The second part, “Imperialism,” surveys an assortment of pathologies in the world politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to (but not directly involving) the First World War. The book’s peculiar organization creates a certain ambiguity regarding its intended subject-matter and scope.2 The first part, “Antisemitism ,” tells the story of the rise of modern, secular anti-Semitism (as distinct from what the author calls “religious Jew-hatred”) up to the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with the Dreyfus affair in France-a “dress rehearsal,” in Arendt’s words, for things still worse to come (10). HANNAH Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, is a bewilderingly wide-ranging work, a book about much more than just totalitarianism and its immediate origins.1 In fact, it is not really about those immediate origins at all. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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