Politics & Power Quote by Hannah Arendt

Arendt is taking the temperature of an era and finding a fever that isn’t local or quirky, but planetary. The sentence is built like a historian’s wager: what looks like scattered unrest in the present will later read as the defining fact of a decade. “May well one day be accounted” is the cool, almost legal phrasing of someone who knows how posterity works: it retroactively turns noise into narrative, and it warns that the real story may be bigger than the headlines that currently dominate attention.

Her choice to pair “religious and secular” with “social and political” is not ornamentation; it’s an insistence that authority is a whole ecosystem. If obedience cracks in one domain, the fracture spreads. Arendt’s subtext is that legitimacy had started to evaporate across institutions that once relied on habit and reverence rather than persuasion. The phrase “established authority” quietly drips with suspicion: established by whom, for whom, and maintained at what cost?

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and the mid-century “age of ideologies,” Arendt had seen how modern systems manufacture compliance and how quickly the public sphere can be hollowed out. By casting defiance as “world-wide,” she’s also rejecting the comforting idea that rebellion is just youthful misbehavior or a regional contagion. It’s a structural response to bureaucratic power, mass society, and the growing sense that moral claims made by institutions no longer match their actions.

The line works because it compresses a historical pivot into a single, sharp forecast: the decade’s real revolution isn’t a new doctrine, but a collapsing reflex to defer.