Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American philosopher and political theorist. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil."

Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden (now a district of Hanover, Germany). When she was three, her family moved to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg for her father's health care. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a romantic affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine, supervised by Karl Jaspers.

Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929 but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. She was arrested in 1933 by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, lived in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. Stripped of her German citizenship in 1937, she divorced Stern and married Heinrich Blücher in 1940. When Germany invaded France, she was detained by the French as an alien. She escaped to the United States in 1941 via Portugal, settling in New York.

Arendt became an American citizen in 1950 and established her reputation with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. She published other significant works, including The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt taught at many American universities without accepting tenure-track appointments. She died in 1975 of a heart attack, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.