What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt

Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “maki

Absence of community. America is one vast, terrifying anti-community. The great organizations to which most people give their working day and the apartments and suburban homes to which they return at night are equally places of loneliness and alienation.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.