Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind

A Life of the Mind

By: Thomas Meyer, Shelley Frisch - translator

Based on new archival research, this is a major new biography on Hannah Arendt, tracing for the first time the intellectual development of, arguably, the twentieth century’s most influential thinker.

In this extraordinary biography, Thomas Meyer seeks to explain the fascination that the woman, friend, lover, journalist, Jew, human rights activist, philosopher and political theorist Arendt continues to exert – and to help both those who aren’t and those who are familiar with her better understand the phenomenon of her as an icon and thinker.

Born in Germany in 1907, Hannah Arendt was a chronicler able to translate personal experience into concise analysis and so make it comprehensible to others; an analytical thinker who wrested from Plato, Kant and Heidegger that which seemed eternal and yet was of the utmost contemporary relevance; a free spirit who felt an obligation only towards her friends and lovers and the truth, who didn’t shy away from any risk and trusted her opponents to take the same kind of pains with people and the world as she.

Arendt’s mode of thinking, the sheer range of her interlocutors and influences form an intellectual panorama of the 20th century that’s unparalleled. You only have to look at some of her German teachers, friends, and intellectual alliances to see that for her entire life, Arendt refused to think within boundaries: Heidegger, Bultmann, Mannheim, Brecht, and Benjamin, to name but a few.

©2026 Thomas Meyer, Shelley Frisch

Critic reviews

‘Thomas Meyer has succeeded in writing a completely surprising biography of an intellectual icon, bringing us closer than ever before to her painful struggle for the lives of others’ Peter Neumann, DIE ZEIT