The book is brilliant but difficult, combining history, political science and philosophy in a way that can be very disorientating. So what might democratic citizens gain from reading it?
Born to a secular German Jewish family in 1906, Arendt studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers before turning to Zionist activism in Berlin in the early 1930s. After a brush with the Gestapo, she fled to France, and in 1941 left Europe for the US. So when she began researching Origins in the early 1940s, she was no stranger to totalitarianism.
