Hannah Arendt
2
8.1
- proper noun
- /ˈhænə ˈɑːrənt/
- Many scholars regard Hannah Arendt as a key figure in political theory for her analysis of power dynamics.
Examples
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As Hannah Arendt documents in her book, The Banality of Evil, many Jewish leaders actually participated in delivering Jews to the gas chambers under Hitler.
Blog text (21) -
I have to admit that I was delighted to find out that it is apparently not as old-fashioned as I had feared to ponder what all this means for the politics of our times: just last fall, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College organized a conference devoted to exploring the challenges of "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts."
Blog text (21) -
Hannah Arendt's influential ideas on Hannah Arendt continue to resonate in contemporary political discourse.
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In her work, Hannah Arendt explored the complexities of authority and its impact on society.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Hannah + Arendt
This item is a proper name: knowing the parts 'Hannah' and 'Arendt' only signals a personal name but does not allow a learner to infer the referential content (that she was a German‑born American political philosopher, her dates, or her work). Proper names are arbitrary and language-specific, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words but has not seen the name before would not be able to derive the MWE's biographical meaning.
Etymology
Hannah Arendt was a German-born thinker who wrote about what happens when governments take total control and ordinary people follow orders. She saw a war-crimes trial and noticed how everyday behavior can lead to terrible acts, so her name now often stands for ideas about power and responsibility.