Review essay by Neil McLaughlin: Totalitarianism, Social Science and the Margins

Peter Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 248 pp. $US 55.00 hardcover (978-0-8047-5650-1)

We can always count on wide historical learning, deep theoretical insight, close textual reading, graceful writing and sensible judgments on contemporary political issues when encountering essays, articles and books by Peter Baehr. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Social Sciences is certainly no exception. Organized around the engagement of sociologists David Riesman, Raymond Aron and Jules Monnerot with Arendt’s 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Baehr’s concise, well-written book raises big questions about Nazism, Communism, social science and, in the final, speculative chapter, radical Islam. Read more …