On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt

A MOMENT FOR ARENDT:Since the 2016 U.S. election, Hannah Arendt and her works have experienced a major rise in popularity. Her writings on how democracies collapse into autocracies and why populations support totalitarian governments have found an interested audience as authoritarians take power across the globe. In the months following the election, The Origins of Totalitarianism was selling at sixteen times its normal rate and was selling out at bookstores around the world, and she was the subject of pieces by the Guardian, Vox, and the Washington Post, among others. Love and Evil is perfectly positioned to find audiences eager to explore Arendt's thoughts further.TOTALITARIANISM ON THE RISE:Across all media, we have been inundated with warnings of the rise of would-be populist authoritarianism around the world, from the politics of Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping. There is an appetite for books that examine the moral imperative to understand and confront political movements that threaten human rights on a fundamental level.ICONIC FIGURE IN 20TH-CENTURY HISTORY:It's important not to understate what an iconic figure Hannah Arendt has become. In 1961, she reported for The New Yorker on the war-crimes trial of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, after which she famously coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Thus "evil" is juxtaposed with "love" as a major current in her philosophy. This period of her life is the subject of a 2013 German biopic, Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Arendt's work is cited today in connection with the worldwide crisis of migration and stateless refugees, as evidenced by the following New Yorker piece by Masha Gessen: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-right-to-have-rights-and-the-plight-of-the-stateless. Arendt herself experienced life as a stateless refugee after she was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually making her way to the United States in 1940.INTEREST IN LITERATURE ON TYRANNY:The past several years has seen a resurgence of interest in literature examining the nature of tyranny and in Arendt's life and philosophical and political thinking in particular. Arendt's book The Origins of Totalitarianism is considered a definitive treatise on the subject, examining the rise of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and it is an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history. Her book The Human Condition was reissued by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. In a similar vein, Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny was a #1 New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller.UNIQUE THEMATIC APPROACH TO ARENDT'S THINKING:In this book, Dr. Ann Heberlein presents an utterly unique approach to Arendt's thinking, by demonstrating how major themes in her work are intimately connected to her lived experiences. By relating Arendt's theoretical reflections to her life, Heberlein paints a dramatic and compelling portrait of this major period in Western history (Arendt lived from 1906 to 1975). As Heberlein "grafts" Arendt's personal biography and thinking onto contemporary debates, she focuses on Arendt's reflections on totalitarianism, violence, responsibility, and forgiveness - topics very much of the moment in our social discourse as we contend with the refugee crisis and the rise of the alt-right, xenophobia, and anxiety.