The first essay, "Lying in Politics" looks for an explanation behind the administration's deception regarding the Vietnam War, as revealed in the Pentagon Papers.

"Civil Disobedience" examines the opposition movements, while the final "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution" is a commentary, in the form of an interview on the third essay, "On Violence".

[7] On February 21, 1970, twenty-seven-year-old Giorgio Agamben ground-mailed a typewritten request for Hannah Arendt to review his "On the Limits of Violence," mentioning that he had "take[n] the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence..."[8] In a response drafted less than a week later, Arendt admitted that "it will take me quite a while to read it because my Italian is not just lousy, but almost nonexistent.

"[9] Arendt had previously claimed that literati Zera S. Fink's 1945 book on a "Venetian vogue" for "stability" by mixed government, and the 1942 article in which Fink first examined il Discorsi passages translated and quoted in the works of James Harrington, partially germinated her research for On Revolution and additional studies.

Before the Italian philosopher informed Henry Kissinger that "you understand absolutely nothing in politics" at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (at least, that's what he reminisced about in 2013 for the twenty-eighth issue of Bidoun), Agamben had "the pleasure of attending the seminars of Heidegger convened at Provence in the Summers of 1966 and 1968."