at the root of modern anti-Semitism and the political power of totalitari-
anism are located by Arendt, the social and cultural historian, in this
domain of modern society. Second, this aspect of the social is important
not only for Arendt the historian, but for Arendt the political theorist
as well. The kind of revitalization of public life that Arendt envisaged
in her later work had at least two salient characteristics. On the one
hand, Arendt was a political universalist, upholding egalitarian civil and
political rights for all citizens, while supporting nonconformism and the
expression of pariahdom in social and cultural life. On the other hand,
Arendt's call for a recovery of the public world is anti-statist; indeed, we
can complain that Arendt's philosophy as a whole suffers from a certain
"state blindness." However, if such revitalization of public life does not
mean the strengthening of the state but the growth of a political sphere
independent of the state, where must this sphere be located, if not
in civic and associational society? Arendt's early biography of Rahel
Varnhagen then not only brings to light hitherto unknown dimensions
of her treatment of the woman question; it also suggests a major re-
reading of one of the central categories in her work--the social--paving
the way for a new understanding of what it means to recover the public
world under conditions of modernity.

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