Author Guide · Political Philosophy
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In 1933 the Gestapo held Hannah Arendt for eight days for researching antisemitism; she left Germany soon after, was interned in the camp at Gurs in southern France in 1940, walked out of it in the confusion after France fell, and reached New York on 22 May 1941. She was 34 and had to learn to write in English. Ten years later she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, and in 1963 her reports from the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker gave the world the phrase “the banality of evil” and one of the bitterest literary quarrels of the century. She died in New York in 1975 with her last book unfinished. This guide covers her 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1951–2003 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Hannah Arendt’s best-known books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and On Revolution (1963). Start with Eichmann in Jerusalem, a trial report rather than a treatise; then read Origins for the history behind it.
Where to Start with Hannah Arendt
If you want her most famous and most argued-over book
→ Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) — the trial report that coined “the banality of evil”.
If you want the book that made her name
→ The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) — antisemitism, imperialism and the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
If you want her philosophy of action
→ The Human Condition (1958) — labour, work and action, and what they mean for politics.
If you want something short
→ On Violence (1970) — her essay on why power and violence are opposites.
12 Hannah Arendt Books, in Order
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Her first major book, in three parts — Antisemitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism — tracing how modern antisemitism, colonial racism and the collapse of the nation-state prepared the ground for the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, which she treats as a new form of government built on ideology and terror. In Britain it first appeared as The Burden of Our Time. An enlarged edition followed in 1958.
Rahel Varnhagen
A biography of Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), whose Berlin salon drew writers and aristocrats, told largely through her letters and diaries and centred on her struggle to escape being a Jew in German society. Arendt wrote most of it in Germany before 1933 and finished it in exile; it was first published in London in 1958, with the first British edition titled The Life of a Jewess.
The Human Condition
Based on her 1956 Walgreen lectures at the University of Chicago, it divides the “active life” into labour (what keeps us alive), work (what builds a lasting world of things) and action (what we do and say among other people), and argues that modern societies have let labour crowd out the other two. The prologue opens with the launch of Sputnik in 1957.
Between Past and Future
Published as Six Exercises in Political Thought, essays on concepts she thought the modern world had lost the meaning of: tradition, history, authority, freedom, education and culture. The revised edition of 1968 added two more, including “Truth and Politics”, written after the Eichmann controversy.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Arendt covered the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, who organised the deportation of Europe’s Jews, for The New Yorker, which ran her report as five articles in February and March 1963. She described Eichmann not as a monster but as a careerist who spoke in clichés and could not think from anyone else’s point of view. Her pages on the Jewish Councils’ cooperation with the Nazis caused a storm that has never quite ended. A revised edition appeared in 1965.
On Revolution
A comparison of the American and French Revolutions. Arendt argues that the American one founded a lasting framework for political freedom, while the French was overwhelmed by the “social question” of mass poverty, and that the revolutionary tradition’s best invention, the councils that spring up in every revolution, has always been lost.
Men in Dark Times
Portraits of people who lived through the first half of the twentieth century: Lessing, Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Waldemar Gurian and Randall Jarrell. The title comes from Brecht’s poem “To Those Born After”, and the Benjamin essay began as her introduction to Illuminations, the English selection of his writing she edited the same year.
On Violence
A short book written against the background of the student revolts and the Vietnam War. Its central claim is that power and violence are not the same thing but opposites: power comes from people acting together, while violence appears where power is being lost and can destroy power but never create it.
Crises of the Republic
Four pieces on the United States of the Vietnam years: “Lying in Politics”, her reading of the Pentagon Papers; “Civil Disobedience”; a reprint of “On Violence”; and an interview, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”.
The Life of the Mind
Her last project, grown out of her Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, turns from the active life to the mental faculties: thinking, willing and judging. The question that started it came from the Eichmann trial: can the activity of thinking stop people from doing evil? She finished Thinking and Willing; Judging was barely begun when she died, and her friend Mary McCarthy edited the two volumes for publication.
