Hannah Arendt cared about facts, and so should we. In the Epilogue to her Origins of Totalitarianism (1979), Arendt wrote that “freedom as well as survival may well depend on our success or failure to persuade the other part of the world [the Soviet bloc] to recognize facts as they are and to come to terms with the factuality of the world as it is” (p. 492). Theories of politics based on misapprehensions fare no better than castles built on sand. Nonetheless, Arendt larded her own political observations with more than her share of insupportably broad generalizations and falsifiable empirical claims, as David Cesarani and Sheri Bernam have argued. How should we deal with them? For those of us who admire Arendt, even her missteps can prove fruitful; even they (or perhaps especially they) prompt us to “think what we are doing” as scholars, citizens, and moral agents. Wrestling with her apparent misstatements—thinking “with Arendt against Arendt” (Seyla Benhabib, “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt's Thought,” Political Theory 16 [February 1988]: 31)—makes for fruitful political theory. Thundering against them, as a number of scholars such as Bernard Wasserstein recently have done, makes for a one-sided conversation. But ignoring them makes for its own kind of trouble.

Patricia Owens's Between War and Politics comprises a gift to Arendt scholars not only because it sheds new light on Arendt's works—especially her often overlooked treatments of violence and war—but also because Owens approaches those works with critical distance. She counsels that “in recognizing Arendt's contribution to thinking about politics and war we need not accept every idea she expressed” (p. 6), and looks to Arendt's observations as “a source … of guidance not in what to think but how to think about politics and war today” (p. 7, stress added). In other words, when explicating Arendt's thoughts on violence and war, Owens invokes the letter of Arendt's works (and illuminates meanings that many of us may have missed), but when analyzing present-day politics, Owens evokes Arendt's spirit.

Throughout her political writings, Arendt employed a broad set of binaries: light and darkness, visibility and invisibility, plurality and isolation, political and social, immortality and oblivion, as this reviewer has argued elsewhere. Power and violence seem to comprise one more pairing in her oppositional framework. Indeed, in On Violence (1970), Arendt specifies that “power and violence are opposites” (113–14). But Owens illuminates in Arendt's works a much richer and subtler relationship between violence and power, war and politics, than simple binaries could convey. Although in On Violence Arendt claims that violence taken to extremes negates authentic, cooperative power, she does not mean to dismiss violence from politics entirely. And while she writes eloquently of war's mute brutality, she also describes its occasionally enlivening, meaningful comradeship and thrill. As Owens explains, Arendt “repeatedly identif[ied] the essence of free political action as taking place during times of war,” because free political action involves “the freedom to act with others to bring something new into the world” (p. 31). Owens's main points are to establish, against poststructuralists, that Arendt can distinguish meaningfully between politics and war (pp. 20–32); to argue against neoconservatives that political ends cannot justify “noble” lies—including lies about the necessity of war in Iraq—because “the denial of political facts … is destructive of the public culture necessary for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to make sense at all” (p. 127); and to argue, against Jürgen Habermas, that a “global public sphere” would threaten our established “spaces of freedom” and could inappropriately sanction “humanitarian” violence (pp. 128–48).

While Owens initially promises “the beginnings of a sophisticated and original political theory of war” (p. 5), she quickly backs off—and for good reasons. As Owens realizes, Arendt never aimed to construct a systematic theory of politics. Owens repeats several times the aspiration for a coherent theory, but in practice she sticks to a more Arendtian aim: to follow “a number of theoretical ‘thought-trains’ inspired by Arendt” in order “to assemble and critically analyse her political writing on war” (p. 7). Owens gives us a series of related but distinct thoughts on politics and war informed by Arendtian words and sensibilities. In Arendtian fashion, she broadens our horizons and challenges received wisdom.

