What is Arendt's book about?

When it was first published in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism established Arendt as a notable student of the political crisis of her time. For all its fame, however, the book is notoriously difficult to come to terms with. One of the reasons for this is that it does not belong to any established academic genre, and therefore confounds the reader's expectations. As Seyla Benhabib says, ‘it is too systematically ambitious and overinterpreted to be strictly a historical account; it is too anecdotal, narrative and ideographic to be considered social science; and although it has the vivacity and the stylistic flair of a work of political journalism, it is too philosophical to be accessible to a broad public’. Arendt herself acknowledged that she had employed ‘a rather unusual approach’, and had failed to make clear what she was doing. In the reply that she wrote to Eric Voegelin's critical review, she explained that writing about totalitarianism had faced her with a dilemma because it is of the essence of historiography to be a work of conservation, saving the past from oblivion. Her problem was ‘how to write historically about something – totalitarianism – which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy’.