cant believe she loved Heidegger; she thought Eichmanns crimes were banal; and so on and so forth). Instead, Hill calmly and quietly, but without truckling applies her close readings of Arendts most controversial ideas to our own oftentimes taut and illiberal social atmosphere. LA Review of Books; The stated aim of Samantha Rose Hills new Arendt biography, a slim installment in Reaktion Bookss Critical Lives series, is to introduce this perennially relevant thinker to new readers . . . A brief primer on her life and thinking is timely, given the resurgence of interest . . . While the aim of this biography might be to serve as a brief, lively introduction to Arendt, Hill accomplishes something richer. In introducing us to Arendt's life and thought, what emerges is an example of thinking as a dynamic activity . . . Hill does not present Arendt as a banister to hold up our thinking. Rather, she aptly shows that Arendt is someone to read now because Arendt is someone worth thinking with. Womens Review of Books; As Hill points out in Hannah Arendt, even in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism surprise bestseller of the Trump era the political is invariably brought back to the personal. Prospect Magazine; This book could hardly appear more opportunely. Arendts way of thinking, though original to the point of being difficult to follow, appeals to an increasing number of men and women who question the meaning of their lives in the world we share. Arendts own writings and the books and essays analyzing them may seem exhaustive, yet Hills work does something new: without simplifying Arendts thinking, she opens it to contemporary readers who, in the darkness of our times, will find a friend, a woman, who lived through the darkest of all times. Jerome Kohn, trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust

Author Bio

Samantha Rose Hill is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. For more information, visit samantharosehill.com