Hannah Arendt on The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential contemporary political thinkers. Her work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in the 1950s, is a classic work that threw light on the emergence of Totalitarian regimes under Hitler and Stalin. Although her opposition to Nazism and Communism may compel us to place her among Liberal Political Thinkers, many of her ideas and observations point out that there are totalitarian tendencies even among the so-called liberal democratic nations. In the book, she holds imperialism and anti-Semetism responsible for the rise of totalitarian regimes. We can see many features she attributed to totalitarianism are prevalent in all modern states claiming to be democratic. That makes Arendt' work relevant even today.