In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré cast a spotlight on the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the simultaneous emergence of Nazism and Stalinism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought from her exile in New York City to answer the fundamental questions raised by the unprecedented atrocities in the Soviet Union and Axis-occupied Europe: How could there be such barbarism in the midst of civilization? How had total­itarian governments succeeded in exerting absolute control over millions of their citizens, and in enlisting so many of them to commit mass violence?

Arendt begins The Origins of Totalitarianism by exploring the historical conditions of these twentieth-century catastrophes. After a thorough examination of nineteenth-century antisemitism in Europe and a trenchant account of the Dreyfus Affair in France, she turns to the rise of imperialism, describing how the racialized violence of Europe’s colonial powers enacted a “dress-rehearsal” for what was to come, laying the groundwork for totalitarianism’s advent in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the most chilling features of that era’s totalitarian regimes, Arendt argues, were their demands for unquestioning loyalty to the ruling party and their efforts to warp shared perceptions of reality. Exploiting the pervasive loneliness of mod- ern life, she writes, these governments conducted elaborate programs of psychological manipulation that offered meaning and a sense of belonging predi­cated upon the victimization of others.

This Library of America expanded edition presents the complete text of the final authorized version of Origins. As a special feature, it includes in an appendix two chapters dropped from earlier editions that reveal how the book evolved in the decades after first publi­cation. The first, her original “Concluding Remarks,” shows Arendt engaging with the emerging concept of human rights in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The second offers an early assessment of the suppressed Hungarian revolution of 1956, a case study in resistance under totalitarian rule. This first anno­tated edition of Arendt’s masterpiece features concise and thorough notes on her many historical and cultural references as well as a newly researched chronology of her remarkable life and career.

Jerome Kohn (1931–2024) co-edited this volume. He was the longtime Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Blücher Literary Trust. The author of acclaimed essays on Arendt’s thought, he edited numerous volumes of her uncollected and unpublished writings, including The Jewish Writings and Thinking Without a Banister. In 2019 he was awarded the Heinrich Böll Founda­tion’s Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thinking.

Thomas Wild, co-editor, is Professor of German Studies and Literature at Bard College. He is the author of Hannah Are ndt: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, and is General Editor of the Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Hannah Arendt.