Why Arendt Matters (Why X Matters Series)

Upon publication of her field manual, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1951, Hannah Arendt immediately gained recognition as a major political analyst. Over the next twenty-five years, she wrote ten more books and developed a set of ideas that profoundly influenced the way America and Europe addressed the central questions and dilemmas of World War II. In this concise book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl introduces her mentor s work to twenty-first-century readers. Arendt s ideas, as much today as in her own lifetime, illuminate those issues that perplex us, such as totalitarianism, terrorism, globalization, war, and radical evil. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who was Arendt s doctoral student in the early 1970s and who wrote the definitive biography of her mentor in 1982, now revisits Arendt s major works and seminal ideas. Young-Bruehl considers what Arendt s analysis of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union can teach us about our own times, and how her revolutionar