Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism Expanded Edition (Loa #389)

A deluxe expanded edition of the masterpiece of political philosophy that transformed how the world thinks about fascism and authoritarianism

Includes two fascinating chapters that were later cut and are available in no other edition

In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré addressed the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought, from her exile in New York City, to answer the unfathomable questions raised by the Soviet gulag and the Holocaust: How could there be such barbarism in the midst of civilization? How had governments exerted such absolute control over citizens, terrorizing them and enlisting them to commit atrocities on their behalf?

Arendt’s historical and cultural analyses extend to a thorough examination of nineteenth-century antisemitism in Europe, including a trenchant account of the Dreyfus Affair in France and brilliant insights into imperialism, racism, and their role in totalitarianism’s rise in the 1920s and 1930s. Arendt contends that totalitarianism, as a political system, is now embedded in contemporary life and is, as she would later remark, ＂the central event of our world.＂

Her clear-eyed warning that totalitarianism is not merely a historical episode but is rather a permanent feature of modernity and beyond--a danger never to be fully eradicated, and a continual temptation for anti-democratic demagogues--makes Arendt, a half-century after her death, a preeminent thinker and political philosopher for the twenty-first century.

The Library of America edition of this indispensable and influential work, based on the final version she revised in her lifetime, also restores to print Arendt’s ＂Concluding Remarks＂ to the 1951 first American edition and a chapter on the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, both of which were cut from later editions. The first annotated edition of Origins, the volume contains concise and thorough glosses on Arendt’s many historical and cultural references, and its Chronology provides a detailed portrait of her remarkable life.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Hanover, Germany, and obtained her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, she became a social worker in Paris, and, once again escaping the Nazis in 1940, she emigrated to the United States, where she lived until her death, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1950. Her major philosophical works are The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind, edited by her friend Mary McCarthy.

Jerome Kohn, editor, is the Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Blücher Literary Trust. He has written numerous essays on aspects of Arendt’s thought and has edited volumes of Arendt’s uncollected and unpublished writings including The Jewish Writings of Hannah Arendt and Thinking Without Bannisters. In 2019 Kohn was awarded the Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thinking. Thomas Wild, editor, is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies at Bard College. He is the author of Hannah Arendt: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, and is General Editor of Arendt’s Complete Works.