There is no experience quite like reading a book that changes the way you think. Page by page, you feel your mind’s conceptual foundations trembling, then starting to shift and slide; at times every paragraph seems to trigger a small avalanche. It doesn’t happen often, and the same book won’t do it for everyone, but this is one of the joys of reading. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition did it for me.
Arendt, a German Jew who fled the Hitler regime and ended up in the United States, is best known for her account of the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, where she coined her famous phrase “the banality of evil,” and for her earlier book The Origins of Totalitarianism, briefly a bestseller after Donald Trump’s election in 2016. As its title implies, The Human Condition (published 1958) casts a much wider lens on the development of western society. Naturally I can only look at a small part of it here.
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