Totalitarianism once seemed like a fairly safe historical word, belonging to the grim regimes of the twentieth century, to another time, and another mindset. To talk of totalitarianism in the twenty-first century seemed, at best, an anachronism, or at worst, alarmist. Yet over the past ten years artists, writers, and activists are now regularly using the word totalitarian to describe not just regimes, but current modes of thinking and ideology. 

In this lecture, Lyndsey Stonebridge returns to the work of the most famous theorist of totalitarianism, the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt.  Woman, Jew, refugee, and pariah – and interdisciplinary thinker par excellence - Arendt looked at the world from outside of conventional academic and political categories. What can we learn from her anti-totalitarian thinking today?