Latest List

Top Ten Books

Best known for her major works, including “The Human Condition,” “On Violence,” “Truth and Politics,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” which grew out of her coverage of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, the writer and thinker Hannah Arendt spent her life grappling with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism, and understood how the wickedness of Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union could be allowed to grow unchecked. But in her understanding was also a warning. It was Arendt who wrote, presciently as it happens, that “the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In his book, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein offers an illuminated introduction to key themes in Arendt’s work, and reminds us why Arendt's work matters today as much as ever. See the full list...