The Origins of Totalitarianism (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Hannah Arendt
- First Published: 1951
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: The late eighteenth and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- Setting: Europe
- Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, History, Sociology
- Subjects: Power, personal or social, Class conflict, Communism or communists, Politics, Racism, Race, Europe or Europeans, World War II, Violence, Jews or Jewish life, Oppression, Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, Cruelty, Government, Nazism or Nazis, Hate crimes, Holocaust, Jewish, Totalitarianism, Imperialism, Soviet Union or Soviets
Form and Content
The fact that Hannah Arendt was a Jewish refugee from Nazi oppression cannot be divorced from The Origins of Totalitarianism. Written with eminent scholarship (hardly a page lacks footnotes and in some cases the footnotes are of greater length than the text), the book nevertheless is a passionate condemnation of totalitarianism. Arendt, in short, was searching for the intellectual roots of the movement which had displaced her from her native Germany and had made her a refugee in a world decidedly unfriendly toward Jews. Clearly the book is the...
[The entire page is 3210 words long]
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