One of the greatest beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s 2016 election was Hannah Arendt—or at least, her literary estate. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, sales of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism soared by 1,000 percent. New editions of Arendt’s works appeared, in which intellectual celebrities argued that Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism anticipated all the great ills of the present, from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia. These commentators saw themselves as engaged actors, using Arendt to launch a new political resistance.
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