San Antonio College Library

This collection provides readings and re-readings of significant aspects of Hannah Arendt's work, suggesting that, 20 years after her death in 1975, we can better afford to listen to her.

"In 1951, publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism brought Hannah Arendt immediate recognition as a political thinker of the first order, and over the next quarter-century, she published numerous books that profoundly influenced the way America and Europe addressed the central questions and dilemmas of World War II. Yet for many, the significance of Arendt's work has been lost in the controversy surrounding a single phrase, "the banality of evil,"...

One of the most brilliant political theorists of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt intended her work to liberate and empower, to restore our capacity for concerted political action, to convince us that the power to improve our flawed arrangements is in our hands. At the same time, Arendt developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, all-consuming monster appearing as if from outer space to gobble up human freedom; she blamed it - not us - for...

"The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jasper's 'inner emigration' and resumes in the fall of 1945. From then until Jaspers's death in 1969, the initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship. Three countries figure prominently in the correspondence: Germany, Israel,...

Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble Man's existence in relation to Death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis. Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young Jewish lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was...

"Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking...