Hannah Arendt

The German-born political theorist who escaped the catastrophe she then spent her life explaining. The Origins of Totalitarianism traces how free societies decay into terror. The Human Condition recovers what is lost when they do: action, plurality, the public realm where people appear among others as equals and begin something new. She wrote that freedom is not an inner feeling but a thing done in public, with others. Few thinkers are more necessary now.