Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

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. 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.