The Latest Breaking News from Hannah Arendt

Fascism has been lurking under the surface of liberal democracy all along — we just didn't want to see it

In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.

In 1963, six years after the first satellite was launched, editors from the Encyclopaedia Britannica posed a question to five eminent thinkers of the day: “Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?” The respondents were philosopher Hannah Arendt, writer Aldous Huxley, theologian Paul Tillich, nuclear scientist Harrison…

Extraordinary evil involves a total moral collapse across society caused by failure of individual humanity and ethical judgment. This was the conclusion of the philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann – the chief architect of the Holocaust – in Jerusalem.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted description of the “banality of evil” could be applied to the disquieting story told in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The Booker prize-winning novel is a perfect study of the banality of totalitarianism.

The “actual impulse of astonishment” that sparks all philosophising is “honest bafflement that other people live as they do,” writes Wolfram Eilenberger in his new book, The Visionaries.

After attending the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt claimed what was terrifying about this man was not his moral monstrosity. It was his sheer normality. She subtitled her 1963 book on the subject, Eichmann in Jerusalem, “a report on the…

Many of Trump’s diehard followers are White Christians who have found a role model and outlet for their desires

Other lives: Academic interested in intellectual history and prolific author of books including on Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg