The word “deconstruction” has a bad reputation among thinking people, as a result of its decades-long association with hermetic literary theory. But the word itself was coined long before Derrida, and even today, after it has ceased to be academically fashionable, it continues to name a vitally modern practice: the deliberate taking apart of received ideas. At its best, deconstruction is a reverse engineering of philosophical tradition, in order to track down that tradition’s hidden assumptions and errors.

In the 20th century, no part of the Western tradition stood in as urgent a need of deconstruction as political philosophy. The first half of the 20th century was one of the worst periods in all of European history, spawning a series of horrors whose true magnitude it is still hard to grasp. In just three decades, World War I, Communism, Nazism, and World War II destroyed every assumption the West had made about its progress and virtues. Because these catastrophes were failures of politics, they put in doubt the inherited wisdom of Europe about how men can and should live together. Worse, they raised the possibility that political philosophy itself, from Plato to Marx, contained the seeds of the disaster.

It was natural, then, that after World War II, the best political minds turned to deconstruction. Just as, after an airplane crash, investigators trace each part of the engine all the way back to the factory, to find out where the fatal problem lay, so philosophers examined the Western political tradition to find out how it could have gone so horribly awry. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, devoted himself to studying the thinkers of the Enlightenment, in order to refute their influential belief that a perfect society could one day be achieved by reasoned effort. Politics would never disappear, Berlin argued, because no ideal society was possible; different human values, like liberty and equality, were necessarily incommensurable, and their balance would always have to be negotiated politically.

Hannah Arendt, whose centenary will be celebrated next year, devoted herself to this same kind of deconstruction, but with still greater passion and profundity. Political theory was not, Arendt always insisted, her first love. As a student in Weimar Germany, she had been trained in existential philosophy by two of its greatest masters, Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. What turned her away from metaphysics and toward history was history itself, as it unfolded in Europe between the wars.

Arendt, a Jew from an assimilated German family, was arrested shortly after Hitler took power in 1933, but escaped to France. She spent the next several years working for Youth Aliyah, an organization that helped European Jews immigrate to Palestine. When Germany invaded France in 1940, she fled once again, finding refuge in New York, which would be her home for the rest of her life. She became an American citizen in 1951, taught in colleges around the United States, and emerged as a central figure in the New York intellectual world. By the time she died, in 1975, she was universally recognized as a major political philosopher.

The direction of Arendt’s work was determined by what she witnessed and experienced during the 1930s and 1940s. Her most famous and controversial books – “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem” – dealt explicitly with Nazism. But Arendt’s more theoretical writing, too, is deeply marked by contemporary history.

“The Promise of Politics” (Schocken, 218 pages, $25), the latest title in Schocken’s exciting series of new editions of Arendt’s work, offers a condensed introduction to her difficult and challenging thought. It is not a book Arendt herself published or even planned. Rather, it was crafted by the series’ editor, Jerome Kohn, out of the fragments of two unfinished books, abandoned by Arendt in the 1950s.

The first half of the volume consists of brief essays on what one piece calls “The Tradition of Political Thought,” including extended discussions of Socrates, Montesquieu, and Marx. The book concludes with a long essay, awkwardly but deliberately translated as “Introduction Into Politics, “that sketches the political ideas informing all of Arendt’s work, including her masterpiece, “The Human Condition.” (The same constellation of ideas, themes, and subjects can be found in “Essays in Judgment” [Schocken, 458 pages, $16.95], a large selection of Arendt’s articles, essays, and lectures – many of them direct responses to current events – that was first published in 1994 and has just been reissued in paperback.)

“The Promise of Politics” does not use the word “deconstruction,” but this is exactly Arendt’s goal: to show that the Western tradition of political thought has forgotten the real nature and possibilities of politics. “What is remarkable among all great thinkers,” she writes at the beginning of “Introduction Into Politics,” “is the difference in rank between their political philosophies and the rest of their works – even in Plato. Their political philosophies never achieve the same profundity. This lack of profundity is nothing but a failure to sense the depths in which politics in anchored.”

In her focus on Plato, Arendt shows herself to be a true product of her German education. Ever since the 18th century, German thinkers had felt a particular affinity for Greece, to the point that many of them regarded the Germans as the sole legitimate heirs of the Greeks. Even Arendt’s disparagement of Plato follows in a vital German tradition, which posited that the classical age of Athens was already a decline from its primal origins. Nietzsche, in “The Birth of Tragedy,” held that Socrates betrayed the true Greek spirit, which was violent and Dionysian; Heidegger wrote that Plato and Aristotle were responsible for occluding the first Greeks’ immediate experience of Being.

Arendt recapitulates these criticisms in the register of politics. In an ingenious argument – which can no more be judged by its historical accuracy than her predecessors’ myths about Greece – Arendt holds that Plato was, in fact, hostile to the political genius of the Greeks. After the condemnation of his teacher Socrates, he no longer shared the Athenians’ respect for the public sphere, the realm of free argument and debate, which was the real essence of the polis. Instead, he saw politics as a source of error and danger, from which philosophy had to protect itself. “The only thing that philosophers from then on wanted with respect to politics,” Arendt writes, “was to be left alone.”

In various ways, Arendt suggests in this brilliantly erudite and imaginative book, all political thinkers since Plato have shared his mistrust of politics. That is why they conceived of politics as a system that should be made perfect, so that nobody would ever have to worry about it again. On the contrary, Arendt argues, politics is not something made but something performed, not an artifact but an action. Action, then, becomes the key word in her political philosophy. She expounds an idealized vision of the Greek polis, where political action was a source of dignity, pleasure, and fame. In politics, citizens inherited something of the glamour of Homeric heroes: “It is as if the Homeric army never disbanded but upon its return to the homeland reassembled, established the polis, and thus found a space where it could stay permanently intact.”

Only by recapturing this heroic sense of politics, Arendt suggests, can we avoid the temptation in Western political thought that eventually led to totalitarianism: the belief that politics can be perfected and thus disposed of. For Arendt, the point is not just that political perfection is impossible, as Berlin taught. It is that political perfection is undesirable, because it would deprive human beings of the realm in which they truly become themselves. Totalitarianism wants to reduce all human beings to a single human being, who would carry out the law of history according to the will of the leader; genuine politics cherishes plurality, the interaction of men who are different but equal. Arendt is not a religious thinker, but she endorses the Biblical precept that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

The ardor and nobility of this vision make it highly seductive, and “The Promise of Politics” testifies that Arendt possessed what the Greeks looked for in a hero – greatness of soul. Still, the book does not fully come to grips with the obvious problem presented by Arendt’s Greek ideal, a problem she acknowledges. After all, the Homeric heroes earned their glory through violence, and the major subject of Greek political debate was war. The “action” that Arendt glorifies, in other words, was far from benevolent, and there is nothing reassuring about the idea of a 21st-century polis, an Athens with nuclear weapons. The darkest possibility raised by Arendt’s thought is that the modern world has made real politics too dangerous, just when it is more necessary than ever. By insisting that politics remains a promise, rather than a threat, Arendt offers a hope that history has yet to justify.