Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born on 14 October 1906 in Linden, Prussia, and died in New York on 4 December 1975. She studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg between 1924 and 1926, and had an affair with him while he was her teacher, which complicated the rest of her life given what he became. She completed her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1929 under Karl Jaspers, on Augustine's concept of love.

In 1933 she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for gathering evidence of antisemitism and left Germany. She spent the later 1930s in Paris helping Jewish young people emigrate through Youth Aliyah, was interned at the Gurs camp when Germany invaded France, escaped, and reached the United States in 1941.

What did Arendt mean by the banality of evil?

The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established her, and The Human Condition followed in 1958. Then in 1963 she published Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and introduced a phrase that has been argued about ever since. Her claim was not that the crimes were banal. It was that the man administering them was not a monster in any recognisable sense but a functionary - unremarkable, careerist, largely incapable of thinking from anyone else's position - and that this is more frightening than demonic villainy, because there is a great deal more of it available. The book also criticised the conduct of some Jewish councils under occupation, and the combination cost her friendships that never recovered. She consistently refused to be called a philosopher, preferring political theorist, on the grounds that philosophy concerns man in the singular and her subject was people in the plural.

Arendt is dominant Ti, and it shows in the thing that got her into trouble: she would not stop making distinctions. Her work is a sustained effort to separate concepts that everyone else runs together - labour from work from action, power from violence, authority from tyranny - because she held that political disaster follows from muddled categories. That is Ti doing what it does, building an internally exact framework and refusing to blur it for anyone's comfort.

The auxiliary Ne is where the range comes from. She moves freely between Augustine, Greek political practice, the French and American revolutions, refugee statelessness and the mechanics of the death camps, because Ne keeps finding the structural resemblance between things nobody had connected. The Origins of Totalitarianism only works because she was willing to put antisemitism, imperialism and the modern mass party in the same book.

Why was Eichmann in Jerusalem so badly received?

Because inferior Fe means she had no functioning sense of how it would land, and she was writing about the most raw subject available to her readership. She reported what she thought she had seen, in a tone that struck people as cold and occasionally sardonic, about a man on trial for the murder of her own people, and she did not anticipate that the tone itself would be the injury. The tertiary Si is the counterweight and it is why the work endures: an extraordinary command of historical detail, marshalled precisely, so that even her fiercest critics have to argue on the evidence.

INTJ is the most common alternative, and the moral seriousness and the architecture of the books support it. The difference is closure. An Ni-Te thinker converges on a conclusion and builds toward it. Arendt keeps opening the question - she revises, qualifies, adds distinctions, and her late work on thinking, willing and judging was unfinished when she died. The framework was never meant to close.

INFJ comes up because of the ethical weight of the subject matter. But her method is categorical rather than empathic: she analyses what totalitarianism structurally is, and her most controversial judgements were made by following the analysis into places where the humane response would have been to stop. Ti first.