The year 2006 was Hannah Arendt's hundredth anniversary. By the time she died in 1975 at the age of 69, Arendt had established herself as one of America's leading public intellectuals. There was the early triumph of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which earned her fame and a reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the analysis of contemporary political affairs. There was the stunningly original (and densely philosophical) The Human Condition (1958), followed (in 1963) by two books, On Revolution and the controversy-inspiring Eichmann in Jerusalem. There were also, in Arendt's lifetime, several volumes of essays, including Between Past and Future (1961), Men in Dark Times (1968), and Crises of the Republic (1972).

At the time of her death, she was working on the tripartite Life of the Mind, the first two volumes of which (on “thinking” and “willing,” respectively) appeared, thanks largely to her friend Mary McCarthy's editorship, in 1978. Since then, there has been an accelerating output of posthumous publications, beginning with Ronald Beiner's edition of her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1982), extending through four volumes of correspondence (with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Heinrich Blücher, and Martin Heidegger), to a series of volumes edited by Jerome Kohn, which collect together a staggering number of previously published and unpublished essays on diverse topics (totalitarianism, Jewish politics, the Western tradition of political philosophy, moral responsibility and judgment).

These publications—as well as a series of conferences (in New York, Berlin, Paris, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere) to mark her one-hundredth year—would seem to confirm Arendt's status as a thinker who, while not exactly ubiquitous, has hardly lapsed into obscurity. Indeed, a compelling case could be made that she is now being taken more seriously, by more people in more places, than at any time during her life.

How to explain, then, the feeling of anxiety that hovers over Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's excellent Why Arendt Matters, a feeling manifest in the title itself? Does a case really need to be made that Arendt matters? There are many figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social, philosophical, and political thought whose “stock,” as they say, is much lower than Arendt's (a random list might include Oakeshott, Aron, Gadamer, Kojeve, Simmel, Althusser and Ricouer). Indeed, world events and scholarly interests have conspired to raise such “second rank” figures as Isaiah Berlin, Arendt, and Leo Strauss to a plane previously monopolized by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and (possibly) Robert Nozick. Like the world itself, political theory is pluralizing, and the idea that broadly historical and/or textual approaches to the subject are “not really” theory or philosophy is beginning to break down.

Yet Young-Bruehl's anxiety is understandable. While Arendt may be alive and well in universities and colleges all over the globe, her visibility to a more general reading public is declining, simply because the “general reading public”—as category and social reality—is itself declining. In our media-saturated lives, fewer and fewer people outside university campuses have the time or inclination to read books or lengthy essays, let alone the dense and often demanding ones Arendt wrote. Thus, there emerges a ready market for books about books: not digests per se, but relatively quick tours d'horizon intended to familiarize harried and distracted readers with a bit of what “X” might have thought or said. Young-Bruehl's book is, ironically, a book written for an increasingly post-literate, post-book age. Its purpose is to insure that Arendt does not turn into one of the great names that everybody knows but that fewer and fewer people actually read.

In this mission, I think Young-Bruehl succeeds brilliantly, offering much more than a sketch of leading Arendtian ideas (combined with a few contemporary examples to demonstrate “relevance”). Young-Bruehl's three chapters—on The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind, respectively—offer surprisingly intelligent and penetrating analyses of Arendt's main themes and concerns. To write a reasonably comprehensive introduction to a complex thinker without once offering up a gross simplification is, in itself, quite an achievement. As a guide to Arendt's thought, Young-Bruehl is not only lively and informed. She is, most importantly, trustworthy. Furthermore, she is well situated to draw direct, and sometimes startling, connections between Arendt's theoretical concerns and contemporary American and international politics. The attentive reader will most likely be convinced by her argument that The Origins of Totalitarianism is not only a work of prodigious historical and theoretical understanding, but an invaluable “field manual” for identifying proto-totalitarian tendencies in our time.

Yet the very elements that contribute to making Young-Bruehl's book an unqualified success in its stated mission also present certain problems. First, as in any introduction, there is the question of selection: What works and themes get discussed, and what get left out? Second, there is the problem posed by the guiding theme of Arendt's continuing relevance, which serves (in large part) as the main principle of selection. Third, there is the question of authority—a question Young-Bruehl sums up in her introduction: “[A]s our world has grown darker, as America … has grown further and further removed from its founding principles, which all concerned respect for the public realm, I have frequently found myself wondering: What would Arendt have said? What would she think of this world we live in, three decades after her death?” (14). Fourth, there is the question of theoretical comprehensiveness. For Arendt to matter, must she provide us with a set of concepts, distinctions, and analyses adequate to virtually every important dimension of our current situation? This is an extremely heavy burden to impose on any thinker.

We begin with the first two issues, namely, selection and the guiding principle of relevance. By foregrounding Arendt's relevance for our world, Young-Bruehl is forced to make the occasional dubious choice. For example, in the chapter on The Human Condition, she spends relatively little time on Arendt's analyses of labor, work, and action, focusing instead on her suggestive but hardly systematic or well worked out reflections on forgiveness in section 20 of that work. The result is that the “Greek” Arendt—the Arendt who celebrates a politics of talk and the civic life generally—disappears behind what I can only describe as a vaguely “Christianized” Arendt. Young-Bruehl, it must be said, is not in the business of conversion, and has, so far as I know, no theological agenda. She is, however, anxious to connect Arendt's thought to recent political events. Thus, a relatively brief and, in my eyes, tangential section of The Human Condition is placed front and center, the better to bring up recent events in South Africa and Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (110–22).

To be sure, this example is connected to a broader theme in the book, namely, Arendt's longstanding concern with crimes against humanity and issues of responsibility and punishment. Yet there is something odd about a consideration of The Human Condition that might lead a prospective reader to think that the book is centrally concerned with the question of forgiveness. This is clearly one moment in Young-Bruehl's volume where the principle of relevance skews the selection process to the point of distortion.

Second, there is the question of authority. Young-Bruehl was Arendt's student and prize-winning biographer (Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 1982). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that she should try to imagine how Arendt would view contemporary events and try to work out some of the contours of her response. It comes as no surprise when Young-Bruehl states that Arendt would take a dim view of the present administration and its policies. The question is what, if anything, such hypothetical disapproval should mean to us. The fact that everything we know about Arendt's views of the public realm, public liberty, the nature of judgment, and the need for extensive political participation clashes with the policy and prejudices of the current administration is—in and of itself—of little interest. If we want to condemn the policies of the Bush administration and its “neo-absolutism,” the vocabulary of John Locke and liberal constitutionalism is probably more helpful and—given our traditions—much closer at hand. Arendt's posthumous critical voice does not give us reason to oppose what is being done in our names. At best, it can only reveal unthought-of dimensions of the massive damage administration policies have inflicted on our standing in the world, our relations with others, and on our fundamental law, the Constitution.

Finally, there is the question of comprehensiveness. Reading Young-Bruehl, I often had the feeling that she thinks Arendt's work provides a vocabulary adequate to the task of mapping and understanding contemporary political reality. I doubt Young-Bruehl would ever explicitly make such a claim, but the impression is, nevertheless, a strong one. Of course, in political theory circles—even among those, such as myself, who find Arendt's work continually stimulating—Arendt stands as one political thinker among many. Her concepts and distinctions bring various underappreciated phenomena (such as political action) to light. They cannot, however, bear the burden of supplying anything like a comprehensive theory of politics. Thus, anyone who wants to understand our “dark times” would do well to read Arendt. They would do even better if their encounter with Arendt—perhaps mediated by Young-Bruehl—led them to read some of the great theorists Arendt criticized so brilliantly and on whom she relied for sustaining intellectual nourishment.