There are two senses in which the interpretation of Hannah Arendt's political thought presented here is a reinterpretation. It is, in the first place, a reading of her work that differs in a number of important respects from other accounts. I hope to persuade students of her work both that this reading is closer to her thought, and that there are good reasons why she should have been widely misunderstood.

The second sense is more personal, for this is not my first book on Arendt. A brief introduction to her ideas, aimed at students and written while her work was still incomplete, appeared in 1974 and (being the first in the field) became fairly well known. While subsequently working in other areas I kept in mind the possibility of going into the matter in more depth, and occasionally published pieces on Arendt. But it was only when (with the aid of grants from the British Academy) I started to study her unpublished writings, preserved in the Library of Congress, that I began to realise just how much more there was to explore. Rereading Arendt's published work in the light of these other writings, I found myself obliged to revise my previous understanding of many aspects of her thought, and to suspect that what was needed was a full-scale reinterpretation. This book is an attempt to begin that process. It cannot pretend to be comprehensive, but it is focussed particularly on the areas of Arendt's thought where a revised reading seemed to me especially necessary. Other students of her work will certainly find much to criticise here, and will want to dispute many of my specific interpretations.