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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Hannah Arendt's exploration of Totalitarianism
Description: Hannah Arendt tackled the big ideas behind possibly the most dangerous period of the twentieth century: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. These phenomena and the concepts of freedom and evil were all the more immediate to her, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in her writing which has often focused on mass propaganda, the differences between fact and fiction and the rise of the strong man leader. It's 70 years since Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, so what does a re-reading of it tell us about our own world?<...