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Gross sales of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) rocketed when Donald Trump received the 2016 US presidential election. Just about a 12 months into the second one Trump management – and 50 years since Arendt’s loss of life in December 1975 – it kind of feels like an apposite time to revisit the guide and notice what gentle it sheds on 2025.

The guide is sensible however tricky, combining historical past, political science and philosophy in some way that may be very disorientating. So what may we, as democratic voters, achieve from studying it?

Born to a mundane German Jewish circle of relatives in 1906, Arendt studied philosophy below Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers ahead of turning to Zionist activism in Berlin within the early Thirties. After a broom with the gestapo, she fled to France, and in 1941 left Europe for america. So when she started researching Origins within the early Nineteen Forties, she was once no stranger to totalitarianism.

Penguin

Totalitarianism, she argued, was once a radically new type of executive prominent by way of its ideological conception of historical past. For the Nazis, historical past was once a conflict of races; for Stalinism, it was once elegance struggle. Both manner, totalitarian leaders sought to execute ancient “laws” by way of forcibly reshaping the people they dominated.

Humanity, Arendt mentioned, is prominent by way of its limitless variability – nobody can ever…

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Author : bq3anews

Publish date : 2025-12-24 16:27:00

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