One of the most brilliant political theorists of our time, Hannah Arendt intended her work to liberate, to convince us that the power to improve our flawed arrangements is in our hands. At the same time, Arendt developed a metaphor of "the social" as an alien, appearing as if from outer space to gobble up human freedom; she blamed it not us for our public paralysis. In "The Attack of the Blob," Hanna Pitkin seeks to resolve this seeming paradox by tracing Arendt's notion of "the social" throughout her writings. Doing this, Pitkin developes a resolution that considers everything from language...

"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you've got to knock her around some." Niccolo Machiavelli
Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systematically place gender at the center of its exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.
"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's writings." "The American Political Science Review"
"

Hanna Pitkin argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy offers a revolutionary new conception of language, and hence a new and deeper understanding of ourselves and the world of human institutions and action.