The Problem of Loneliness John Douglas Macready Collin College Books reviewed in this essay: The Experiential Ontology of Hannah Arendt. By Kimberly Maslin. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-7936-1244-1. Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding. By Jennifer Gafney. Lanham: Rowman & Litlefeld, 2020. 217 pp. ISBN 978-1-7866-0694-5. T HE WIDE-SPREAD ANXIETY OVER THE GLOBAL ERUPTION OF RIGHT-WING POPULISM, which was exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and the succeeding four years of his presidency, produced a renewed interest in the political theory of Hannah Arendt, espe- cially her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). In that work, Arendt profered a peculiar defnition of totalitarianism as “or- ganized loneliness.” 1 Loneliness, she argued, “prepares men for totalitarian domination” by destroying the public space between human beings and pressing them together in the “iron band of terror” that organizes human beings by the tyranny of an ideological-logic. 2 Political theorists have seized on this insight in recent years in search of an explanation for the increasing number of authoritarian regimes and autocratic leaders whose firtations with fascism were inspiring a swell of populist and nationalistic mobs driven by wild and often absurd ideologies. Could Arendt’s loneliness thesis—that loneliness prepares people for totalitarianism—provide a diagnostic tool for interpreting our own current political crisis? More importantly, could Ar- 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 616. 2 Ibid., 615. ©ARENDT STUDIES. ISSN 2474-2406 (online) ISSN 2574-2329 (print) ARENDT STUDIES doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies20216739 Online First: June 8, 2021