Political freedom is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom has been described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion in society, such as economic compulsion.
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
The sans-culottes were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to "aristocrat", seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by Jean-Bernard Gauthier de Murnan in a derogatory sense, speaking about a "sans-culottes army". The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792.
Marianne has been the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution, as a personification of liberty, equality, fraternity and reason, as well as a portrayal of the Goddess of Liberty.
Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire, Murray Rothbard, and many others. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.
Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century.
François Furet was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University of Chicago.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and The Will of the People is a book on the power of nonviolence by Jonathan Schell published in 2003.
Miguel Abensour was a French philosopher specializing in political philosophy.
Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two regimes, and why both came to prominence simultaneously. During the 20th century, comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism were made on totalitarianism, ideology, and personality cult. Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal democratic Western world, emphasising the similarities between the two.
The Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies is a research institute hosted by Dresden University of Technology and devoted to the comparative analysis of dictatorships. The institute focusses particularly on the structures of Nazism and Communism as well as on the presuppositions and consequences of the two ideological dictatorships. The institute is named after the German-American philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt, whose magnum opus The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is considered across disciplines as one of the most influential works of the 20th century and continues to shape in particular scholarly discussions of totalitarian systems of political domination.
Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution is a book by Eric Hobsbawm first published in 1990 by Verso Books. It was written just after the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 which was accompanied by a large outpouring of new scholarship. The recent anti-communist revolutions of 1989 further polarised commentators between those who saw them as a culmination or embodiment of French revolutionary ideas and those who saw it as their emphatic repudiation.
The League of the Just or League of Justice was a Christian communist international revolutionary organization. It was founded in 1836 by branching off from its ancestor, the League of Outlaws, which had formed in Paris in 1834. The League of the Just was largely composed of German emigrant artisans.
The YES! Association is an art collective based in Sweden. The collective was founded in 2005 and continues to be active today. The collective creates art through the use of enactments and performances. The YES! Association is known primarily for art exhibitions that deal with themes of gender, sexuality, race, and capitalism.
Emmanuel Faye is a philosopher and historian of French philosophy. A specialist in the Renaissance and Descartes, he has also published several critical studies on Heidegger and his reception.
The onion metaphor is a metaphor used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It is used to provide an example of the underlying structure that characterizes the organization of totalitarianism.
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