This is the opening to my essay on Hannah Arendt and her significance today, published in the Observer on 4 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?” asked Hannah Arendt in a preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. These were “questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life”. Among the most influential political thinkers of the 20th […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aime cesaire, antisemitism, frantz fanon, hannah arendt, holocaust, imperialism, jewishness, nazism, race-imperialism, racism, scramble for africa, stalinism, the origins of totalitarianism