Arendt was born in Hanover and raised in Konigsberg, studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, where she had an affair with Martin Heidegger, and received her doctorate in 1929 for a study of St. Augustine. With the Nazi rise to power, Arendt was forced to flee to Paris in 1933, had to escape to the United States in 1941 after the Nazis occupied France, and became a United States citizen in 1951. Arendt was a lecturer at Princeton University and the University of Chicago and a professor for many years at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where she also held key positions in several Jewish organizations.

Arendt established her reputation as a keen analyst of politics and society in the modern age on the basis of her penetrating studies of totalitarianism and the horror of genocide in the 20th century. In 1963, Arendt observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, which provided the material for her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt coined the famous phrase the banality of evil to describe the unexceptional character of Eichmann, who employed the most common features of the modern bureaucratic and technological state for the purpose of systematically and efficiently exterminating millions of human beings. Some commentators sought to demonize Eichmann as an inhuman monster, but Arendt made the more important point that the Nazi enterprise was horrific precisely because it was planned and executed by ordinary individuals with an unquestioning obedience to authority. Arendt argued that the motive of expediency had become a central feature of the modern state, at the expense of moral judgment and the ability to think from the point of view of others.

Arendt's effort to demystify the Nazi regime can be traced back to her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. After detailing the historical precedents to the totalitarian political system, in particular the administrative structure of imperialism, Arendt focused her analysis on Nazism and Stalinism. For Arendt, the prevalence of totalitarianism in the 20th century and its success in eradicating political freedom through ideology and terror makes it "the burden of our time." According to Arendt, perhaps the most striking feature of totalitarianism is the way it intentionally deprives whole communities of their humanity. Unlike despotism, which creates enemies of the state who are then made to conform to the power of the ruler, totalitarianism creates victims who are eliminated from the state by being deprived of identity, community, and legal status. The victims of totalitarianism are rendered anonymous through the comprehensive eradication of their human rights and sense of personhood by means of propaganda and the arbitrary use of legal and political power. Against these victims, the totalitarian state organizes the masses around myths of common national identity and the willing submission to a single authority.

Beyond these concerns, Arendt also developed a theory of politics based on the classical Greek idea that political action is the sphere of human freedom. In The Human Condition, Arendt explained that what is distinctive about the classical conception of politics is its emphasis on the meaningfulness or value of political action as such. The Greek conception that political action is the most meaningful form of human activity thus stands in opposition to the modern conception of politics and its narrow focus on political action as a mere means to some efficient end. In Arendt's estimation, modern politics is dominated by utilitarianism, with the result that conformity rather than creativity has become its guiding principle. She suggested that the 20th century has been marked by a gradual loss of the right to public action and opinion, a right that serves as a cornerstone of the social sphere where individuals ought to be able to act in association with others as equals. Consequently, Arendt concluded that an essential dimension of "the human condition," our freedom to interact creatively with others, has been gradually restricted.

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