Hannah Arendt Research Paper

Sarah Veslany

PLSC 155

Final Exam

Arendt

4/28/2015 Hannah Arendt was a political theorist who wrote about the essential features of a state’s authority, the field of political science, pure democracy, political dominance, and the origin of tyranny. While a number of members of both the writing and political science fields refer to her as a political philosopher, Arendt did not feel as though her work put her in the philosopher category. Her reasoning behind the refusal of the philosopher title was that philosophers tend to focus on individuals rather than the population as a mass. Additionally, she is most widely known for her 5 part writing series on the Adolf Eichmann trial published in The New Yorker in 1963. Arendt was a German-born citizen

She feels that moderns like Nietzsche mock the integrity of the working class and paint sacred institutions like government and religious orders to be forces that are cited against rather than in service to the masses. According to Arendt, self-preservation which is a cornerstone of Nietzsche’s political philosophy, has nothing to do with totalitarian movements or the motivations behind such political movements. In Arendt’s view totalitarian movements come to be because disenfranchised masses want order and protection that they believe the government has an obligation to provide. When the masses are in a state of desperation people will take the word of any leader whose movement promises stability and economic security much like Hitler did for the German people. While Hitler was a corrupt dictator he delivered on his promise of economic prosperity to the German

Plato is considered a tyrant due to his strict supervision of his guardian class. Nietzsche on the other hand is a self-serving glutton that romanticizes power over the masses, with the tyrants living off the spoils of the oppressed people’s labor. While I do not consider Arendt’s theories tyrannical in nature I feel that her analysis of real tyrannical regimes in society breaths new life into a discipline that primarily considering everything as a hypothetical situation. Nietzsche himself agreed with that notion when he said, “All that philosophers have been handling for thousands of years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their hands alive (Nietzsche, p. 16).” Arendt’s work puts political theories on the same plane as reality as she attempts to uncover the cause of tyranny. Though she fails to connect her thoughts completely her analysis provides a more holistic perspective of tyrannical