The Origins of Totalitarianism, a thick volume on political philosophy, written in the aftermath of World War II, is Nietzschean in its approach (cf. Hannah Arendt, a German-born woman of Jewish descent, witnessed the rise of antisemitism in Germany in the early 1930s and even got arrested by the Gestapo. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975.

In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century.

The origins of totalitarism