Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophersKarl Jaspers and Martin Heideggerthroughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances and events. She was a questioner rather than an answerer, and she wrote what she thought, principally to encourage others to think for themselves. Fearless of the consequences of thinking, Arendt found courage woven in each and every strand of human freedom.
Karl Marx and the tradition of western political thought ; The broken thread of tradition ; The modern challenge to tradition -- The great tradition ; Law and power ; Ruling and being ruled -- Authority in the twentieth century -- Letter to Robert M. Hutchins -- The Hungarian revolution and totalitarian imperialism -- Totalitarianism -- Culture and politics -- Challenges to traditional ethics : a response to Michael Polanyi -- Reflections on the 1960 national conventions : Kennedy vs. Nixon -- Action and the "pursuit of happiness" -- Freedom and politics, a lecture -- The cold war and the west -- Nation-state and democracy -- Kennedy and after -- Nathalie Sarraute -- "As if speaking to a brick wall" : a Conversation with Joachim Fest -- Labor, work, action -- Politics and crime : an exchange of letters -- Introduction to The Warriors by J. Glenn Gray -- On the human condition -- The crisis character of modern society -- Revolution and freedom, a lecture -- Is America by nature a violent society? -- The Possessed -- "The freedom to be free" : The conditions and meaning of revolution -- Imagination -- He 's all Dwight -- Emerson-Thoreau medal address -- The Archimedean point -- Heidegger at eighty -- For Martin Heidegger -- War crimes and the American conscience -- Letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books -- Values in contemporary society -- Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt -- Remarks -- Address to the advisory council on philosophy at Princeton University -- Interview with Roger Errera -- Public rights and private interests : a response to Charles Frankel -- Preliminary remarks about the life of the mind -- Transition -- Remembering Wystan H. Auden, who died in the night of the twenty-eighth of September, 1973.