Why Arendt Matters

From Arendts preeminent biographer, an exploration of the particular relevance of the great philosophers thought to the world of today Upon publication of her field manual, The Origins of Totalitarianism,in 1951, Hannah Arendt immediately gained recognition as a major political analyst. Over the next twenty-five years, she wrote ten more books and developed a set of ideas that profoundly influenced the way America and Europe addressed the central questions and dilemmas of World War II. In this concise book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl introduces her mentors work to twenty-first-century readers. Arendts ideas, as much today as in her own lifetime, illuminate those issues that perplex us, such as totalitarianism, terrorism, globalization, war, and radical evil. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who was Arendts doctoral student in the early 1970s and who wrote the definitive biography of her mentor in 1982, now revisits Arendts major works and seminal ideas. Young-Bruehl considers what Arendts analysis of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union can teach us about our own times, and how her revolutionary understanding of political action is connected to forgiveness and making promises for the future. The author also discusses The Life of the Mind, Arendts unfinished meditation on how to think about thinking. Placed in the context of todays political landscape, Arendts ideas take on a new immediacy and importance. They require our attention, Young-Bruehl shows, and continue to bring fresh truths to light.