Not all of us will accept the invitation. And in this respect we will share the skepticism of Hannah Arendt, whose core insight in her indispensable book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is that the path to totalitarianism is cleared when the nation-state hyphen is severed, when the nation becomes an exclusive group that must defend itself through actions residing outside of the law and beyond the protections afforded by state institutions and procedures. Once the logic of a threatened national genus is accepted, emergency action grossly expanding the brutal exercise of state power is not far behind.

In this light, the Arendtian in the presidential race of 2016 would appear to be Hillary Clinton. One obvious sign of this is Clinton’s pledge to admit many more refugees from the Syrian conflict into the United States. In the most famous chapter of “The Origins,” Arendt harshly criticizes all those European and North American powers who had refused entrance to refugees during World War II, even characterizing them as participants in the Nazi program of imposing statelessness on European Jewry. Clinton has signaled that she will not repeat this mistake.

Clinton is also clearly much more statist than Trump, and in fact it is difficult to discern in her rhetoric a sense of nationhood standing apart from state institutions and policies — this is a major source of her emotional deficit as a politician. Hers is a politics of the achievable, of incremental progress within received institutional bounds, trained by the kind of long experience that breeds familiarity with the workings of government.

But statism is not an end in itself for Arendt, and we can certainly imagine her having misgivings about Clinton. In a curious moment of agreement with Schmitt, Arendt cites him in “The Origins,” in describing how the state’s rising domination and possession of the category of nationhood in the 18th and 19th centuries leads wealthy and powerful elites to claim that they are rising above party faction only when it suits their interests. In an even curiouser moment of agreement, when Schmitt later articulates his thought on this development in the context of the 1848 uprisings that erupted across Europe, he relies on Karl Marx’s analysis in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”

Uniting these three very different political philosophers, Arendt, Schmitt and Marx, is an insight on the ways in which pure statism inherently favors moneyed interests. Without some sort of pressure from the sphere of political action, the levers of the state fall all too readily into the hands of the wealthy and well connected. For Arendt this leads to a politics where Enlightenment principles like justice and equality are hollowed of significance and used only to advance the agenda of the powerful.

So when several commentators on the right and left accuse Clinton of being beholden to banks and corporations, we can imagine Arendt paying close attention. As is clear from “The Human Condition,” the portions of the liberal tradition that mattered to Arendt emphasize a political space for the kind of human creativity that has positive civic effect. This she likens to the human capacity for procreation: Just as we have the power to bring new human beings into the world, so also we have the power to bring new ideas into the world that reshape their environment, having ripple effects of responses that are also new. This is our highest calling, and highest achievement, as social and political beings. If Arendt is a liberal, she is a liberal with a significant civic republican streak.

Schmitt is widely, and justly, despised as a person and thinker for having joined the Nazi party in 1933 and refusing to submit to denazification after the war. But his insights on the way politics works still prove to be remarkably, if also lamentably, useful. Trump, like Schmitt, sees the government of his time as having failed, and seeks to heighten our sense of political emergency.

On the other side is Clinton, who with Arendtian poise casts cold water on a tribalist politics — she has admirably not responded in kind, even if she has frequently indulged in a politics of fear by playing up the monstrosity of her opponent. But if we truly cast our lot with Arendt’s political philosophy, as so many of us do either knowingly or unknowingly, we might find that both candidates leave us wanting.