Title:: [[The Origins of Totalitarianism]] Authors:: [[Hannah Arendt]] Tags:: #nonfiction #antisemitism #imperialism #totalitarianism #history Read:: [[2022-11-06]] ## Editions - Edition:: [[Penguin Classics]] Modern Classics, 2017 - Original Copyright:: 1951 - Pages:: 629 ## Annotations Arendt spends the last few pages of her exhaustive history of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism on the topic of loneliness: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world 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 merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality.” Arendt’s loneliness is more akin to alienation, as in the world, culture, economics, or technology move forward with such speed and indifference that, to choose two contemporary examples off the top of my head, movements based on making things great again or conspiracies like QAnon, become an escape from reality that Arendt describes as “a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.” Cool, cool.