In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world. What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible. The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt’s thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt’s famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane. On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later. Reviews: “On Love and Tyranny is a stunning biography of Hannah Arendt, one of the most important thinkers of the last century. Heberlein shows us how the personal and the political, living and thinking, are woven together in a tapestry of threads that we cannot and should not tease apart.” — Janice Gross Stein, political scientist and founding director, Munk School of Global Affairs About the Author: Dr. Ann Heberlein is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including A Little Book on Evil, A Good Life, and the autobiographical I Don’t Want to Die, I Just Don’t Want to Live, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and has been translated into multiple languages and dramatized and mounted on several stages. In 2018, Heberlein debuted as a fiction writer with the novel Everything Is Going to Be All Right. Heberlein has researched and taught at the Department of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University and at the Faculty of Theology, Lund University. Alice Menzies is a freelance translator based in London. She has translated books by Fredrik Backman and Katarina Bivald, among others.
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