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
Edited by Ronald Beiner from her lecture notes, this is the nearest thing to the missing third volume of The Life of the Mind. She reads Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a book about taste and beauty, as the political philosophy Kant never wrote, built on the ability to judge from the standpoint of others.
Responsibility and Judgment
Lectures and essays from the last decade of her life, edited by Jerome Kohn, many unpublished before. They return to the moral questions raised by Eichmann: “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”, the lecture course “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” and “Thinking and Moral Considerations”. It also includes her disputed 1959 essay “Reflections on Little Rock”.
In What Order to Read Hannah Arendt
Her books do not build on each other in sequence, but they talk to each other. The Origins of Totalitarianism asks how the worst happened; The Human Condition and On Revolution ask what political freedom could look like instead; Eichmann in Jerusalem and everything after it ask how ordinary people come to take part in crimes, and what thinking and judging have to do with it.
Reading in publication order shows that shift from history to philosophy, but most readers find it easier to start with the reportage and essays, which are shorter and closer to events, and to come to Origins and The Human Condition once her vocabulary is familiar.
A reading path
1. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
2. On Violence (1970)
3. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
4. The Human Condition (1958)
5. The Life of the Mind (1978)
Everything Else Hannah Arendt Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Dissertation and posthumous collections
6
6 books · 1978–2018
- 1978The Jew as Pariahessays on Jewish identity and politics, edited by Ron H. Feldman
- 1994Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954early essays, reviews and the 1964 Gaus interview, edited by Jerome Kohn
- 1996Love and Saint Augustineher 1929 doctoral dissertation, supervised by Karl Jaspers, in English
- 2005The Promise of Politicsunpublished writing on philosophy and politics, edited by Jerome Kohn
- 2007The Jewish Writingsessays from the 1930s to the 1960s, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman
- 2018Thinking Without a Banisteressays and interviews from 1953 to 1975, edited by Jerome Kohn
The years · 1906–1975
Quick facts about Hannah Arendt
- Known for
- Explaining how totalitarian regimes arose and how ordinary people become part of mass crimes, summed up in her phrase “the banality of evil”
- 1906
- Born in Linden, near Hanover
- 1933
- Arrested by the Gestapo; leaves Germany
- 1941
- Reaches New York
- 1975
- Dies in New York
- Born
- 14 October 1906, Linden, near Hanover, Germany
- Died
- 4 December 1975, New York, of a heart attack
- Studied
- With Martin Heidegger at Marburg; doctorate under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg (dissertation published 1929)
- Exile
- Paris from 1933; interned at Gurs in 1940; New York from May 1941; US citizen 1951
- Married
- Günther Stern (Anders), 1929–1937; Heinrich Blücher, from 1940 until his death in 1970
- Taught
- University of Chicago, 1963–1967; the New School, New York, from 1967
- Honours
- Sonning Prize, 1975
The red mark is 1963: Eichmann in Jerusalem, the book that coined “the banality of evil”.
How Hannah Arendt Writes: Thinking From Events
Arendt called herself a political theorist, not a philosopher, and her books nearly always start from something that happened: the camps, the Hungarian uprising, the Eichmann trial, the Pentagon Papers, the student revolts. Her stated aim in The Human Condition was “to think what we are doing”, and she distrusted theories that explained events away instead of looking at what was new in them.
Her method is to make distinctions and hold on to them: labour, work and action; power and violence; the social and the political; thinking and knowing. Much of her writing traces the history of a word, such as authority or freedom, back to the Greeks and Romans to show what it once meant. She also tells stories — the portraits in Men in Dark Times, Eichmann’s career in Jerusalem — because she held that stories reveal meaning without pinning it down. From the 1940s she wrote mostly in English, a language she learned as an adult in New York, and her sentences are long, ironic and unafraid of a provocative judgement.
That bluntness is part of why she is still argued with: the tone of Eichmann in Jerusalem offended readers as much as its claims. For writers who think about power, evil and freedom in a similar way, see Authors like Hannah Arendt.
