The Virtues of Solitude

Loneliness also imperils the health of the body politic. As Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam warned twenty-five years ago in his modern-day classic, Bowling Alone, runaway isolation threatens democracy itself. Decades earlier, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterizes loneliness as “the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” According to her, loneliness leaves us vulnerable to totalitarian power, which exploits this “radical and desperate” human experience to coerce and control people.