This book does so much in such a small space. It is at once an introduction to much of Western philosophy and an original treatise on many fundamental philosophical questions. Like her other books, Arendt focuses here more on philosophy as it applies to a person rather than more theoretical matters such as metaphysics. Everybody should read this book. I had it for a sophomore-level philosophy class, and I have found myself coming back to it time and time again for the next 8 years.

"Nathan the Wise" is one of the greatest and wisest dramas I ever read, not only the picturesque and interesting backround but also the wise, idealistic and forwardlooking image that the author produces makes the drama worth being read by everybody. Lessing wrote this drama two-hundred years ago and that fact makes it even more interesting to see the message that it tries to spread, because in our-days-world the demand for humanity and tolerance is more important than ever.

In a true Arendtian sense, Kimberly Curtis rescues the pearls of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy for the contemporary predicament. The totalitarian model is still lurking around the corner, and while we allow ourselves to become more beauraucratized, more sheltered in the enclaves of our gated communities, blocking out the plight of the workers who labor to make our commodities, becoming ever more apolitical, we are allowing ourselves to slip ever closer to totalitarianism once again. And the insights of Hannah Arendt are perhaps more vital now than ever before. Here, Curtis simply does an excellent job of revitalizing the spirit of Arendt's work... definitely one of the best sources on Arendtian politics I have read.

(First of all, there is a paperback printing of this, as I have it.)
This is a very readable, very well organized overview and assessment of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. The book is broken into 5 major sections: 1) Introduction 2)Arendt's conception of modernity 3)Arendt's theory of Action 4) Arendt's theory of judgement & 5) Arendt's conception of citizenship.
Now, anyone familiar with Arendt's work is probably already well aquainted with these themes, yet this book manages to bring more life to these major concepts and takes some of the most illuminating quotes from Arendt's works, so that the reader needn't take the author's word on what Arendt meant.
This book is not merely an introduction to Arendt (though it is fine as that, too) it is a sharp critique of her ideas, but is aware that even when her words seem inadequate, the spirit of Arendt's political philosophy is still strong; and d'Entreves does quite well emphasizing this intangible aspect of Arendt's philosophy. He addresses the criticisms and responses of many philosophers and critics and draws Arendt into a dialogue with these writers, helping to continue the project of Arendtian philosophy.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. She was equally at home in philosophy, political theory, and history, and blended all three disciplines in her pursuit of integrity in political thought and action. This fine book is perhaps the single best place to begin to get to know her thought and work. The introduction is first-rate -- clear, accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, respectful of Arendt while critical. The choices of readings -- both complete and self-contained essays and extracts from larger books such as ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, and ON REVOLUTION -- are excellent. The annotations don't get in the way and are of much aid to the reader. The bibliography of works by and about Arendt is excellent. All in all, this is a superb addition to the VIKING PORTABLE series.

Hannah Arendt has had much of her correspondence published over the last decade or so. We have volumes of her correspodence with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Martin Heidegger, among others. But these letters between Arendt and husband Heinrich Blucher stand out as the finest volume yet published. Whereas in the other volumes we see Arendt as student, friend, confidant, teacher, philosopher, intellectual, in these letters with Blucher we see Arendt as intimate confidant, vulnerable lover, and supportive wife. Heinrich Blucher was the one person to whom she could reveal herself, with whom she dropped her guard. The confidence was mutual as well; in Blucher's letters to Hannah we see his hopes, frustrations, trepidations, and above all, his devoted attachment to her hopes, needs and ambitions. Two people for whom the other was much more than a spouse or lover: someone in whom to take refuge in dark times.

The letters begin in 1936, shortly after Arendt and Blucher met in Paris, to which both escaped from Berlin in 1933: she after a short prison term for illegal Zionist activity, and he as a member of the German Communist Party, fleeing via Prague. At the time they met she was 29 and he 37. Both were married, but not to each other. They would not marry until 1940, shortly after their divorces became final.

Their first letters set the tone. Interspersed with intellectual and political affairs are their feelings for each other and their doubts and a lasting commitment can be achieved. IT grows from there, in all aspects, intellectual and emotional. When Arendt reproaches Blucher for not sticking to their letter-writing schedule, she tells him that she cannot continue to careen like a car wheel that has come off, "without a single connection to home or anything I can rely on."

They also discuss mutual friends such as Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, and Martin Heidegger (whose relationship over the years with Arendt can only be described as ambivilent), holding nothing back and giving the reader a rare glimpse into their intellectual and social world, a glimpse one can only imagine in a formal biography of the two. As no one writes letters anymore, this is a most valuable look into an intellectual time and world as distant from our cyber-present as last century's history.

Worth your time and money? Yes - in every sense of the word.

There are few books from college that remain with me 15 years later. This is one of them. Arendt's writing transcends academia. Not only does her philosophy apply to politics but it can easily be applied to all relationships (worker/employer, parent/child, siblings, black/white, etc),as all relationships involve a power struggle. Her general thesis is that where there is lack of power or where power is slipping away, there is greater potential for violence. Lack of power begets violence. Apply that to the current world scene and you begin to wonder exactly how safe we are. In re-reading it recently, I couldn't help think that this book could just as easily be prescribed for management solutions...right alongside The Art of War.