Whereas Owens urges caution against direct “application” of Arendt's words (p. 7), Patrick Hayden's Political Evil in a Global Age makes application its business. On the theoretical front, Hayden characterizes Arendt's political views as a form of “cosmopolitan realism”—“a critical cosmopolitanism shorn of historical and moral idealism”—an orientation that also underpins the International Criminal Court (p. 9). But Hayden's primary, creative argument aims less at finding new words to describe Arendt's politics than in finding new ways to employ her words politically. Most significantly, Hayden proposes to use Arendt's conception of political evil as a “tool for both critique and change,” which is to say for political advocacy (p. 3). Justifying his endeavor, he cites Arendt's thoughts on the dangerous “lesser evil”: “[A]ll historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil. If homelessness, rootlessness, and the disintegration of political bodies and social classes do not directly produce totalitarianism, they at least produce almost all of the elements that eventually go into its formation…. [F]ar from protecting us against the greater ones, the lesser evils have invariably led us into them” (Essays in Understanding, 1994, pp. 271–72, quoted in Hayden, p. 7).

For the rest of his book, Hayden reframes those “lesser evils” of homelessness, rootlessness, global poverty, genocide, and crimes against humanity, as well as a surprise addition—neoliberal globalization—as forms of Arendtian political evil. Poverty and rootlessness often pass our peripheral vision, but the rhetoric of evil might arrest our attention and galvanize us to action.

If theorists have any tendency toward insularity, Hayden's case studies will draw them forcefully into the present. Indeed, theorists with a care for the political world should aspire to know as much as possible about its problems and promises. Arendt serves as a suitable guide, having beckoned us throughout her works to look inside and outside the nation-state's boundaries, to all corners of the globe and occasionally beyond it: to examine political issues that are timely as well as timeless. Hayden's book, in addition to making a provocative political argument, offers a useful instrument for teaching undergraduates about vital world events and the ways in which political theory can interpret them.

Hayden's first several chapters frame global poverty (pp. 32–54) and statelessness (pp. 55–92) as threats to human plurality, and as gateways to the conditions of “superfluity” and “disposability” that Arendt associated with totalitarianism's rise. Up to that point, many readers might follow him completely. No one defends poverty or statelessness, and describing them in Arendtian terms can enrich our understanding of the harms that they cause. But Hayden's biggest punch, saved for last, will appeal primarily to those who share his political commitments. Neoliberal globalization, one sees from assembling the previous chapters' claims, has been causally associated with the conditions of poverty, rootlessness, and disintegration of political bodies and social classes. Thus, if Arendt once called those conditions “lesser evils” that “invariably” lead to greater ones such as totalitarianism, then neoliberal globalization must be called politically evil by association. Its one, specific evil is “to depoliticize human affairs as such, to render the worldly spaces between people apolitical and devoid of care” (p. 93). Neoliberalism's proponents and agents might lack evil intentions, but so did Adolf Eichmann's thoughtless facilitation of evil (according to Arendt).

While bold and arresting, Hayden's arguments struggle on several fronts and could have benefited immeasurably from a willingness to think critically about some of Arendt's assertions. For example, her causal claim about “lesser evils” might not be true. Have the lesser evils of rootlessness, homelessness, and the breakdown of social and political classes really “invariably” led us into totalitarianism? Perhaps so, except in the myriad instances when they have not. And even that formulation might be too generous, because Arendt does not actually demonstrate in any systematic or conclusive way that the so-called lesser evils led to Hitler's or Stalin's totalitarianism in the first place. In effect, Hayden presents as a systematic theory what Arendt offered only as a sweeping generalization and a broad warning. As a broad warning, it remains cogent and timely; we should guard against any conditions that inflict gross harm and marginalize political voice. As systematic theory, it founders on the shoals of what Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961) calls “demonstrable fact” (p. 149).

