By exploring Addams's lifelong fascination with work, this essay analyzes the ways in which her understanding of work fundamentally shaped her wider political vision. For Addams, work was the foundation of not only a personal sense of identity, but also a collective democratic character. The workplace had the potential to be the model of a cooperative community, providing a venue for social solidarity and civic reciprocity. By working together, Americans would develop a more cosmopolitan and inclusive politics. In short, the essay argues that Addams's political thought was an attempt to revitalize democracy by giving meaning to work. It concludes by suggesting that her arguments can be applied to many contemporary political problems, and that today's democratic theory and practice would be enlivened by a renewed attention to work. Joel Winkelman is Lecturer in the

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The study's last chapter is titled "The Discontents of Liberal Democracy and the Continuing Relevance of Arendtian Thought." There the discussion of Arendt is accompanied by a lengthy, programmatic survey of ills and malaises besetting present-day American democracy. McCarthy fears that pervasive social anomie and persistent civic apathy may make for a crisis of political legitimacy; he warns that gross inequalities of power and wealth will grow ever more entrenched, owing to changes in the global economy. He makes no claim to any great originality in this diagnosis of our predicament, and draws freely on such writers as Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel; also William Galston, Robert Putnam, and Benjamin Barber. At the end he comes back to Arendt, whom he takes as an exceptionally vigorous exponent of the republican ideal of the active, vigilant citizen. Yet he also believes that her ideas would have to be significantly modified before they can speak usefully to the present situation as he sees it. Among other things, he regrets that she did not pay enough attention to matters of economics, or to questions of social justice, and he faults her for failing to attend more closely to Aristotle's notion of practical wisdom. Even more than the rest of the book, this last chapter feels a bit dated-as if untouched by events of the past dozen years. No doubt the malaises of liberal democracy to which McCarthy adverts are still with us, now more than ever. But there is something odd, even disconcerting, in the way the discussion is framed, in a book which sets out to affirm Hannah Arendt's present-day pertinence. The chapter's topical subheads include the words "security" and "power"-the first referring to anxieties arising from economic uncertainty, the second to grievances over the global maldistribution of wealth. Those indeed are worrisome issues, deserving serious attention. And yet, the reader may feel something close to nostalgia, recalling an era when Americans' worry over "security" was chiefly a question of economic prospects, or when worldwide discontent over America's disproportionate power had chiefly to do with the regulation of markets. Our times are darker than that-as Arendt's had been.