The irony of viewing the natural need of men (and increasingly, women) to view power as dominance over rather than as a part of a coooperative spirit toward mutual goals is the foundation of this articulate and simple philosophy where violence becomes a part of the political and economic landscape. Arendt stopped short of asking to what extent men will sacrifice to acquire the power through violence that is supposedly the motive underlying the methods used. When males sacrifice both their honor and their natural masculinity for power, one wonders what limit, if any, is man willing to condone in himself to "win" the power or money he fervently and diligently pursues. Although supposedly, man comes equipped with the height of survival instinct, it is remarkable how willing he is to castrate himself in pursuit of essentially man made goals that symbolize success, often crippling many others in the process without hesitation, too often, in violation of the religious teachings of compassion and brotherhood. Given this rather historically well documented pattern of acceptance in mankind, it appears the decision to request increasingly more of man's sacrifice for that pursuit tilts the seesaw in the other direction. What man hath wrought, man will deliver in the finest mode of free market principles, leaving us to question whether indeed there are limits to what man ought to be asking other men to do, i.e., to what extent moral and logical principles are allowed to become the modifying influence that limits the scope of that pursuit and the credible measure by which such decisions are made.

The most simple questions are the hardest to answer so we leave them to people like Hannah Arendt. Here she writes about the difference between violence in the hands of the state versus violence in the hands of extremist groups or individuals. In other words, how is terrorism different from totalitarianism? Her theoretical conclusions on violence and power are interesting because she reasons that they are opposites: violence is the lack of access to power (and is power then the ability to use violence at any time? I didn't really grasp that). Something about that idea resonated with me the fist time I read this book, and it made me think about the violence in schools like Columbine, and even self-violence in young adults, but she doesn't go into those more psychological areas- only historically and politically on a larger scale-attacking state-sponsored violence. Through this short book she argues intelligently and factually and does not use sophistry or tug at our emotions with wishy-wash.
You should also read her other books and I suggest the Hannah Arednt Reader to get started. The fact that the author was an exiled Jewess who lived during the Holocaust and spent her life as a political activist, and is still able to objectively examine the nature of of violence in the 20th century make her words speak even greater. For me, someone who can take something so evil and complex as this subject, crack it open, get to the heart of it and understand it, and then rearrange ideas about violence in a new, simpler form, may have more to say about stopping it than the spiritual/inspirational leaders who have preached nonviolence in our century like Mahatma Ghandi or the Dalai Lama.

Everyone who is currently nauseated or confused at the state of our world affairs, every student of history should be forced to read this book. Its not morbid, just thoughtful. But- like George Orwell's 1984- pretty scary if you let it get to you.

Robert Pirro sets himself a difficult task in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy. His thesis that Greek tragedy was a formative influence on her political thought is correct and illuminating. Yet to make this case he has few references in her work to rely on, and he has to overcome the common criticism that Arendt idealized the Greek polis.

A key to understanding Arendt's view of politics is her statement in The Human Condition that theater is "the political art par excellence." Her view of politics was theatrical in ways that Pirro makes clear. This is more than an analogy, and it goes deeper than the joy of appearing in public that the political actor has in common with the player on stage. Arendt's Kantian concept of judgement in terms of imaginative visiting of multiple points of view is based on the role of the spectator before whom events in history as on stage unfold.

Pirro makes his case carefully with scholarly deployment of citations and ingenious arguments, yet he never loses sight of the big picture. For those who would understand Hannah Arendt as an actor in the theater of political thought, his book is invaluable.

Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish refugee who suffered as so many others did from tremendous personal and political upheavals following the end of World War II. Arendt struggled to make sense of recent events by drawing on elements of classical tragedy in her political writing. She also found in imaginative literature a means to meld political philosophy and political commitment, the theoretical and the personal. Hannah Arendt And The Politics Of Tragedy reveals the crucial role of imaginative literature in Arendt's political thought. Author Robert Pirro has employed an admirable scholarship and attention to detail in his presentation of Hannah Arendt life, thought and writing which is highly recommended reading for Arendt's many admirers, as well as students of political philosophy.

This was a typical example of a very poor book written by a pseudo-intellectual who spent little if ANY time in real combate.
Oh how I wished he had spent at least two days and nights on patrol behind enemey lines with my squad in Korea. As far as I can tell, Gray doesn't have any idea what real hand to hand combate is all about. He has NO right to judge the actions of real soldiers in combate or what they are thinking or feeling.
My recomendation is to please do not buy this "book".

