[In the review below, Green comments on the "astonishing" insight Arendt brought to her writings, despite "those occasional lapses from which no truly serious work of the intellect is ever wholly free."]

In a recent essay not reprinted in this collection, Hannah Arendt has written that "thinking" isinherently an antisocial and subversive activity, a quiet enemy to all established versions of right and order. The truly independent thinker is never finally at ease with the customs and institutions of his (or her) times, but rather is continually and relentlessly probing for the soft spots in a society's self-image; attacking the difference between appearance and reality, what is and what ought to be. Thinking scorns all "isms," convenient fictions masking the truth about the imperfections of a social order—or of its revolutionary opposite; the thinker is not an ideologue but a philosopher.

Those who enjoy their social criticism in small doses only, or who like to believe that the political ideas of others are lies but theirs are the truth ("you are an oppressor, I am a liberator"), can never quite be happy with thinking in this sense.

And few of the people who have been deeply engaged in the political life of our age can be happy with Hannah Arendt, for there is virtually no panacea for the political diseases of this age that she has not subjected to the subversion of thought. Socialism and capitalism, anarchism and élitism, imperialism, and "third-world" revolutionism, student rebellion and adult repression, have all been shorn of their glossy facades by Arendt's practice of philosophy unalloyed by partisan interest; and that is still happening in these latest essays (all of which have recently appeared in The New York Review of Books).

Thus the reader who searches here for some sympathetic variant of "radicalism," "liberalism," or "conservatism" will be disappointed. Anyone, though, who doubts the worthiness of our own status quo, and is inspired by the most fundamental criticisms of it, will find at least as much to be grateful for in the work of Hannah Arendt as in that of any recent political thinker: for what she has constructed over the past several decades is nothing less than the most radical challenge of all to the entire course of our modern political history.

In such influential works as The Origins of Totalitarianism, Between Past and Future, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and Men in Dark Times, Miss Arendt has returned again and again to a set of interrelated themes: that the unrestrained, "value-free," individualistic secularism of the modern world has gradually undermined the bases of legitimate authority, of any meaningful affective relationship between man and the state; that the illusion of liberal "freedom" has often been purchased at the cost of devaluing real political participation by the people; that the bureaucratic organization of modern societies permits the most hideous of evils to be accomplished by the most ordinary of men; that the "mass societies" of our era "can no longer be controlled, let alone governed." ("Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"). All of this, finally, is summed up in a phrase that reappears throughout her writing: "the crisis of modern times," a crisis which, brought about by the lack of opportunities for humane and creative action by the mass of men and women, leads to the opposite kind of (pseudo-) action, to war and repression.

Miss Arendt's latest essays on this grand theme are particularly interesting for two reasons. First, in the 1950's it was possible for those Americans who noticed her work at all, to write off her perception of permanent crisis as the misapprehension of a refugee from European horrors, whose view of the twentieth century as a blasted heath was poetic but of little relevance to Americans. That kind of dismissal is no longer possible. These essays are, in large part, about, as she says, the Crises of the Republic; Miss Arendt is talking about us as well as others when she writes that "(the) defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a worldwide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade."

Second, it is likely that those unfamiliar with the traditions of "political philosophy" think of it as an abstract and slippery subject, producing grand generalizations but shedding little light on worldly matters. It is true that to maintain the stance of a detached, speculative thinker sometimes strains one's ability to observe mundane affairs accurately. In Miss Arendt's case, for example, her account of Communism (in Origins) as an uprising of the classless masses has never been persuasive; Eichmann in Jerusalem indeed contains errors of scholarship (though none that affect her basic argument about the way in which modern bureaucracy produces "banal" evil); historians have quarreled with her interpretation of both the French and American revolutions (in On Revolution). And yet, in the end it is astonishing how much insight into the daily events of our political history is contained in those books, and especially in these recent essays.

In particular, the essay "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" is worth the closest attention. Miss Arendt's treatment of the Pentagon Papers is unique. Her denunciation of mindlessness and duplicity in government—of (in a phrase she borrows from Senator Fulbright) "the arrogance of power"—is combined with a politely savage critique of those social scientists who, possessing (in her words) their own "arrogance of mind," lent their talents to provide the underpinnings of that duplicity. But both the arrogance of power and the arrogance of mind are merely two related versions of the same disease she has discussed before; of a modern attitude that refuses to recognize any natural limits on what the aggressiveness of science and power can accomplish. The world, in her phrase, is "defactualized," and nothing in the political universe is seen as so "real" that the clever and the mighty cannot restructure it at will. We thought, that is, that we could do anything to anybody, which was stupid; and we were willing to try, which was brutal and immoral: and those two kinds of folly are really one and the same, an inability to see that there is a real factual and moral human universe beyond what we ourselves construct as the targets for our weaponry or our propaganda. Thus, in other words, we are back with Miss Arendt's permanent theme of the absence of true authority, and the substitution for it of the sheer will to dominate: a theme now both sharpened and deepened by being located in this concrete historical instance.

The other essays as well develop this basic theme in an immediate historical context. In "Civil Disobedience" her argument is that the question, to obey or not to obey, is not a "moral" question but a "factual" one; or rather, that there are no "moral" questions separate from what is actually happening. People in large numbers disobey because they have to, not because they are willfully conscientious; and the problem is not how to repress them, but how to reconstruct our politics so that they do not have to disobey; so that real authority again exists: "Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the courseof time, all institutions that permitted the citizens' actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties' tendency to represent nobody except the party machines."

On Violence (which has been previously published in what is now an obsolete paperback edition) makes a similar point. The violence of authorities or rebels occurs when legitimate authority no longer exists, and we know that legitimate authority no longer exists when large-scale violence occurs; the question is not whether one ought to be violent, but what can be done to restore the situation in which it makes sense to be nonviolent. Again, the crisis of our time is that such a restoration is now necessary in so large a part of even the "democratic" world; and at the moment it is not forthcoming.

The subtlety and attention to detail with which these and related points are pursued can hardly be more than hinted at here. As before, too, the grand swath that Miss Arendt cuts through the weedy ideologies around her leaves some confusions of its own in its wake. In particular, one wonders with whom comparison is being made, and on what grounds, in the remark that "(as) distinguished from other countries, this republic … may still be in possession of its traditional instruments for facing the future with some measure of confidence." Here and elsewhere in her writings, the Cassandra of the twentieth century seems a little like Pollyanna where America is concerned. But there is so much to grapple with, and learn from in those writings, that one accepts those occasional lapses from which no truly serious work of the intellect is ever wholly free.