To characterize the way writers, men of letters and thinkers had lived the period of the French Résistance, Hannah Arendt speaks of a "treasure."

Indeed, René Char had stated during this period: "If I survive, I know that I have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject my treasure."

This treasure is the experience of freedom all intellectuals made during this unique period, when they left their traditional occupation, that is a life focused on their personal affairs and the quest of themselves.

But with the Liberation, they had lost their treasure, in other words they had either to return to their past occupations or to be involved again in public life but defending ideologies and engaging themselves into endless polemics, which had nothing to do with the time of the Resistance movement.

According to Arendt, the origins of European philosophical thinking date back to Ancient Greece, with Aristotle and Plato.

Plato had taught us that the truth was not present within the society and in public affairs, but in eternal ideas, as demonstrated in the allegory of the cave.

The Marxian identification of violence with action implies another fundamental challenge of tradition.Marx's own attitude to the tradition of political thought was one of conscious rebellion.

What appears really alarming to Arendt is that in free countries, to the extent that unwelcome factual truths are tolerated, they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions; as if facts such as Germany's support for Hitler or the collapse of France to the German army in 1940 or Vatican policy during World War II were not documented historical facts but matters of opinion.

A factual statement, such as German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, for example, acquires political implications only if it is placed in an interpretive context.

[5] As to the difference between the traditional political lie and the modern mass manipulation of fact and opinion – as has become evident in the rewriting of history, the fabrication of images – and actual government policy, for Arendt the former concerned mostly real secrets, data which had never been made public.

This is evident in the case of rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but it is equally true in the case of image-making of all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected if it is likely to damage the image; an image, in fact, unlike an old-fashioned portrait, is not made simply to improve reality, but to offer a complete substitute for it.

We are thus faced with highly respected statesmen, such as de Gaulle and Adenauer, who were able to build their basic policies on obvious "non-facts", such as the "fact" that France was one of the winners of World War II, and therefore is one of the great powers, and Adenauer's statement that "the barbarism of National Socialism had affected only a relatively small percentage of the country."

[5] In the last essay of the book Arendt addresses the possible effects of the conquest of space, and more generally of the developments of modern scientific research, on the humanist vision of the world.