We Are Free to Change the World

'In the months after Donald Trump's election, Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism crashed onto the Amazon bestseller lists. 'Never has our future been more unpredictable,' she had written in the preface to the first edition in 1951, 'never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.' With an uncannily accurate prescience, Arendt's dark history of her times seemed to be describing the insanity of our own. Arendt would've recognized the extremes of the twenty-first century from her own: the disenchantment with politics; the rise of conspiracy theories; self-censorship; powerlessness; tyranny and occupation, the climate catastrophe, the banality of evil. She had lived through it already. Born in the first decade of the last century, just before it lurched into war, she escaped Fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential-and controversial-public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Hannah Arendt wrote, and thought, in order to engage directly with the political chaos of her time. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. Her approach was to change the world by examining it unflinchingly, and not simply to criticise and protest. It is this defiance that attracts so many to her work today'