How long does it take to read The Origins of Totalitarianism?
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt takes about 9 hours 40 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 40 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1951. 527 pages, about 144,925 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 6 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 40 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 64 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in her time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.
Subjects: Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism, Philosophy, german, Antisémitisme, Impérialisme
