Book NOT completed
Jan. 7th, 2026 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThe Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt. This is the book I chose to read for January, from my resolutions, but having reached page 163 (not quite a third of the way through), I’ve decided to stop. Although it’s a major work of political theory, and I’ve read some of it before, I am having too many issues with it this time.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is a history of anti-Semitism in Europe, then we have a discussion of the European style of imperialism, and finally there’s a section on totalitarianism. I got all the way through part one and started part two. My problems are threefold. First, in at least the first section she’s writing for people who have a much greater familiarity with the history of Jewish Europe than I have – I’m not familiar with the different types of emancipation, for example, although it seems obvious now that I’ve heard of it that each country must at some point have decided to give at least some of its Jews some of the same rights as its Christian citizens. Relatedly, Arendt isn’t organizing her thoughts to develop clear arguments. She doesn’t set forth the points she’s trying to make and explain how she gets there, she just wanders around the theme a lot. As a small example, she refers several times to the now relatively obscure “Panama scandal” long before she bothers to explain what that scandal was. The third problem is that she makes lots of assertions without providing supportive evidence. She is obviously highly familiar with her topics, and presumably she does have that evidence. Because we know her as a philosopher as well as a historian and political theorist, I would expect that she would be clear about assertions, arguments, evidence, potential counter-arguments, etc., but it’s all rather muddy.
Anyway, my rule for myself is that I need to read at least 100 pages of my self-assigned book before I can set it aside, and if I do set it aside, I need to choose a new book for the month. I am thus choosing Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture. Maybe I’ll come back to Arendt later.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is a history of anti-Semitism in Europe, then we have a discussion of the European style of imperialism, and finally there’s a section on totalitarianism. I got all the way through part one and started part two. My problems are threefold. First, in at least the first section she’s writing for people who have a much greater familiarity with the history of Jewish Europe than I have – I’m not familiar with the different types of emancipation, for example, although it seems obvious now that I’ve heard of it that each country must at some point have decided to give at least some of its Jews some of the same rights as its Christian citizens. Relatedly, Arendt isn’t organizing her thoughts to develop clear arguments. She doesn’t set forth the points she’s trying to make and explain how she gets there, she just wanders around the theme a lot. As a small example, she refers several times to the now relatively obscure “Panama scandal” long before she bothers to explain what that scandal was. The third problem is that she makes lots of assertions without providing supportive evidence. She is obviously highly familiar with her topics, and presumably she does have that evidence. Because we know her as a philosopher as well as a historian and political theorist, I would expect that she would be clear about assertions, arguments, evidence, potential counter-arguments, etc., but it’s all rather muddy.
Anyway, my rule for myself is that I need to read at least 100 pages of my self-assigned book before I can set it aside, and if I do set it aside, I need to choose a new book for the month. I am thus choosing Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture. Maybe I’ll come back to Arendt later.
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