Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism Today

Confirmed speakers: Jeffrey Goldfarb, Siobhan Kattago, Michael Weinman, Peter J. Verovšek, Veronica Cibotaru.

When Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was first published in 1951, it was widely hailed as the first work to offer a systematic conceptualization of the political catastrophe that had menaced European civilization in the preceding decades. The book continues to attract both academic and non-academic readership. In many ways, The Origins is the epitome of the surge of interest towards the contemporary relevance of Arendt’s thinking. It is telling that in 2016, following Donald Trump’s first election as president, The Origins became an international bestseller once again. In the face of widespread fear that we are sliding into a new era of authoritarian rule, if not totalitarianism proper, understanding the origins and elements of what Arendt called ‘total domination’ continues to be of foremost political importance and central to the democratic project.

75 years after the publication of The Origins, this international and interdisciplinary conference will gather scholars from different fields of studies critically interested in the current relevance of her reflections in Arendt’s study of “the totalitarian phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society.” Empirically and politically, many different aspects of totalitarian domination she itemizes in this book continue to threaten democratic self-governance today, sometimes in their already-known and sometimes in a novel guise. These threats include conspiracy theories, ideology, loneliness, mass superfluity, statelessness or the crisis of human rights, and this list is far from being complete.