Further, Hayden's aspiration to use the label of evil as a “tool for critique and change” contrasts with Arendt's spirit of nuance and complexity. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt berates postwar Soviet communism for suffocating the political realm, plural discourse, and the grounds of common sense, a situation made world-shatteringly dangerous because of nuclear capabilities. Nonetheless, she refrains from labeling Soviet communism (or Western capitalism) evil. Why, then, would one use an Arendtian framework to label neoliberal globalization evil, when its proponents or its agents have nowhere near the Soviets' ambition or ability to eliminate free spaces and crush dissent? And why would one simultaneously omit to mention, as Hayden does, those forces that undeniably do aim to quash plural discussion and diversity among equals, such as Al Qaeda, North Korea, or Iran? Must we run so far from anything associated with the Bush or Blair administrations that we intentionally overlook any sources of danger that those politicians dared to flag? “The enemy of my enemy gets a free pass” should not be a maxim by which political theorists or political scientists take their bearings.

In one additional area, not only Hayden but Owens might have profited by challenging Arendt's claims, rather than accepting them at face value. Both authors oppose humanitarian wars fought in the name of human rights, and they anchor their opposition in Arendt's elevation of plurality. We can and should fight genocide, both authors agree, not primarily because of the human suffering or mass murder or mass cruelty inflicted but because genocide denies the human condition of plurality (Hayden, p. 14; Owens, p. 109). Although this rationale might puzzle readers from across the political spectrum, Owens and Hayden share their ground with Arendt.

Arendt wrote of Eichmann that “the real reason, and the only reason, you must hang” was not the fact of mass murder or gross cruelty but denial of plurality: “[J]ust as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations … this is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963, p. 279). But just because Arendt elevated the nebulous concept of plurality above the concrete harms of torture, cruelty, and death, we might and must ask: What makes that claim true? After all, alongside plurality, Arendt also elevated light and visibility, which led to her bald assertions that “darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty” and that “the tragedy of savage tribes is that they live and die without leaving any trace” (On Revolution, 1990, p. 69; Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296). The murdered, the poor, and the “savages” might have something to say about those stylized pronouncements. The point here is not that we should discard Arendt; the point is that even if we appreciate her brilliant and visionary insights, we can question her foundations before building on top of them.

The many virtues of the interpretive projects of Patricia Owens and Patrick Hayden far outweigh any of the criticisms offered here. Both books will engage and educate Arendt scholars, political theorists more generally, and students of world politics. Owens breaks new ground on Arendt and war, making valuable contributions to existing Arendt scholarship; Hayden employs an extremely clever and creative, if contentious, strategy for employing Arendt practically.

Beyond their obvious appeal to political theorists and Arendt specialists, both books also aim to interest international relations scholars in her work and words. Through no particular fault of the authors, that audience may prove substantially more difficult to reach. At least in the United States (perhaps to a lesser degree in the UK and elsewhere), quantitative analysis has assumed the leading role in international relations studies. Even many qualitatively oriented scholars do not usually engage with the type of specialized vocabulary and nonsystematic reflection that Arendt offers. One can guess that if mainstream IR scholars were to employ Arendt's works at all, their purpose would be to pick a quote or phrase here or there to bolster one of their existing commitments. Nonetheless, in one respect Arendt could prove valuable to scholars of international relations (and political scientists generally) on their own terms. Instead of looking to her for a complete theory of politics or for a pronouncement on events that occurred after her death, political scientists could view her works as a rich source of testable hypotheses from one of the twentieth century's most fertile minds. As Owens mentions, Arendt felt that “the likelihood of violence increases when those we usually understand as ‘holding’ power ‘feel it slipping from their hands’” (Crises of the Republic, 1972, quoted in Owens, p. 16). Is Arendt right? Amass evidence systematically and test the hypothesis. For a second example, Arendt asserted that superfluousness and statelessness contributed to totalitarianism's rise. One might define those terms consistently and then examine the relevant (historical and current) evidence.

Some of Arendt's claims will undoubtedly stand up to scrutiny; others will prove misguided or misleading. Regardless, in addition to appreciating Arendt's thoughts for their own sake, scholars have much to gain by taking her seriously and testing her original and provocative insights—challenging, as she too did, our own assumptions and prejudices for the sake of understanding our common world.