After an interval of private study he went in 1791 to the University of Greifswald as a student of theology and history, and in 1793 moved to Jena, where he came under the influence of the German idealist philosopher Gottlieb Fichte.

[4] After the completion of his university studies he returned home, and for two years was a private tutor in the family of Ludwig Koscgarten (1758–1818), pastor of Wittow on Rügen, and having qualified for the ministry as a candidate of theology, he assisted in church services.

[2] At the age of 28 he renounced the ministry, and for 18 months led a life of traveling, visiting Austria, Hungary, Italy, France and Belgium.

[5] In 1800 he taught at the University of Greifswald as an independent lecturer (privatdocent) in history, and the same year published Über die Freiheit der alten Republiken.

In this year he published the first part of his Geist der Zeit, in which he flung down the gauntlet to Napoleon and called on countrymen to rise and shake off the French yoke.

He again set out on his adventurous travels, lived in close contact, with notable men of his time, such as Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, August von Gneisenau and Heinrich Friedrich Karl Stein, and in 1812 was summoned by the last named to St Petersburg to assist in the organization of the final struggle against France.

When, after the peace, the University of Bonn was founded in 1818, Arndt was appointed to teach from his Geist der Zeit, in which he criticized the particularist policies of the German principalities.

Although speedily liberated, he was in the following year, at the behest of the Central Commission of Investigation at Mainz – established in accordance with the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees – arraigned before a special tribunal.

The revolutionary outbreak of 1848 rekindled in the venerable patriot his old hopes and energies, and he took seat as one of the deputies to the National Assembly at Frankfurt.

He participated in the deputation that offered the Imperial crown to Frederick William IV, and was indignant at the king's refusal to accept it, so he retired from public life.

He continued to lecture and to write with freshness and vigor, and on his 90th birthday received from all parts of Germany good wishes and tokens of affection.

[8] During the liberal Revolution of 1848, when the issue of reviving the Polish state was raised in Frankfurt, Arndt declared that "tribes" of Slavs and Wends "have never done or been able to do anything lasting with respect to state, science, or art," and concluded: "At the outset I assert with world history that pronounces judgment [that] the Poles and the whole Slavonic tribe are inferior to Germans.

[10] Arndt paired his antisemitism with his anti-French views, calling the French "the Jewish people" ("das Judenvolk"), or "refined bad Jews" ("verfeinerte schlechte Juden").