hannah arendt on the origins of totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, born in Linden near Hanover in 1906, was a German-Jewish political philosopher who later became an American citizen, having fled war-time Europe. The participants at the international conference will discuss how Arendt’s work came to exist, how it has been received in different contexts over time, and how we can interpret the book today. Seventy years after her book was first published, her insights into the origins of totalitarianism have a haunting timeliness. The book would go on to inspire future work on subjects such as the nature of antisemitism, expansionist policies of imperialism, and organized mass genocide in the twentieth century. Though she was not the first person to use the adjective “totalitarian” when speaking of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, her analysis of totalitarianism would, in the long term, become the most influential by far.

It is considered a key text in the study of totalitarianism and a milestone in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Divided into three sections (“Antisemitism,” “Imperialism,” and “Totalitarianism”), The Origins of Totalitarianism explores the historical development of National Socialism and draws comparisons between it and the Stalinist regime of the USSR. Now considered one of her most important works, the text cemented Arendt’s reputation as a political theorist and turned her into a public intellectual virtually overnight. A heavily rewritten and expanded German version followed in 1955. The book, which Arendt began writing in the early 1940s, was finally published in 1951 as The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Hannah arendt on the origins of totalitarianism