1 The parable of Franz Kafka, used by Hannah Arendt in the preface to Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Hannah Arendt (Penguin Books, 1996), 7 2 Václav Havel (address to Joint Session of U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C., February 1990), 43.
Arendt describes the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill once more the vital essence of these concepts.