Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism--an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history--now with a new introduction by Anne Applebaum.

In recent years, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become essential reading as we grapple with the rise of autocrats and tyrannical thought across the globe.

The book begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I.

Hannah Arendt then explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

This edition includes an introduction by Anne Applebaum--a leading voice on authoritarianism and Russian history--who fears that once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize.

The past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the political thinker Hannah Arendt, the theorist of beginnings, whose work probes the logics underlying unexpected transformations--from totalitarianism to revolution.

A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then--diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions--continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan's 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.

A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.

More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience

Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature.

In Resistance to Civil Government (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a higher law.

In Civil Disobedience (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur.

This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.

Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth century's foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetry--especially that of Dickinson, Goethe, and Lowell--informed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems.

In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography. For nearly forty years after her death, these poems remained hidden among the archives of the Library of Congress, until 2011, when they were rediscovered by scholar and translator Samantha Rose Hill. Now, for the first time in English, Hill and Genese Grill present Arendt's poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York's Upper West Side.

Throughout, Arendt uses poetry to mark moments of joy, love, loss, and reflection. In W. B., written in 1942, she remembers Walter Benjamin, who died near the French-Spanish border while attempting to flee the Nazis: Gentle whispering melodies / Sound from the darkness. / We listen so we can let go. So, too, she reflects on mutability and transience in 1946: I know that the houses have fallen. / We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they / were more durable than ourselves. She tries to understand her place in the world: Ironically foolish, / I've forgotten nothing, / I know the emptiness, / I know the burden, / I dance, I dance / In ironic splendor.

A gift to all readers of Arendt, this stunning, dual-language edition provides an unparalleled view into the inner sanctum of one of our most original thinkers.

The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism

Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative--an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich

No one, Hannah Arendt observed, has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue. But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function?

Fifty years ago, the century's greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, remain powerfully relevant, perhaps more so today than when they were written.

In Truth and Politics, Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality--the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives--can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents.

In Lying in Politics, written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia, arguing that the real goal of the Vietnam War--and of the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations--was nothing other than the burnishing of America's image.

In his introduction, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) engages with Arendt's essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying.

A unique and fascinating look at violent political change by one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century and the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt's penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. On Revolution is her classic exploration of a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the eighteenth-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the twentieth century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future. Illuminating and prescient, this timeless work will fascinate anyone who seeks to decipher the forces that shape our tumultuous age.

From the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day (Harper's Magazine)

Hannah Arendt's insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future. To participate in these exercises is to associate, in action, with one of the most original and fruitful minds of the twentieth century.

An analysis of the nature, causes, and significance of violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Arendt also reexamines the relationship between war, politics, violence, and power. Incisive, deeply probing, written with clarity and grace, it provides an ideal framework for understanding the turbulence of our times(Nation). Index.

A collection of studies in which Arendt, from the standpoint of a political philosopher, views the crises of the 1960s and early 1970s as challenges to the american form of government. Index.

Essays on Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, Randall Jarrell, and others whose lives and work illuminated the early part of the century. Index.

The most intriguing...and thought-provoking book that Hannah Arendt wrote (The New York Times Book Review), The Life of the Mind is the final work by the political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker.This fascinating book investigates thought itself as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from Arendt's previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this is an exploration of the mind's activities she considered to be the most fundamental. The result is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.

A deluxe expanded edition of the masterpiece of political philosophy that transformed how the world thinks about fascism and authoritarianism

Includes two fascinating chapters that were later cut and are available in no other edition

In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré addressed the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought, from her exile in New York City, to answer the unfathomable questions raised by the Soviet gulag and the Holocaust: How could there be such barbarism in the midst of civilization? How had governments exerted such absolute control over citizens, terrorizing them and enlisting them to commit atrocities on their behalf?

Arendt's historical and cultural analyses extend to a thorough examination of nineteenth-century antisemitism in Europe, including a trenchant account of the Dreyfus Affair in France and brilliant insights into imperialism, racism, and their role in totalitarianism's rise in the 1920s and 1930s. Arendt contends that totalitarianism, as a political system, is now embedded in contemporary life and is, as she would later remark, the central event of our world.

Her clear-eyed warning that totalitarianism is not merely a historical episode but is rather a permanent feature of modernity and beyond--a danger never to be fully eradicated, and a continual temptation for anti-democratic demagogues--makes Arendt, a half-century after her death, a preeminent thinker and political philosopher for the twenty-first century.

The Library of America edition of this indispensable and influential work, based on the final version she revised in her lifetime, also restores to print Arendt's Concluding Remarks to the 1951 first American edition and a chapter on the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, both of which were cut from later editions. The first annotated edition of Origins, the volume contains concise and thorough glosses on Arendt's many historical and cultural references, and its Chronology provides a detailed portrait of her remarkable life.

A collection of writings by a groundbreaking political thinker, including excerpts from The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem

She was a Jew born in Germany in the early twentieth century, and she studied with the greatest German minds of her day--Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers among them. After the rise of the Nazis, she emigrated to America where she proceeded to write some of the most searching, hard-hitting reflections on the agonizing issues of the time: totalitarianism in both Nazi and Stalinist garb; Zionism and the legacy of the Holocaust; federally mandated school desegregation and civil rights in the United States; and the nature of evil.

The Portable Hannah Arendt offers substantial excerpts from the three works that ensured her international and enduring stature: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Additionally, this volume includes several other provocative essays, as well as her correspondence with other influential figures.

Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt's writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt's developments as a thinker--and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.

Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The disseration became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change.

In Love and Saint Augustine, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years.

This middle volume focuses on the curious and cruel epoch of declining European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Index.

In the final volume, Arendt focuses on the two genuine forms of the totalitarian state in history-the dictatorships of Bolshevism after 1930 and of National Socialism after 1938. Index.

Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt's life, where she addresses fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. At the heart of the book is a profound ethical investigation, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, in which Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral truths as standards to judge what we are capable of doing and examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We also see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed.

Responsibility and Judgment is an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time.

Recognized since publication as the definitive account of the philosophical origins of the totalitarian mind, this work remains the foundation for further study of its subject.

Tracing the rise of antisemitism to Central and Western European Jewish history during the nineteenth century, Dr. Arendt delineates the part Jews played both in the development of the nation-state and within Gentile society. With the appearance of the first political activity by antisemitic parties In the 1870s and 1880s, Dr. Arendt states, the machinery that ended in the horror of the final solution was set in motion. She further views the Dreyfus Affair as a kind of dress rehearsal for the performance of our time -- the first characteristically modern use of antisemitism as an instrument of public policy and of hysteria as a political weapon.