This volume could not have come together without the immense support of Bloomsbury’s dedicated editors, especially Liza Thomson and Lucy Russell. Their dedication to this project never flagged and it appears in your hands today as much for their work as for ours. Peter would like to thank Peg Birmingham in particular, whose graduate courses first gave him a love for the complexities and force of Arendt’s work—and whose writings continue to influence his work up until today. We also thank each contributor—the dozens!—who patiently took up our requests to contribute in the first place, then dealt with questions and suggestions quickly and without hesitation. Arendt argued that thinking happens always in dialogue and no doubt, too, this book’s editors thought much together and apart, as all dialogues are, with the major contentions involved in each of these inventive and incisive chapters. The size of the volume makes it the largest such project for each of us. We would thus like to thank our partners and friends who supported us in this work even as life’s events often intruded to divert us from this undertaking, one that is ultimately dedicated to Arendt’s continued importance for thinking a world that we must engage and invent, even as the day’s news would often have us turn away. Arendt is a key inspiration for continuing, despite it all, this love of the world.
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We would like to thank Kerry Whiteside for giving us permission to publish Chapter 39 in this volume from his essay, which appeared as “Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (1994): 339–58. We would also like to thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing us to republish Richard Bernstein’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 381–401, as Chapter 21 in this volume. We would also like to thank Bonnie Honig for allowing us to republish her “What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or: The Jewish Unconscious of Arendt’s Most ‘Greek’ Text,” Political Theory 44, no. 3 (June 2016): 307–36, as Chapter 30 in this volume. These are the only chapters that have previously appeared in some form.