Read Part Two first. Nobody tells you this and it makes the whole thing legible.

I read this properly for the first time in a hospital corridor in February, over four nights, while my mother slept and woke on the other side of a door, and I mention it only because it is entirely the wrong book for a hospital corridor and I couldn't put it down.

A structural warning first, because the book is badly served by its own architecture and by nearly every recommendation of it I have seen. It is three books. Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism, written in that order and published together in 1951 as though they formed one argument, which they don't quite. Part One is a history of the decline of the nation-state told through the position of the Jews within it, it is dense, and it assumes a familiarity with the Dreyfus affair and the Rothschild loans that most readers do not have. People begin there, drown by chapter three, and conclude that the book is impenetrable.

Start with Part Two. Specifically the chapter on the boomerang effect, and then the one called "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man." That second chapter is the finest thing she wrote and it can be read alone. The argument, that human rights turned out in practice to be the rights of citizens, and that a person stripped of a state discovers there is no abstract human being underneath to fall back on, was written by a woman who had been stateless for eighteen years, and it shows in the temperature of the prose. There is a sentence about the calamity of the rightless being not that they are oppressed but that nobody any longer wishes even to oppress them. I have not recovered from that sentence in twenty years and I doubt I will.

Where I part company

The synthesis is the weak part, and a nine rather than a ten is entirely about the synthesis.

Arendt wants Nazism and Stalinism to be species of a single thing, and she builds an elegant machine to make them so: the masses, the mob, ideology plus terror, the destruction of the space between people. As a phenomenology of what it is like to live inside such a state it remains unmatched. As comparative history it has been picked at for seventy years and a good deal of the picking is fair. Her Soviet material is thin because in 1951 the archives were shut, and she is honest about that in the later prefaces, which she added rather than rewriting the text, an editorial decision I respect and find maddening in equal measure. The 1958 and 1968 additions sit at the front of my Harvest paperback like apologies, and the reader who dutifully ploughs through them before reaching chapter one has already lost an hour and some nerve.

Then there is the prose. She is a German philosopher writing English and it shows in the sentence lengths. There are periods here that would not disgrace Burke and there are others that need a diagram. Normally I wouldn't bother making this complaint; I teach Clarendon, my tolerance is high. But many people are sent to this book by newspaper columnists and are not warned.

On the misuse of it

Every few years it sells out because a politician has done something and a columnist has reached for the word. That isn't wholly illegitimate. She wanted the analysis to be usable. But the specific thing she describes is a state that has abolished the difference between law and terror and turned an ideology into a physical process, and applying that frame to an ordinary bad government is a way of making yourself unable to see either clearly. Is that her fault? Not entirely, though a book this quotable is unusually easy to strip-mine. My worry isn't that people cite her too often. It's that the citations are always the same three phrases and never the argument underneath them.

Get the one-volume Harvest edition if you can. Do not buy the standalone Part Three, which exists, and which strips out the imperial material that makes Part Three intelligible in the first place.

Nine. I have taught out of it, argued with it, been wrong about it in print once, and I still find something in the imperialism section on every visit that I hadn't registered before.