Episode description

Hannah Arendt tackled the big ideas behind possibly the most dangerous period of the twentieth century: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. These phenomena and the concepts of freedom and evil were all the more immediate to her, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in her writing which has often focused on mass propaganda, the differences between fact and fiction and the rise of the strong man leader. It's 70 years since Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, so what does a re-reading of it tell us about our own world?

Anne McElvoy is joined by the guests: Author and journalist Paul Mason, who has just published a book called How to Stop Fascism; Samantha Rose Hill is a senior research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities and her latest book is a biography, Hannah Arendt (2021). Her edition of Hannah Arendt's Poems will be published in 2022. Daniel Johnson is a journalist and the editor of The Article And, Gavin Delahunty is the curator of On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for Exhibition running at the Richard Saltoun Gallery throughout 2021.

Producer: Ruth Watts

In the Free Thinking archives and available to download as an Arts & Ideas podcast: Anne McElvoy talks to Susan Neimann, Christopher Hampton and Ursula Owen about tolerance, censorship and free speech and lessons from German history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008hvz Matthew Sweet looks at What Nietszche Teaches Us with biographer Sue Prideaux and philosophers Hugo Drochon and Katrina Mitcheson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000d8k Orwell's 1984: A Landmark of Culture brings together Peter Pomerantsev, Joanna Kavenna, Dorian Lynskey and Lisa Mullen to explore Orwell's ideas about surveillance and propaganda. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nrl