The Origins of Totalitarianism Introduction by Samantha Power

And the last book is a classic. It's not a modern study. But I think we now need to read Hannah Arendt. And we need to read The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, another one of these books that when you begin quoting it, you know things are not going great. "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all firstrate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

The last book is a classic; we need to read The Origins of Totalitarianism and reflect on the developments of the 20s and 30s and how those regimes came to power.

The last book is a classic... we need to read the Origins of Totalitarianism and reflect on the developments of the 20s and 30s and how those regimes came to power.

The last book is a classic. It's not a modern study. But I think we now need to go back to read Hannah Arendt, and we need to read the origins of totalitarianism and reflect on the developments of the 20s and the 30s and the nature of how these regimes came to power.

third book I would recommend, which, you know, I was also very impressed by actually rereading a book by, you know, Anna Arendt and, you know, the rise of totalitarianism, which I did not realize how much she was also talking about the issue of federalism and democratic federalism.

if people are interested in the Arendt book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, a couple weeks ago on the show, I had on an Applebomb for discussion all about that book and what it teaches us today.

That's how Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and journalist at The Atlantic, begins her introduction to a new edition of Hannah Arendt's 1951 classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Why do people keep going back to this book?

I certainly had that experience reading Arendt for this, but I think like you do that her description and discussion of loneliness is really quite important.

She says towards the end that what makes a society vulnerable to takeover is loneliness.

The third thing I recommend is Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. If you haven't read it, it's a very long book. You don't have to read all of it. But the sections in the second part that focus on mass movements and propaganda and dictatorship, you'll find them revelatory because they sound so much like things that are happening today.

which of course is a quotation from Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, which I will just make then book number two because Arendt is very good at getting inside the kinds of logics that we've talked about.

And this is something Hannah Arendt wrote about, right? That totalitarian regimes hold out the carrot of stability while constantly manufacturing instability.

the concept of totalitarianism was important to the realism of this period realists argued that totalitarian regimes were ruthless and relentlessly expansionist the totalitarian menace was supposedly so great that it required the managers of the US state to abandon conventional morality in order to combat it

the concept of totalitarianism was important to the realism of this period realists argued that totalitarian regimes were ruthless and relentlessly expansionist the totalitarian menace was supposedly so great that it required the managers of the US state to abandon conventional morality in order to combat it

We read Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism recently.

We read Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism recently.

We read Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism recently. Chuck just read that too.

She said that in totalitarian regimes, people tend to give up their everyday concerns for abstract concepts.

Hannah Arendt...wrote on what led to the to the evil that is the Nazis and she had a phrase that that was really powerful uh the banality of evil

she really she talked about how it's not just you know someone cackling with horns and a red tail like so obviously evil that that you know you're like okay this is this is a crazy bad guy it was the boring aspect she talked about I think it was Eichmann how when he testified at Nuremberg he he sounded like an accountant

a mass society of laborers such as Marx had in mind when he spoke of quote socialized mankind consists of worldless specimens of the species mankind, whether they are household slaves driven into their predicament by the violence of others or free performing their functions willingly.

this worldlessness of the animal labyrinth to be sure is entirely different from the active flight from the publicity of the world, which we found inherent in the activity of good works. The animal labyrinth does not flee the world. But is ejected from it in so far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfillment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate.

the outcome is what is euphemistically called mass culture and it's deep rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness due on one side to the troubled balance between laboring and consumption and on the other to the persistent demands of the animal labyrinths to obtain a happiness, which can be achieved only where life's processes of exhaustion and regeneration of pain and release from pain strike a perfect balance.

I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life. I would receive no directives from anybody. No orders and commands would any longer be issued to me. No pertinent ordinances would be there to consult. In brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me.

what prepares men for totalitarian domination...is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.

in a world where people are going to say it is even though they know it isn't. That is deeply estranging. That's what creates those conditions of loneliness and despair.

if there is a bar in the underworld where the lost angels of history now hang out, I imagine Arendt drawing on her eternal cigarette and issuing us a word of caution about the contemporary relevance of her work.

the mistake we made last time was to try and derive the unprecedented from things that had already happened. We didn't think properly. Your reality is both similar, but different in ways you will have to work out.

the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

I guess we need a little bit more of you. Why don't you just tell me something mundane like what you had for lunch?

And I think it was actually much later in my life that I came to her and it was a sense of moral and historical clarity that she had.

And Hannah Arendt asked another question, which I think is uniquely important, which is how in modern times is evil organized?

she was very committed to the idea that people who felt like they were outsiders and spectators in their worlds could have a contribution to make to that world, could understand that world from a certain perspective and could engage with it.

if there is a bar in the underworld where the lost angels of history now hang out, I imagine Arendt drawing on her eternal cigarette and issuing us a word of caution about the contemporary relevance of her work.

what prepares men for totalitarian denomination

loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human

the banality of evil

the dark background of difference

what prepares men for totalitarian denomination. And here again is what happens in the human heart and psyche and society that makes these things possible is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

the isolation of - that she wrote, what prepares men for totalitarian denomination.

loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

the more interconnected the world gets, the more global it gets, the bigger the dark background of difference is going to get. And therefore the more threatened, you know, the more threatened people who are, you know, consider themselves to be in political nation states, the more threatened they're going to be.

but there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.