Take Me Out with the Crowd

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies loneliness as a precondition for the horrors of Hitler and Stalin. She shows how loneliness is an intellectual experience by recovering the ancient Stoic Epictetus’s analysis of solitude. Plato’s Republic shows loneliness to be a kind of injustice in the city as well as the psyche. Walter Benjamin recommends the flâneur, taken from Baudelaire and Poe, as a model for living justly in modernity. But in free and traditionless America, where loneliness arises from creative destruction, being a baseball fan brings just balance to life and shows that the opposite of loneliness is happiness.