Hannah Arendt, the student and lover of the famous German Existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, is perhaps best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which discusses the trial of that Nazi War Criminal captured by the Israelis in Buenos Aires in 1968. She controversially writes that this man was not an obvious monster or some epitome of Evil. Rather, she describes him as a dull bureaucrat whose job happened to be organizing the trains transporting Jews to the Nazi concentration camps. She describes him as banal.
In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt is more concerned with issues surrounding freedom and technology. She raises concerns that human agency and political freedom are diminishing even as our technological powers increase. The consequences of the widespread use of these new technological means of control often escape us and she considers how they can become a threat to democracy. Arendt is a brilliant writer, difficult to categorize, but certainly relevant today. Her major concern is how human freedom can be practiced and not merely talked about. She is a refreshing alternative to postmodern theorists who use obscurity and pretension to say very little that is helpful. Arendt is, above all, the opposite of an armchair philosopher and the problems she addressed in1958 have only become more urgent.
