Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born Jewish-American political theorist. Although she had often been described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."

She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, and eventually became an American citizen. Her works deal with the nature of power and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of her most important work was written in English. The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honor.

She is perhaps best known for coining of the phrase "The banality of Evil" in her controversial description of the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, that was described in a series of articles in the New Yorker.

In her reporting of the 1961 trial conducted in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, which later evolved into her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

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