Modern and contemporary · 1951 onward
Arendt’s politics of action
Overview
Thoughtlessness does harm, power is what people make by acting together and every person can begin something new.
Hannah Arendt was a German-born political thinker who fled the Nazis and wrote in the United States. Watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she described what she called the banality of evil: great harm done by an ordinary official who had stopped thinking and spoke in clichés. For her, thinking means pausing to ask what one is actually doing.
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In The Human Condition she distinguishes labor, work and action. Action is what people do among others, beginning something new and revealing who they are. Power, for her, is not force but what appears when people act together, and it lasts only while they stay together. Public spaces matter because they let people appear to one another.
She stressed natality: every person is a new beginning. Because action is unpredictable and irreversible, she named two remedies, forgiving and promising. Critics argue that her sharp split between public and private leaves out much that matters, and scholars still debate her account of Eichmann. The lasting habit is to pause, act with others and keep new starts alive.
Where it answers
Who should govern?
A public is made when people appear to one another and act together. Power lasts while they do.
How should we act?
Pause before routine does the harm, then begin something, and keep it going by forgiving and promising.
Key terms
- Banality of evil
- Great harm done by ordinary people who fail to think, not by monsters.
- Natality
- The fact that each birth brings someone new, able to begin something.
- Plurality
- The fact that we live among many different people, each one unique.
- Action
- Acting and speaking together in public, the activity that makes politics.
- Forgiving and promising
- The two powers that release us from past deeds and bind an uncertain future.
In their words
“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
Further reading
- The Origins of Totalitarianism · Hannah Arendt
- The Human Condition · Hannah Arendt
- Eichmann in Jerusalem · Hannah Arendt
- The Life of the Mind · Hannah Arendt
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Quest2Reason. “Arendt’s politics of action.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/arendt. Accessed 13 November 2026.