Stephen J. Whitfield on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1951).Even over the span of more than half a century, I can still vividly recall when The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) first came to my attention, as the gesture of a Tulane University upperclassman named Burt Channing. A gangly bohemian from Boston who had changed his family name from Cohen and had become a Unitarian, he showed me his paperback edition (1958), and told me how brilliant its author was. Channing was right, even though I Read more