Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Eight years ago, the philosophical notebooks of one of the most widely-read political theorists of our time were published. Spanning twenty-three years, from 1950 to 1973, and containing more than eight hundred pages of annotations, Arendt's Denktagebuch is a unique testimony to the life of the...