Hannah Arendt's "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

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Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) was a German-American political theorist known for her deep and original insights into power, authority and totalitarianism. Born in 1906 in Germany to a secular Jewish family, she studied philosophy under major figures like Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933, Arendt eventually settled in the United States, where she became an influential writer and academic.

Her essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship”, written in the aftermath of the Eichman trial, discusses the problem of voluntary conformity during the Nazi era and asks what characterized the few people who refused to collaborate. In the essay Arendt emphasizes the importance of personal judgment and moral choice, even under totalitarian rule.

The essay is 32 pages long and can be downloaded here