[S]he didn't want to be registered as [a philosopher]. That was her final position. But what her work on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the main subject of the first half of her book) offers is a philosophy that has what she in her teens brought to Heidegger's stale world: fresh air. The essays in The Promise of Politics are not musty or suffocating from dread—but very much alive, affirmative, and, at times, as easy on the mind as a breeze on the skin. Nietzsche once spoke of philosophizing with a hammer; Arendt philosophized with an open window.And who pointed out the importance of the open, that musty dusty hermeneutical transcendental horizonal clearing, to said "teenager", then?