Sources of Tyranny

The world is less free than it was even a couple of decades ago. This isn’t a phenomenon confined to one country; political parties nearly everywhere are willing to stoke hatred against minorities and are seeking power in order to institutionalise division and discrimination, inventing new propaganda techniques to cultivate exclusionary narratives as they go. Set against this, the political world of the late twentieth century looks almost like a golden age of individual freedom, rights and international cooperation.

We may not fully understand the reasons, mechanics or the destination of the current descent into unfreedom; not at least until enough time has passed to interpret it clearly. However, we can still learn from earlier instances of people being seduced into the grip of totalitarian regimes, and that’s what this course sets out to do.

Through eight weeks, we do a close and collective reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt, one of the most significant philosophical voices of the twentieth century, analyses how her own country descended into mass hatred and a kind of collective unthinking.

Written in the years just after the Second World War, as the documents from German archives were first emerging, Arendt traces the path to mass incarceration, deportation and a world war. We shall also read a short excerpt from Arendt’s later, more philosophical work, The Human Condition, which grew directly out of the political reality described in The Origins.

Each week takes up a specific section, which shall be assigned in advance. The goal isn’t to discover a pre-given answer, but to use the nuances of a different historical moment to sharpen our interpretation of our own political and cultural condition. Participants should be able to commit to 40-50 pages of reading a week.