Hannah Arendt can be truthfully described as an anomaly, an enigma, an outlier, an icon, a rebel, a chameleon, a nuisance, and perhaps the greatest interdisciplinary philosopher of the 20th century. It’s difficult to choose a single description that comes close to encompassing the myriad facets of her presence in the world.  

In HANNAH ARENDT: A Life of the Mind, celebrated German philosopher Thomas Meyer --- with a brilliant translation from Shelley Frisch --- takes on the daunting task of sifting through numerous written artifacts (some never previously accessible) of Arendt’s personal and public life for an ambitious biography that can justly rank as definitive without being perfect.

Divided into 11 chapters of varying length, and arranged primarily by topic rather than time, this work of 500-plus pages is dense, detailed, circuitous and convoluted. In some places, the pages turn like lead. Yet the layered prose and numerous overlapping stories of Arendt’s restless and often haphazard 69 years on earth exert an almost mystical energy that compels one to read on…and on.

While academic specialists (which I definitely am not) might find Meyer’s meandering exploration of Arendt’s intellectual and personal relationships a distraction from major works such as THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (1951) or THE HUMAN CONDITION (1958), it is important to remember that Arendt was pretty much unique in her generation for bridging the wide town-and-gown chasm wherever she went.

"This eclectic biography will not capture everyone’s taste, but Meyer’s exhaustive research has produced a work of real substance that is remarkably in tune with our present times."

By taking difficult and contentious human issues from cloistered academia into the public domain and making them accessible through every form of media then available (newspapers, magazines, open lectures, popular publishing, radio and early television talk shows), she became a widely known and often controversial figure quite early in her career. In fact, from the 1930s until her sudden death from heart failure in 1975, she developed as a philosopher in full view of enthusiastic European and North American audiences from all demographics and in all pre-internet media. This aspect alone of HANNAH ARENDT does unprecedented service to her legacy in placing her authentically within a world that ordinary working and thinking people can relate to. 

Like so many rock stars in other areas of human art and endeavor, Arendt’s perennial inconsistencies, changes of mind, shifting loyalties, fractious relationships, fluid identities and outright blunders in judgment not only endeared her to non-academic fans, but kept her face and voice in the forefront of popular culture. Between the ’50s and ’70s, in a world fresh from the trauma of WWII and sliding into yet more conflict and uncertainty (Cuba, Vietnam, the Cold War, etc.), people yearned for what leading thinkers like Hannah Arendt might say next. She literally could write or speak about anything at all, and the public would devour it. Unlike so many populist figures, her academic community, while often critical of her concepts and opinions, never rejected her scholarship or intellectual credibility. 

Born into an era when Jews in Germany could see trouble coming decades away and when the Zionism movement ignited by Theodor Herzl aggressively campaigned for a Jewish homeland in the supposedly “empty” land of Palestine, Arendt pursued her undergraduate and doctoral studies in an environment of aspiration, anticipation and social change.

Due partly to the political and economic ferment of the time, Arendt evolved as an almost constant academic traveler, both in Europe and overseas. As social, legal and government policy made life increasingly difficult for Jews, especially Jewish youth who faced dwindling career prospects, Arendt became involved as a volunteer administrator with several organizations working to send young people to Palestine and out of harm’s way. Their generation would become the first Israelis when the Jewish state was formed in 1947. Did that period of intense activity make her a Zionist? To this day, evidence from her own writing and speaking is inconclusive, but current events have kept her profile prominent half a century after her death.

Meyer also points out other areas in which Arendt’s legacy is somewhat confusing and clouded. Her brief and awkward venture into commentary on American race issues during the 1960s earned her the ire of prominent advocates for Black equality. She seemed tone-deaf to their horrific history of slavery and discrimination. And leaders in the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1970s justly criticized her for having a wide and influential platform that she could have used to further the cause of women in professions like hers, where they are still too often treated and paid like second-class citizens. Yet Arendt never seemed to “get it” because she professed never to have had trouble working with men.

HANNAH ARENDT proves beyond a doubt that she was a figure of such complexity and ever-evolving intellectual innovation that she fits nowhere and everywhere. What Meyer achieves is to show how philosophy can be ubiquitous and therefore humanly useful when it comes packaged in a force like Hannah Arendt. This eclectic biography will not capture everyone’s taste, but Meyer’s exhaustive research has produced a work of real substance that is remarkably in tune with our present times.