hannah_arendt [Witapedia]

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Hannah Arendt's work focuses primarily on how individuals and collectives can think and act in ways that escape the social and political conditions that inhibit ethical and imaginative thinking and action.  Her work emerges out of the tragedy and chaos of World War II and the holocaust, having escaped as a Jewish woman to the United States.

From my reading at this point, her diagnosis and response draws upon Kant, Heidegger, Socrates, and even Nietzsche's nihilistic diagnoses, to develop novel perspectives grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment (and in various ways, [[:reflective judgment]], Socrates' views of the Greek [[:polis] and [[:enlarged mentality]] from the conversing of free men with each other beyond the myopia of private lives (in contrast to what we think now of restricting politics so we can be free individuals, and appointing experts to carry out the tasks), and Heideggerian critiques of rationality and technology.   

She also draws on Kafka's work, exploring the meaningless misery of life aimlessly and often viciously delivered by people through rules -- perhaps the basis of her [[:banality of evil]] in explaining how German guards like Eichmann were able to deliver evil without being evil, but simply dumbed-down individuals delivering violence and death through the mindless following-of-rules, divorced from human conditions and [[:existential]] responsibility.  In concluding in this way, her work is an indictment of political [[:nihilism]] --  ie. the empty following of unrooted rules connected to nothing -- as opposed to the psychological nilhilism expressed by [[:Nietzsche]] 

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