The Origins of Totalitarianism.

THE RAREST OF ARENDT'S MAIN WORKS

First edition, first printing. 8vo. xv, [1], 477, [1] pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge in red, dust jacket (neat ownership inscription to front free endpaper; slight lean to text block; jacket rather edge worn and heavily creased with some small areas of loss along the extremities, crude tape repairs to head of spine panel and upper edge of front panel, notwithstanding a good example of the rare jacket). New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Arendt's first major work, and certainly the rarest of her main works in first edition, an unusually difficult book to find in any kind of acceptable condition. An advance review copy, with the publisher's printed review slip pasted to the front free endpaper.

 This seminal study of modern totalitarianism 'established Arendt's reputation as a leading political theorist and triggered an intense debate - which persisted throughout the Cold War - about the true nature of totalitarianism. Arendt's analyses of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism - the three main sections of Origins - convey a complex and dynamic image: European nation-states declining, supranationalist movements arising, political anti-Semitism becoming the key ideology of the Nazis, and traditional class structures crumbling, replaced by masses of alienated, déclassé proto-totalitarians. While many felt Arendt clearly analysed Nazism, some critics believed she was less successful in identifying the development of Stalinism, which in Arendt's view was a horrible new form of one-party dictatorship' (ANB). 

Arendt 'was a critic of modern mass society which, with its tendency to atomization, alienation, anomie, and diffusion of responsibility, was fertile ground for what she called 'totalitarianism', in which individual human life becomes meaningless and freedoms are eroded' (Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, p. 30).

Arendt's study was particularly pertinent when, a decade later, she came face to face with Adolf Eichmann, the orchestrator of the Final Solution, at his trial in Jerusalem, about whom she coined the term 'the banality of evil'.

Stock Code: 252694