![]() So Arendt is interested in what makes people and societies vulnerable to this kind of takeover, takeover by totalitarianisms in the moment she’s writing, but I’d also say in our moment to authoritarians, to demagogues, to con artists. This is not a lesson that’s been learned. Look at how deeply liberals underestimated all of them, and the appeal they would have and continue having, even when they failed the very movements they promised to help. And look around today, it’s still happening - look at Putin, look at Trump, look at Xi. Arendt was the master theorist of liberalism’s most fundamental blind spot, its inability to account for or even understand the appeal of its shadow, of illiberalism. That’s how Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize winning 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? What is it about Arendt that matters, and that keeps mattering decade after decade? I think it’s this. ![]() ![]() So many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. So much of what we imagine to be new is old. Transcript Anne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism The writer discusses what Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” reveals about the fragility of liberal democracy. ![]()
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