The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt, Second Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1998, 349 pages with 1 billion footnotes
Reviewed by Angela Allen, Dec. 3, 2020

To semi-torture myself this fall, I slogged through Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition.”

I usually read fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, so philosophy can be a stretch. But she was a gap in my education, and I got sucked into an online seminar. I hated the reading; I loved the class — and the suffering was worth it.

Arendt wrote “The Human Condition” in 1958, and much of it remains prescient and relevant, though I don’t recommend trying it on your own. Instead, to become familiar with her, read the graphic novel, “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt,” by Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury Publishing), much more fun and easier to read. Arendt is a turgid writer if a clear thinker. Is that possible?

A German philosopher who read all of Kant by the age of 11, Arendt was brilliant, controversial (she is known for the phrase, “the banality of evil,” coined during her writing about the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Nazi butcher Adolf Eichmann), and difficult to read — and boy, did she have trouble with men.

She understood un-rootedness and refugee mentality. She was kicked out of pre-World War II Germany for being Jewish, escaped from France, and eventually settled in the United States. Her insights into refugee status are reason alone to read her now. Good luck!