Why am I passionate about this?
A good part of my life has been devoted to trying to think and write creatively about politics, history, media, and democracy. Under the pseudonym Erica Blair, my first writings were about the meaning and significance of civil society. In early 1989, in London, I founded the world’s first Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD); more recently, I designed and launched the experimental Democracy Lighthouse platform. My books have been published in more than three dozen languages, and I’ve also contributed interviews and articles to global platforms such as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Letras Libres, and the Times Literary Supplement.
John's book list on the abuse of power and democracy
Why did John love this book?
Commonly interpreted as the finest account of the ‘gigantic criminality’ of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes, Arendt’s book has for me a more immediately visceral significance. It has profound things to say about what she called a "terribly cruel" contradiction lurking within the modern democratic commitment to equality.
She pointed out that although democracy demands that we recognize others as our equals, certain groups, especially for reasons of their past sufferings, are prone to misuse and abuse their democratic freedoms. They do so by violently asserting their rights to live as a "sovereign people" at the expense of others whom they treat as "superfluous."
Would Arendt have been surprised by the way a "democratic" state born of the ashes of genocide is nowadays behaving? Would she have condoned its military efforts to destroy "in whole or in part" (Genocide Convention Article 2c) a "superfluous" people known as Palestinians? Almost…
5 authors picked The Origins of Totalitarianism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism—an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history.
The Origins of Totalitarianism 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. Arendt 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…