Arendt maintained that our ‘common sense’ depends on our good will and curiosity, our adventurous enjoyment of testing opinions and perspectives against those of others.
Over the past 15 years, the world has seen a financial crisis, the rise of populist politics and a fracturing of the world economic order. Sounds all a bit pre-WWII, right?
The perceived “otherness” of eastern and central Europe is a complex phenomenon, which a new book on the Polish Nobel laureate’s oeuvre brings to light.
Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czech author best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died, aged 94. His work interrogated totalitarianism and explored ideas – leavened with bleak humour.
In ideological terms, Putin’s regime is neither totalitarian nor fascist. But it is reactionary, and in a way that begs questions about the recent maltreatment of language in Western politics
Putin often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they normally do – a practice diagnosed by political author George Orwell as ‘doublespeak,’ or the language of totalitarians.
George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was an instant success when it was first published. His writings on totalitarianism and socialism continue to be relevant today.
Critical decolonisation means accepting risk of error. It means considering whether indigenous knowledge systems might contain truths that western science hasn’t accessed.