Hannah Arendt's lessons for our times: the banality of evil, totalitarianism and statelessness

If you spend any time on the internet, you'll no doubt be aware of Hannah Arendt’s famous image, that young, sad woman, cigarette in her hands, staring into the mid distance. You'll no doubt be aware too of her quotations that seem to drop into social media every time we have another political outrage. “There are no dangerous thoughts,” Hannah Arendt says, “Thinking itself is dangerous”. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she also says, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds”. “The practise of violence changes the world” she also says, “but the more likely change is into a more violent world”. If you remember the '60s, you'll also remember Hannah Arendt for her famous phrase: "The banality of evil". But who was this beautiful woman who had the ability to drop the perfect words into the right political context at any given time?

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906 to progressive Jewish parents. She was reading Kant by the age of 15. At university, she met the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This was good news because he gave her the philosophical tools she needed to later develop her political thought. It was bad news because he became a Nazi. In 1933, she fled Berlin having been captured by the Gestapo and spending the night in the cells. She fled to Paris where she worked with refugee children. At the beginning of the war, she was sent into an internment camp, which she escaped in 1941. From there, she went to New York where she lived the rest of her life to 1975 and became one of America's most prominent and controversial intellectuals. She died in 1975. She spoke her mind and she loved her world, and she never stopped fighting against totalitarianism. So what has she got to teach us today? I'm going to give you three quick dives into three of her key concepts.

The banality of evil

The "banality of evil" is probably Hannah Arendt's most famous phrase. She coined it when she attended the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Arendt was one of the first to discover what was happening in the camps, the first to study the new system of the “corpse factories”, as she called them. When she watched the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s, she was aghast. She thought the Nazis had, she said, "exploded the limits of law". “We're never going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle”, she thought. This changed when she went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for ‘The New Yorker’.

Eichmann had always, in some ways, been in Arendt’s life. They were born only seven months apart. She said she'd never forgive herself unless she went to look at this walking disaster face-to-face, and so she went. But what she found was not a figure of radical, awful, evil, but a small, rather pompous man – talking in cliches, self-important and radically unable to think about where he was and who he was talking about. Eichmann was banal. This didn't mean he was not evil – he was definitely evil – but that the evil he represented is going to be far more difficult to counter. Eichmann was thoughtless. He was the kind of guy who sat next to you at a wedding and talked through you, looked through you, unaware that you were there. Eichmann couldn't grasp the world that was full of plural, different people. So he eliminated a section of it. This evil, Arendt said, this thoughtless evil had got into our culture and was spreading like fungus.

Totalitarianism

Eichmann’s thoughtlessness spoke to a bigger cultural change. Arendt was the first theorist, one of the first theorists, of totalitarian regimes, and what she noted was how totalitarian regimes got into your head, between people, into the home, everywhere. Loneliness was a symptom of totalitarian regimes, she said, and with it came incapacity to think for oneself. Loneliness gripped people, fear gripped people. So thoughtlessness, she said, was part of a totalitarian regime. It was worse than that: totalitarian regimes would always fall, Arendt said – history would make sure of that, but totalitarian thinking is a different matter. Long after Hitler and Stalin had died, she predicted, the elements of totalitarianism might still persist.

Statelessness

Hannah Arendt spent nearly 17 years of her life as a stateless person. She was a refugee, and she looked at the world and its history from the perspective of a pariah, an outsider, a stranger, curious all the time. She theorised that one of the things that made totalitarianism work was the categorisation of people, some people, as superfluous. The point, the radically new point to totalitarianism, was to create superfluous people, hence the camps. But statelessness was bigger than this for Hannah Arendt: it wasn't just refugees, displaced people – the pariahs of the world who were suffering from statelessness. Statelessness, uprootedness, non-belonging was also a political condition for all of us. Our politics no longer make sense, she said, to us as human beings – we are all radically uprooted from our homes and communities. Statelessness was a modern malaise.

That was all then in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. But what about now? Arendt always worried that while totalitarian regimes would fail – history would make sure of that – totalitarian thinking would not. We need to ask now where the spaces are for the deep thoughtfulness that can counter oppressive thoughts and regimes. Many of us are lonely today. Many people are considered superfluous.

Lessons for our times

So what can Hannah Arendt teach us about today? In some ways, it's a totally bizarre question. It's not a question Hannah Arendt would approve of. We're used to now seeing mugs and t-shirts – my favourite has ‘What would Hannah Arendt do?’ written on its chest. But Hannah Arendt would not have liked that. She was a fierce defender of free thinking. She thought through her own times, which she said time and time again are without precedent. You can't run analogies through this. You can't actually say this moment of history is the great culmination of this narrative that started then. You need to think for yourself. You need to think for yourself in order to describe the reality you find yourself in, so that you can then resist it.

But there are three takeaways, I think, that Hannah Arendt can help us with today.

One: the observation that superfluous people are a feature of totalitarian thinking. Once you've decided that some people's lives are not important or not as valuable as others, you are already walking into trouble.

Two is the importance of free thought, of thinking for yourself. And for us, that means creating spaces in which free thinking is possible. Education, culture, institutions that protect free thought.

But third, perhaps, and perhaps this is most important, Hannah Arendt never stopped loving her world. She was a fierce friend, a fierce lover, and she was also someone who wrote and thought not to make the world a better place, but to teach us how to love it for what it is.

Hannah Arendt is still a thinker for our times.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.