Another excellent contribution by Hannah Arendt. comprised of eight essays dealing with the modern concept of history, political authority and its decline in the modern world, freedom, education, culture, politics and space exploration.

To touch on just two of the above, the essay on freedom discusses how the ancient and explicitly political concept of freedom, which held that freedom existed only among men [sic], was gradually replaced by concepts drawn from philosophical and religious experience that affirmed freedom as a sort of sanctuary away from the interference and influence of others. Freedom thus became a feature of thought and perhaps individual behaviour, rather than of political action.

The essay on authority is apropos in Canada right now, as we re-evaluate the role of the Senate. Arendt argues that all modern concepts of authority are derivations of the ancient Greek efforts to work out what authority meant, and they in turn drew theres from two essentially anti-political relationships: that of the master to his slave, and that of the head of house to his family.
By contrast, only the Romans, Arendt argues, had a genuinely political concept of authority, which for them (as for some later, e.g. Machiavelli) was explicitly tied to the act of founding (the political act par excellence) and augmenting that foundation. ( )