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 to the nature of political theory itself.
