The massive, magisterial book resists easy summary, as it’s a ruminative and essayistic-and occasionally repetitive-performance. In a recent Harper’s essay, Rebecca Panovka addresses Arendt’s misuse over the last half decade, as centrist liberals mistook her for someone who might sympathize with tech-monopoly censorship, positivistic fact-checking, the politicization of art, the adulation of science and expertise, social-media cancellation campaigns, or other features of Trump-era “resistance.” If Origins of Totalitarianism is anything to go by, though, Panovka undersells the affront Arendt offers the contemporary liberal reader-an affront that might serve as a useful shock to our system. This sense of mission might explain the use to which politically-engaged readers have lately put Arendt’s concepts. To invalidate all obsolete political differentiations from right to left and to introduce beside and above them the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah ArendtĬoncluding this 1951 classic of political science, polymathic refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt gives the postwar reader a solemn charge:
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