Hannah Arendt regarded herself as a political theorist but her writings on politics had profound philosophical resonances too. As I see it, her greatest achievement was that she stood up against two deep-flowing currents of twentieth century thought – one which tried to see the whole of public life in terms of conscience and personal morality, the other seeking to reduce it to clashes of economic or sectional interests. Her big idea was that politics, or the 'political public space', has its own values and principles, and that they need to be kept distinct both from economics and morality.

Her position was in part a reaction to the twentieth century phenomenon of totalitarianism (a topic about which she published an influential book in 1951). But it was also an attempt to revive a classical argument about citizenship – an argument which, from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau and Hegel, had insisted on the dignity that people gain from participating in the life of the state.

Like her philosophical mentor Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), she thought of the modern age as a period of dangerous subjectivism – of a tendency to reduce all problems to personal, mental or psychological ones. Hence when she faced up to the classic 'problem of evil', she found it necessary to challenge the modern tendency to identify evil with deliberate maliciousness. Evil happens, to be sure, but it is not necessarily an expression of monstrous or deep-seated malignity. It may just happen.

And that is what got her into trouble when she went to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (pictured right)

The book that resulted, with its notorious reference to the 'banality of evil', provoked an outburst of indignation and personal animosity which – as I discovered when I went to Jerusalem to make this programme – has still not died down. Arendt’s critics had little time for her principle that the political must be kept separate from the personal. Even more seriously, it seems to me, they failed to recognise the kind of discussion she was trying to initiate – not a vindictive exchange of political opinions, but a careful excavation of some of the deepest and most tendentious assumptions of modern thought.

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Content last updated: 27/07/2005

Jonathan Rée

Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian, philosopher and househusband living near Oxford. His books include Descartes, Philosophy and its Past, Proletarian Philosophers, Philosophical Tales, Heidegger, and I See a Voice. His journalism has appeared in the Evening Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lingua Franca, London Review of Books, Prospect, The Independent, and Times Literary Supplement. He recently gave up a career as a university lecturer in London in order to have more time to think.

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