
Hannah Arendt was a German-American political philosopher whose work on totalitarianism, revolution, and the nature of political action remains essential reading. A student of Heidegger and Jaspers, she escaped Nazi Germany and developed a philosophical account of politics grounded in the human capacity for plurality and action. Her report on the Eichmann trial, which introduced the concept of the "banality of evil", and her major works The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition established her as one of the twentieth century's most important political thinkers.