This study seeks to resolve the paradox of Hannah Arendt's ideas; that she intended her work to liberate and empower and to restore our capacity for concerted political action whilst at the same time developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, all consuming monster appearing from outer space to gobble up human freedom. Arendt blames it - not us - for our public paralysis and depoliticization. The text traces Arendt's notion of "the social" from her earliest writings to "The Human Condition" and beyond, interpreting each work in its historical and personal context. The answer considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender, authority and the nature of political theory itself. There are repeated challenges on established interpretations of Arendt's project, including the role in it of her teacher and lover Martin Heidegger and her supposed neglect of economic concerns.

"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you've got to knock her around some."--Niccolo Machiavelli
Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systematically place gender at the center of its exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.
"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's writings."--"The American Political Science Review"

Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a historical study of the way in which representative government has evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior of contemporary representatives or the expectations voters have about them. Yet, although the book is about a word, it is not about mere words, not merely about words. For the social philosopher, for the social scientist, words are not "mere"; they are the tools of his trade and a vital part of his subject matter. Since human beings are not merely political animals but also language-using animals, their behavior is shaped by their ideas. What they do and how they do it depends upon how they see themselves and their world, and this in turn depends upon the concepts through which they see. Learning what "representation" means and learning how to represent are intimately connected. But even beyond this, the social theorist sees the world through a network of concepts. Our words define and delimit our world in important ways, and this is particularly true of the world of human and social things. For a zoologist may capture a rare specimen and simply observe it; but who can capture an instance of representation (or of power, or of interest)? Such things, too, can be observed, but the observation always presupposes at least a rudimentary conception of what representation (or power, or interest) is, what counts as representation, where it leaves off and some other phenomenon begins. Questions about what representation is, or is like, are not fully separable from the question of what "representation" means. This book approaches the former questions by way of the latter.

'[A] generous, careful and clearly argued book...[which] deserves a very wide circulation, and could serve as the prototype for a whole new genre of analysis in politically theory.'--Stephen E. Toulmin, American Political Science Review