Origins of Totalitarianism: Race-Thinking Before Racism

Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

This episode of Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz deals with Chapter 5 of Origins of Totalitarianism: Race-Thinking Before Racism. Our podcast follows the book that we are reading in our current Virtual Reading Group (VRG), which meets weekly on Fridays at 1 PM EST. We are currently reading Arendt's classic analysis of the 20th century, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In Origins, Arendt tracks the rise of Fascism and Communism and explores what differentiates these regimes from past authoritarian systems. THE HOST Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is editor of The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.