THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover Germany in 1906 and received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933 she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo after which she fled Germany for Paris where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children. In 1937 she was stripped of her German citizenship and in 1941 she left France for the United States. Her many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) in which she coined the famous phrase the banality of evil. She died in 1975.A kind of nonfiction bookend to Nineteen EightyFourHow could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we too live in dark times even if they are different and perhaps less dark and Origins raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can leadPerhaps Arendts most profound legacy is in establishing that one has to consider oneself political as part of the human condition. What are your political acts and what politics do they serve?Her masterpiece ... Arendts inquiry into the elements of totalitarian domination teaches us we must never let go of the fear of totalitarian governmentA vivid account of the system of concentration and death camps that Arendt believed defined totalitarian ruleRemarkable for us no doubt is Arendts conviction that only philosophy could have saved those millions of livesHer greatest work is this 1951 classic ... More than any thinker it was Hannah Arendt who identified how those movements of ideas racial theories people and methods take place showing how they fused with other forces most notably European antisemitism to shape and ultimately disfigure the twentieth centuryHow could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we too live in dark times Washington PostHannah Arendts chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a warning from history about the fragility of freedom exploring how propaganda scapegoats terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards total domination. A nonfiction bookend to Nineteen EightyFour The New York TimesThe political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and the banality of evil has become a surprise bestseller Guardian