Table of Contents

Chronology 1. Life, Influences, and Central Concerns 2. Totalitarianism and Political Evil 3. Marx, Labor, and the "Rise of the Social" 4. Work, Action, and the Modern Age 5. Revolution, Constitution, Authority 6. Judging 7. Thinking and Willing 8. Legacy. Index

About the Author

Dana Villa is Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Theory at the University of Notre Dame, USA. An internationally known scholar of the political thought of Arendt, Villa’s work has been translated into numerous languages, and he has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Reviews

"Villa’s comprehensive account of Arendt’s work stresses that although she wrote extensively about the rupture in the tradition of political philosophy that made it impossible to rely on the insights of the past alone, Arendt remained in continual conversation with Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, Machiavelli and Kant, Hegel and Marx. Central to this conversation is Arendt’s critique of philosophy for being contemptuous of the "frailty" and unpredictability of public affairs that often frustrates political actors, who frequently discover the full meaning of their actions only in retrospect. Villa is particularly astute in analyzing the temptations this unpredictability gives rise to: some are led to treat political life as an artifact that could be constructed as an engineer designs a building or a sculptor builds a monument." - Seyla Benhabib, New York Review of Books"No student of Arendt should be without this excellent book, which will doubtless become a classic in the field. It combines breadth and depth in discussion of Arendt's major works, and is written in beautifully clear prose. Detailed analysis is interwoven with sharp philosophical commentary, exemplifying Arendt's concern with 'worldliness' by connecting her thinking with recent political concerns." - Frisbee Sheffield, University of Cambridge, UK