eye on ways of thinking and behaving that we take for granted.
Indeed, her calm assumption that we may be able to learn impor-
tant lessons from the experience of people who lived two and a
half millennia ago itself challenges the modern belief in progress.
Continual references to the Greeks have added to the sense of
bewilderment experienced by many readers of The Human Condi-
tion, who have found it hard to understand what is actually going
on in the book. Here is a long, complex piece of writing that
conforms to no established pattern, crammed with unexpected
insights but lacking a clearly apparent argumentative structure.
The most urgent question to be addressed by way of introduc-
tion is, therefore, what is Arendt actually doing}
Both the book's difficulty and its enduring fascination arise
from the fact that she is doing a great many things at once. There
are more intertwined strands of thought than can possibly be
followed at first reading, and even repeated readings are liable to
bring surprises. But one thing she is clearly not doing is writing
political philosophy as conventionally understood: that is to say,
offering political prescriptions backed up by philosophical argu-
ments. Readers accustomed to that genre have tried to find
something like it in The Human Condition, usually by stressing
Arendt's account of the human capacity for action. Since the
book is laced with criticism of modern society, it is tempting to
suppose that she intended to present a Utopia of political action,
a kind of New Athens. Nor is this caricature entirely without
foundation. Arendt was certainly drawn to participatory democ-
racy, and was an enthusiastic observer of outbreaks of civic activ-
ity ranging from zAmerican demonstrations against the Vietnam
War to the formation of grassroots citizens' "councils" during
the short-lived Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Reminding us
that the capacity to act is present even in unlikely circumstances
was certainly one of her purposes. But she emphatically denied
that her role as a political thinker was to propose a blueprint for
the future or to tell anyone what to do. Repudiating the title of
"political philosopher," she argued that the mistake made by all
political philosophers since Plato has been to ignore the funda-
mental condition of politics: that it goes on among plural human
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