The political ideal of neutrality toward conceptions of the good is unsustainable at the extremely abstract level proposed by some liberal theorists. Neutrality is nonetheless a valuable political ideal. One of the many ways that government can go wrong is to take a position on some question that it would, all things considered, be better for it to abstain from deciding. The classic example is the question of which (if any) religion is true. The idea of neutrality holds that government ought to avoid this pathology.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), unlike her later books, is centrally concerned with the nature and fate of the modern state. The book presents a series of political pathologies – antisemitism, imperialism, tribalism, and totalitarianism – that Arendt regards as the result of failures in the state's dual mission to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all. Her underlying conception of the state bears a striking, though unacknowledged affinity to that of Hegel. Like Hegel, moreover, she argues that citizens' mutual recognition of one another's human rights, as mediated through state institutions, is an indispensable condition for full human self-consciousness and agency. Her version of this argument is developed first through an excursus on the origins and effects of racism among Europeans living in Africa, and then through an analysis of the unique plight of stateless refugees.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Anti-Federalists wanted representative bodies to mirror the electorate, and that the Federalists envisioned representation as a device for refining and enlarging popular views. This characterization is accurate in a broad sense, but it overlooks an important element in Anti-Federalist thought. I argue that certain key Anti-Federalists, in particular the Federal Farmer and Melancton Smith, synthesized the “mirroring” ideal and the “refining” ideal into a theory of representation that incorporated the best features of each system. This hybrid theory, though overwhelmed in the ratification debates of 1787–88, nevertheless provides a creative alternative model for effective national union.