Critical Essay | Critical Review by Philip Green

SOURCE: "Crises of the Republic," in New York Times Book Review, May 7, 1972, pp. 27-8.

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...
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