Between war and politics : international relations and the thought of Hannah Arendt / Patricia Owens.

Originally published: 2007.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [153]-215) and index.

Introduction -- Violence and power, politics and war -- Who is revealed in war? : history, war, and storytelling -- The boomerang effect : on the imperial origins of total war -- 'How dangerous it can be to be innocent' : war and the law -- Rage against hypocrisy : on liberal wars for human rights -- Beyond Strauss, lies and the war in Iraq : a critique of neoconservativism -- The humanitarian condition? : on war and making a global public.

This book studies war in the thought of one of the 20th-century's most important and original political thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book assesses the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy, and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality, and political immortality. Chapters engage Arendt's writing in dialogue with various schools of political and international theory, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, neoconservatism, and Habermas-inspired critical theory. Re-reading Arendt's writing -- forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding, and resistance in time of war -- reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics in new ways by thinking with Arendt.