Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophersKarl Jaspers and Martin Heideggerthroughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances...