The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Summary

'How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times' Washington Post

Hannah Arendt's 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 non-fiction bookend to Nineteen Eighty-Four' The New York Times

'The political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and the 'banality of evil' has become a surprise bestseller' Guardian

Reviews

A kind of nonfiction bookend to Nineteen Eighty-Four
The New York Times

About the author

Hannah Arendt

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.

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