On Pain Of Extinction
Laws of Nature and History in Darwin, Marx, and Arendt

Hannah Arendt's great work The Origins of Totalitarianism, conceived during the Second World War and published in 1951, addresses the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe through theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of "superior races" to expand territorially. An idiosyncratic history linking the failure of the bourgeoisie, "the decline of the nation state," and "the alliance between mob and capital" provided some brilliant insights into the newly baptized phenomenon of "totalitarianism."