Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism

Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt’s writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt’s developments as a thinker—and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.

Although she herself rejected the title, Hannah Arendt is widely considered one of the foremost political philosophers of her time. This book collects 41 examples of her writings from the first two decades of her career, in exile in Paris in the 1930s and as an emigre to the United States in the 1940s. In the essays, she grapples with the philosophical ideas of Augustine, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others; considers the nature of communism, fascism, and totalitarianism; critiques social science techniques and assumption; and explores the relationship between religion and politics; among other wide-ranging topics. This is a paperbound edition of a work first published in 1994. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, 1906, fled to Paris in 1933, and came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. She was editorial director of Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and The New School for Social Research. Arendt died in 1975.