In 1950, in the preface she wrote to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, knowing that what had just passed could repeat itself, described the scant half decade that had elapsed since the end of the Second World War as an era of great unease: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest-forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” Autocrats have risen before they have used mass violence before they have broken the laws of war before. So much of what we imagine to be new is old so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago.
This article has been adapted from the introduction to The Folio Society’s new edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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