Hannah Arendt

Arendt studied under Heidegger and Jaspers, fled Germany in 1933 after a week in Gestapo custody for collecting antisemitic material for the Zionist organisation, and was interned in France as an enemy alien before escaping to New York in 1941. She was stateless for eighteen years, an experience that produced her insight that human rights mean very little to a person who has lost the standing of a citizen, and that the right that matters first is the right to have rights.

The Origins of Totalitarianism argued that Nazi and Soviet rule were a new kind of regime, not a bad version of an old one. The Human Condition distinguished labour, work and action and defended politics as the space where people appear to one another. Then in 1963 she covered Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and described a man of striking ordinariness who had organised deportations without hatred and largely without thought; the phrase the banality of evil, and her criticism of the Jewish councils, cost her friendships that were never repaired. She died of a heart attack in her New York apartment at sixty-nine, with friends in the room; the title page of the last part of her unfinished book was still in the typewriter. Her ashes were buried beside her husband's at Bard College, where he had taught for years.