About this item
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism - an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history - now with a new introduction by Anne Applebaum.In recent years, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become essential reading as we grapple with the rise of autocrats and tyrannical thought across the globe. The book begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Hannah Arendt then explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left.
About the Author
Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, , published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, , published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action) . In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, , which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging) .
