Thinkers Timeline

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political philosopher. She was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany, and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she fled Germany, was briefly interned in France, and eventually reached the United States in 1941, where she spent the rest of her life. Her experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany shaped all of her thinking: she wanted to understand how the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, had been possible, and what they revealed about the fragility of political freedom and human dignity. Her most important books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). She was a professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. She died in 1975, mid-sentence at her typewriter, working on her final book.

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American political philosopher, widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied at Princeton University. He served in the Pacific during the Second World War, an experience that shook his earlier religious faith and deepened his concern with questions of justice: he witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima from close range and refused a commission that would have required him to participate in such actions again. He spent most of his academic career at Harvard University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement. His major work, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, transformed academic political philosophy and became one of the most discussed books of the century. In it he developed a systematic theory of justice grounded in the idea of a social contract among free and equal citizens choosing principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. His later work, Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999), developed and revised his ideas in response to criticism. He died in 2002.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American political economist. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up during the Great Depression, a period of severe economic hardship in the United States. She studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and spent most of her career at Indiana University, where she co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She received it for her work on how communities manage shared resources: things like forests, fisheries, water systems, and grazing land that many people depend on and that can be damaged if anyone takes too much. The standard economic view was that shared resources would always be destroyed by overuse, the so-called tragedy of the commons. Ostrom showed, through decades of careful fieldwork and research across many countries, that this was wrong. Communities around the world had developed their own rules and institutions for managing shared resources sustainably, without privatisation and without government control. She died in 2012, still working.

Judith Heumann was an American disability rights activist. She is often called 'the mother of the disability rights movement'. She was born on 18 December 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Werner and Ilse Heumann, were German Jewish immigrants. Many of their relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. The family later moved to Brooklyn, New York. When Judy was 18 months old, she got polio. This was during a large outbreak of the disease in the United States. A machine helped her breathe for three months. When she recovered, she could not walk. She used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. At age five, the principal of her local school refused to let her attend. He called her a 'fire hazard'. Her mother fought this. Eventually Judy got an education, partly in special classes and partly in a public high school. She went to Long Island University, where she began organising other disabled students. In her twenties, she applied to become a teacher in New York City. The Board of Education passed her written and oral exams but failed her medical exam because she used a wheelchair. In 1970, she sued them. The judge, Constance Baker Motley (the first Black woman federal judge), made it clear the Board would lose. They settled. Heumann became the first wheelchair user to teach in the state of New York. She taught for three years. She became one of the main leaders of the American disability rights movement. In April 1977, she led a 26-day sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco. The sit-in forced the US government to implement Section 504, the first major US disability civil rights law. She later worked for both the Clinton and Obama administrations. She wrote her memoir Being Heumann in 2020. She died on 4 March 2023 in Washington D.C., aged 75. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) both owe much to her work.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born 1959) is an indigenous Maya K'iche' woman from Guatemala and one of the most important human rights activists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She was born in the village of Chimel in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala, the sixth of nine children of a poor farming family. Her father, Vicente Menchú, was a community organiser who had been involved in land rights struggles against wealthy landowners. Her family and community were caught up in the brutal counterinsurgency campaign conducted by the Guatemalan military against indigenous and rural communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s, part of a civil war that lasted thirty-six years and resulted in the killing of over two hundred thousand people, the vast majority indigenous Maya. Her brother Petrocinio was tortured and killed by the military in 1979. Her father was killed in the burning of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in 1980, an event orchestrated by the military. Her mother was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in 1980. Menchú herself went into exile in Mexico, where she dictated her testimony to the Venezuelan anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, which was published as I, Rigoberta Menchú in 1983. She has been a continuous advocate for indigenous rights and human rights. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

Alice Wong was an American disability activist, writer, and editor. She founded the Disability Visibility Project, which gathered and amplified the stories of disabled people across the United States. She was born on 27 March 1974 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her parents had immigrated from Hong Kong. Alice was their eldest daughter. She had a genetic neuromuscular condition from childhood. Over her life, her muscles grew weaker. She used a powered wheelchair and, in her later years, a device to help her breathe. She described herself sometimes as a 'cyborg', reclaiming the machines that kept her alive as part of her identity rather than a sad necessity. She studied English and sociology at Indiana University and later earned a master's in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. She lived in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She worked at UCSF as a research associate for over ten years, studying health care for disabled people. In 2013, President Obama appointed her to the National Council on Disability, a federal body that advises the US government. In 2015, she took part in a White House ceremony for the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She attended through a telepresence robot, one of the first public figures to do so. Obama waved at her robot on camera. In 2014 she founded the Disability Visibility Project with StoryCorps, a non-profit oral history group. Over the following decade she built a huge body of work: anthologies of disabled writers, podcasts, campaigns, and a memoir called Year of the Tiger (2022). In 2024, the MacArthur Foundation named her one of their fellows, an award often called a 'genius grant'. She died in a San Francisco hospital from an infection on 14 November 2025, aged 51.