Sunday, May 18, 2008

Hannah Arendt



(German-American political philosopher, 1906–1975). Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she interprets Fascism and communism as variants of the broader historical phenomenon of totalitarianism, is perhaps her most important contribution to political philosophy. Her Report on the Banality of Evil, which covered the trial of Adolph Eichmann, is often misunderstood as a description of the banality of the holocaust itself; the phrase is instead intended to express the chillingly ordinary, bureaucratic mentality of the Nazi officials who oversaw the genocide, such as Eichmann.

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