The highly influential work by political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) on totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century will be the subject of discussion at an international conference at Freie Universität Berlin from October 19-21, 2022. The event is organized by researchers from the German Research Foundation project "Hannah Arendt - Complete Works: Critical Edition." The Origins of Totalitarianism / Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft is the fifth volume in the series. Scholars from different disciplines will discuss the newly edited, annotated, and commented material from Arendt’s seminal study of totalitarianism. The new critical edition of the book is set to be released next year.
The book, which Arendt began writing in the early 1940s, was finally published in 1951 as The Origins of Totalitarianism. A heavily rewritten and expanded German version followed in 1955. Now considered one of her most important works, the text cemented Arendt’s reputation as a political theorist and turned her into a public intellectual virtually overnight. Divided into three sections ("Antisemitism," "Imperialism," and "Totalitarianism"), The Origins of Totalitarianism explores the historical development of National Socialism and draws comparisons between it and the Stalinist regime of the USSR. It is considered a key text in the study of totalitarianism and a milestone in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Though she was not the first person to use the adjective "totalitarian" when speaking of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, her analysis of totalitarianism would, in the long term, become the most influential by far. The book would go on to inspire future work on subjects such as the nature of antisemitism, expansionist policies of imperialism, and organized mass genocide in the twentieth century. Seventy years after her book was first published, her insights into the origins of totalitarianism have a haunting timeliness.
The participants at the international conference will discuss how Arendt’s work came to exist, how it has been received in different contexts over time, and how we can interpret the book today.
Hannah Arendt, born in Linden near Hanover in 1906, was a German-Jewish political philosopher who later became an American citizen, having fled war-time Europe. She died in New York in 1975. Her vast body of work confronts the traditions of political thought through critical readings, addressing the challenges of a twentieth century scarred by totalitarianism and horrific violence.
This critical edition is the first publication to present all of Arendt’s published and unpublished works in a reliable scholarly edition with critical commentary. The edition will be bilingual, and all of Arendt’s texts will be published in the language in which she originally wrote them. Three volumes have been released so far, with seventeen volumes in total to be published as hybrid editions - that is to say, a digital publication will be made available online as an open access resource alongside each print publication. A new critical edition of volume fourteen titled Life of the Mind will come out next year, followed by The Origins of Totalitarianism in the fall.
International Conference on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism from October 19-21, 2022 at Freie Universität Berlin
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