Listen
Hannah Arendt in Conversation with Günter Gaus
Hannah Arendt talks with Günter Gaus in the ZDF series Zur Person, broadcast 28 October 1964, about her life, politics and thought; 73 minutes, in German. From the archive of ZDF.
Frequently asked questions about Hannah Arendt’s books
How many books did Hannah Arendt write?
Nine books in English appeared in her lifetime, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to Crises of the Republic (1972), after her 1929 German dissertation on Augustine. Since her death in 1975 editors have published her unfinished The Life of the Mind and many collections of essays, lectures and letters. This page lists 12 key books and six further collections.
What are Hannah Arendt’s books in order?
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Rahel Varnhagen (1958), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1970), Crises of the Republic (1972), and posthumously The Life of the Mind (1978), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982) and Responsibility and Judgment (2003).
Where should I start with Hannah Arendt?
With Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). It is a trial report, written for magazine readers, and it introduces the questions about evil, responsibility and judgement that run through everything she wrote later. If you want something shorter, On Violence (1970) is under a hundred pages.
What is Hannah Arendt’s most famous book?
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is her most famous and most disputed book. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is the one that established her reputation, and The Human Condition (1958) is her most influential work of philosophy.
What does “the banality of evil” mean?
It is the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt meant that Eichmann’s crimes were monstrous but the man was not: he was an ambitious official who spoke in stock phrases and seemed unable to think about what he was doing from the point of view of anyone else. She did not mean that the evil itself was trivial.
Why was Eichmann in Jerusalem controversial?
Two things caused the uproar after The New Yorker published her report in 1963: her account of the Jewish Councils, which she said had cooperated with the Nazis in ways that raised the death toll, and her portrait of Eichmann as a thoughtless bureaucrat rather than a fanatical antisemite. Gershom Scholem accused her of lacking love for the Jewish people, Norman Podhoretz attacked the book in Commentary, and the Anti-Defamation League called it “evil”. Later research, notably Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011), argued that Eichmann was a more committed antisemite than Arendt recognised.
What is The Origins of Totalitarianism about?
Published in 1951, it traces how modern antisemitism, European imperialism and the breakdown of the nation-state after the First World War prepared the ground for Nazism and Stalinism, which Arendt treats as a new kind of rule, based on ideology, terror and the camps. It is divided into three parts: Antisemitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism.
What is The Human Condition about?
Published in 1958, it distinguishes three basic human activities — labour, work and action — and argues that modern society has come to value labour and consumption above the lasting world we build and the public life in which people act together. It is her most important work of philosophy.
Did Hannah Arendt finish her last book?
No. She died of a heart attack in New York on 4 December 1975 while working on The Life of the Mind, planned in three parts: Thinking, Willing and Judging. She had finished the first two; the third was barely begun. Mary McCarthy edited the two completed volumes, published in 1978, and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982) gives the best idea of what Judging might have said.
Was Hannah Arendt a philosopher?
She refused the title. In her 1964 television interview with Günter Gaus she said she did not belong to the circle of philosophers and that her profession was political theory. She was trained in philosophy, by Heidegger and Jaspers, and is now usually read as both.
What was Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger?
She had a secret affair with Martin Heidegger in 1924–25, when she was his 18-year-old student at Marburg and he was married. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933; they met again in 1950 and she later defended him. The affair became public through Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s 1982 biography.
Is there a film about Hannah Arendt?
Yes. Hannah Arendt (2012), directed by Margarethe von Trotta with Barbara Sukowa in the title role, follows her through the Eichmann trial and the controversy that followed.
Footnotes
- Hannah Arendt — Wikipedia
- Hannah Arendt’s Works: Bibliography — Goethe-Institut
- The Trials of Hannah Arendt — The Nation
- The Language Remains — Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College
- Zur Person: Hannah Arendt (1964) — ZDF
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), prologue
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