The Origins of Totalitarianism

How free societies fail, written by someone who escaped the failure and then spent her life explaining it. Arendt traces the path from isolation and loneliness to mass movements to terror, and shows that totalitarianism is not merely cruel government but a wholly new thing, an assault on the human capacity to think and to act together. Required reading when it appeared, and more so now. The book names the machinery so the reader can recognize it early.

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.