Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 into an East Prussian Jewish family. In 1933 she fled the Nazi regime and after brief stays in Prague and Geneva she found a temporary home in Paris. In 1941 she succeeded in gaining entry to the United States, where after ten years she became a citizen. Arendt had short-term positions at a number of universities, but was most closely identified with the New School for Social Research in New York, where she was professor of Political Philosophy at the time of her death in 1975. Much of her most important work attempted either to address the anti-Semitism that had forced her to leave Europe or to celebrate the political ideals of the United States that had enabled her to find refuge there. In the course of exploring these issues she presented a synoptic view of the Western tradition of political thought from the time of the early Greeks to her own day.