More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich Few writers have understood the deep implications of "big lies" better than Hannah Arendt. This short volume brings together for the first time two of her most widely discussed and quoted essays—“Truth and Politics," first published in February 17, 1967 issue of The New Yorker, and “Lying in Politics,” which appeared in the November 18, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books. In these seminal works Arendt explored the natural affinity between lying and politics, and the danger that deceit represents to “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world” and to our ability to differentiate between truth and falsehood, between the real and unreal.
In an introductory essay, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) rereads Arendt’s essays on lying as a clarion call for our fractious times. He examines Arendt’s contention that we become cut off from our own life experience by the human tendency to normalize the aberrant and atrocious. And once we become cut off from our own experience, we lose the ability to question official representations of reality—and can adapt to anything. About the Author: Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born in Hanover, Germany, and obtained her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, she became a social worker in Paris, and, once again escaping the Nazis in 1940, she emigrated to the United States, where she lived until her death, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1950. Her major works are The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and the posthumously published The Life of the Mind, edited by her friend Mary McCarthy. David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s, The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke, and, most recently, American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. His collection of essays on modern poetry, Skeptical Music, won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2002. His articles on contemporary politics, the war on terror, and the fate of civil liberties in the United States have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, HuffPost, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.
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