One of the most brilliant political theorists of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt intended her work to liberate and empower, to restore our capacity for concerted political action, 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, all-consuming monster appearing as if from outer space to gobble up human freedom; she blamed it - not us - for our public paralysis and depoliticization.

How can we understand her vision of the social that seems to conflict with her most important teaching?

The Attack of the Blob is an imaginative and elegantly written study in which Hanna Pitkin seeks to resolve this paradox by tracing Arendt's notion of "the social" from her earliest writings to The Human Condition and beyond. Interpreting each work in its historical and personal context, Pitkin develops an answer that considers language and rhetoric, psychology and gender, authority, abstraction, and even the nature of political theory itself.