Hannah Arendt spent her career dissecting tyranny and totalitarianism, yet concluded that the highest human calling is an active love of the world. This episode traces her path from a precocious child in Prussia who read Kant at fourteen and organized a student boycott at fifteen, through her embrace of the conscious pariah after studying Rahel Varnhagen, her affair with Martin Heidegger and her lifelong, much-criticized defense of him, and her doctoral work on love in Augustine under Karl Jaspers.

The hosts then follow her arrest and eight-day Gestapo interrogation, her refugee work in Paris, her internment in France as an enemy alien, her escape to New York in 1941 as a stateless person, and the ideas that experience produced: the right to have rights, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and her explosive coverage of the  ...