Part of this week’s Torah portion, from Genesis 12, tells the story of a famine in Canaan that drives Abram and Sarai (the names of Abraham and Sarah before they became Abraham and Sarah) to Egypt. As they near Egypt, Abram fears that Sarai will be sexually desired there and that he’ll be killed so that she can be taken. Abram devises a plan. Sarai should pretend to be his sister. That way, she’ll be taken but he won’t be killed in the process. “Please say that you are my sister,” he says, “that it may go well with me because of you.” And that’s what happens. Sarai is taken by Pharaoh (none of this is described as rape; it’s all part […]

Today, in part 4 of our series on the intellectual history of fear, we turn to Hannah Arendt’s theory of total terror, which she developed in The Origins of Totaltarianism (and then completely overhauled in Eichmann in Jerusalem.) I’m more partial, as I make clear in my book, to Eichmann than to Origins. But Origins has always been the more influential text, at least until recently. It’s a problematic though fascinating book (the second part, on imperialism, is especially wonderful). But one of the reasons it was able to gain such traction is that it managed to meld Montesquieu’s theory of despotic terror with Tocqueville’s theory of democratic anxiety. It became the definitive statement of Cold War social thought in […]