Hannah Arendt and International Relations

"Lots of us in the field of International Relations know something about Hannah Arendt - her inquiries into the pathologies of the 20th century, her bracing affirmation of public life, her own life as emigre and intellectual, her remarkable personal and intellectual affiliations. Yet few of us have seen the relevance of Arendt's work to our own. The great virtue of this book is to show that Arendt's construction of the world, and especially her effort to fit classical republican premises to contemporary circumstances, points up the pathologies of the field - its uncritical realism, liberal yearnings and moral myopia - in more ways than we might have imagined possible." - Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University