Author(s): Ann Heberlein

Biography & Memoir

A timely, dramatic biography that explores how Hannah Arendt's personal experience shaped her indispensable work on totalitarianism, refugees and the nature of love and evil.

Hannah Arendt dedicated her life to thinking through the most fundamental and difficult of human problems: totalitarianism, exile, the nature of love and the moral problem of evil.

But these were not only philosophical concerns for Arendt - they were also personal. In this immersive new biography, Ann Heberlein shows how Arendt's groundbreaking work was intimately formed by turbulence in both the wider world and her own personal experience.

Tracing Arendt's flight from Hitler's Germany and then occupied France, as well as the intensity of her friendships and loves, On Love and Tyranny develops a sharply detailed, complex portrait of Arendt as an involved witness to the crises of her time and an essential thinker for all time.