Thank you.
SFC Case

I have never experienced combat or even war for that matter, but it has always consumed my thoughts. (this would be the single point of contention between me and the author who believes no one gives thought to these matters.) To me, war constitutes all of man's extreme qualities and concentrates them into a single moment. Cruelty and Love, Fear and Courage, can coexist in the same moment and in the same person. If we want to really understand what it is that makes us human, I think we need to understand men in combat, or at least reflect on it and try. This observation is the first part of Gray's 'thesis'.
WWII interests me NOT because of the American involvement in what is hailed as "The GOOD War". I think that is mindnumbing nationalistic propaganda. MY interest in WWII stems from the fact that more civilians died in that war than did combatants. (Another point of the author) What is happening to our world's society? When did the line between combatant and innocent civilian disappear? Why? This is the second part of Gray's 'thesis'.
This book, written by a philosophy PhD (awarded his doctorate with the same mail that brought him his "greetings from the president" letter--his 'draft'), and a soldier who spent 4 years in the war, is an attempt to answer these questions as best he can. It was written in the last years of the Vietnam conflict. This is what prompted him to reflect on his own war experience and the quesitons philosophical, ethical, and moral which had haunted him. He does NOT make any claims that one war is better or different than the next. It is NOT a book about the glory of WWII and the vulgarity of Vietnam, like one might assume.
Gray witnessed the material and human destruction of war from all angles. Having been involved for so long in this otherworldly event transformed him. It disrupted the continutity of his life. While in the war, his past life was meaningless, and then when away from the war, his war years became faded and irrelevant. This was his greatest fear and the ultimate impetus for his writing. This is an important work.
He ends the book with Lee's quote..."It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow to fond of it." [I paraphrased]

Gray's book gives us a chance for a better understanding of what men face in the battle with themselves while in war. A very different view as oppposed to movies and text book history, where all the American soldiers were hero's with little or no fear. Gray does an outstanding job of making someone who has never been in the hell of war, understand why soldiers act the ways they do. An excellent read for any war student or historian.

Though Arendt is one of my favorite political theorists, this compilation left me dissapointed. Though her insights on Truth, Justice and Authority are well argued, she makes very few of the observations that made me love her works. The best chapter in the book is the 7th, a defense of her work Eichmann in Jeruselum (though she does not explicitly mention it) where she discusses the nature of Truth and its role it the telling of history. As usual of course, a knowledge of Greek and Latin is helpful with Arendt (which I don't have) as the text is full of foreign words.

Notice inside the parenthesis next to the title it says (20th century classics). That's because this work belongs to that rank. I first read this book back when I was in grad school, and have used it as a reference ever since. If a 'classic' -- if we may dare use such a term still -- is something akin to a great poem as Ezra Pound defined it, "News that stays new", then this work is a classic. Arendt must have been a great teacher as well as a thinker. These essays read like lectures: Lectures given by a caring professor who actually gives a damn about getting through to her audience. Yes, some Greek and Latin here and there, but with Arendt as your guide you cannot get lost if you pay attention. The subtitle of the book is Eight Exercises in Political Thought, and Arendt, in her grand style, deals with the big topics -- Freedom, Authority, Power, Tradition, etc -- that ground everything else in civic life. The sheer pleasure to be had in encountering the density of her scholarship is found not only in her crystal clear prose, but also in her mastery of the foundational concepts and experience, Roman and Greek, that shape, willy nilly, the warpature within the space of our civic and political discourse even today. However, in her presentation of the trajectory of tradition, she also shows exactly where and how the displacement of tradition occurred. In the opening lines of her essay 'What is Authority?', she asks whether we ought not instead be asking 'What WAS Authority?', making clear from the get go that the notion of Authority has undergone an irreversible transformation since the Roman conception. And then she goes on to explain how that change occurred and in what way, with what chain of consequences. This book is noteworthy not only for its content and inimitable delivery, but also as a model of intellectual "exercise". The calmness, the steady architectural build-up of the argument, attention to philological detail when it's called for, all make up Arendt's generous style of writing and thinking. But that generosity is especially evident in this collection of essays. This is one of those rare books that, if read well, will actually make you more thoughtful. And smarter. Besides, you get to pick up some Greek and Latin for free.

The last reviewer is correct in the sense that Arendt is an incredibly intelligent writer, it is wrong to judge the book on other works of Arendt. I believe this book demonstrates and explains the close, yet, strangely obscure ties between past occurences and ideas and those of the present. Arendt really puts the true meaning of historical study into place when she places it in all three tenses: past, present, and future. For those of you unacquainted with the writings of Hannah Arendt, I will gladly tell you that no one I have ever read has the observation and mental-leaps that Arendt gave us through her writings. The back of the book says something to the effect that Arendt exposed what is usually passed off as genius as a tired process still running its course. As cliche as remarks on the back of books go, this one so happens to describe her talent perfectly. Arendt shows us that there is very little that is original. Many things really depend on past observations and actions. She also shows us that little has changed since ancient times, in some of our most fundamental system of thinking. I am disappointed that the previous Arendt-reader was not impressed with the book. I have owned it for about five months now, and I still find myself picking back through the explanations and exercises that Arendt gave us. This really is a must have for anyone who reads Hannah Arendt, or anyone who finds themselves between past and future.