The Origins of Totalitarianism

Arendt's classic work explores totalitarianism through an extended analysis of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. In a series of dazzling insights, she explores the role of propaganda, the use of terror and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination. A surprise bestseller in the wake of the US presidential election, Arendt's book offers chilling lessons about the threat of totalitarianism that we ignore at our peril.

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>

Auteur
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.