Hannah Arendt Collection: Arendt a "Who's Who"

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College, we came across a shelf that immediately attracted our attention.

It is no coincidence to us that the two books displayed in the middle of the image, Vie Politiques: Hannah Arendt and Who's Who In the World: 1974-1975 (Second Edition), are placed adjacent to one another. Hannah Arendt had lived through the "dark times" that characterized the lives of the other Vie Politiques subjects, among them Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Brecht Bertoit, Rosa Luxemburg, and John XXIII, and had emerged as one of the great political thinkers of her time. Between 1972 and 1975, she worked on her projected three-volume work The Life of the Mind, two volumes of which ("Thinking" and "Willing") were published posthumously, as well as helped create the Structured Liberal Education at Stanford University. Considering all of the other thoughtful publications she wrote earlier in her life, it is clear that Arendt was indeed a "Who's Who" in 1974-5.

Only a year later, Arendt would pass away in New York City as a result of a heart attack. She was 69 years old.

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