The Hannah Arendt essay collection Vol.1
Another instalment from the Museum of Impossible Forms Reading Circle of critical and pertinent texts you need to read RIGHT NOW.
Since we've been busy and been late for this update, here is a set of texts to keep you busy in return:
The Hannah Arendt essay collection Vol.1
Do share your favourite excerpts of these texts, and this amazing thinker.
"The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin's after 1929 and Hitler's after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism, in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted.
The most extreme manifestation of this climate which, with minor geographical and chronological exceptions have been the atmosphere of our century since its inception, is the gradual breakdown of the one form of authority which exists in all historically known societies, the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils and, generally of the elders over the young. Even the least "authoritarian" forms of government have always accepted this kind of "authority" as a matter of course. It has always seemed to be required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilization which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers. Because of its simple and elementary character, this form of a strictly limited authority has, throughout the history of political thought, been used and abused as a model for very different and much less limited authoritarian systems."
– Hannah Arendt, Authority in the Twentieth Century, 1956