![]() ![]() She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. ![]() – From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience … ![]()
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