We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

"Yes, and in 2021 I chose Samantha Rose Hill’s biographical book about Arendt as well. It’s been a good few years for books about Hannah Arendt . This is another book written by a real writer . I mean, she’s a thinker as well as a writer, but the writing makes this an excellent read. She’s approached Arendt in a slightly different way from a straightforward birth to death and beyond biography, combining the events in Arendt’s with thematic questions. She has chapter titles like: ‘How to think like a refugee,’ ‘How to love,’ ‘How not to think about race’ (Arendt made some apparently racist comments at one point about segregation in American schools), ‘How to change the world,’ ‘Who am I to judge?’, ‘What is freedom?’. So, there are a series of questions rather than a sequence of events from Arendt’s life. But it’s richly informed by the biographical study of Arendt, because you can’t really understand Hannah Arendt except by tying her into her times and the places she lived, the people she interacted with. She wrote about totalitarianism as somebody who’d experienced it. She emphasized the importance of freedom and resisting dominant ways of thinking, having lived through Nazi Germany, and survived exile in Paris, and later a certain degree of alienation as an exile in America. She responded to her times. She was very keen that philosophy should respond to the present. She didn’t even see herself as a philosopher, strangely. This is something that Simone de Beauvoir said of herself as well. I think this was because the concept of a philosopher that both were working with was of someone who builds a grand scale metaphysical system, an Immanuel Kant or a Jean-Paul Sartre , or a Martin Heidegger (Heidegger was her tutor and lover). As well as writing books, Arendt was an intellectual journalist. She didn’t have a grand system. Lindsay Stonebridge finds very elegant ways through her work, making it seem relevant to today, teaching us to read Arendt not just as a historical phenomenon of the 20th century. She builds in autobiography as well. You get Lindsay’s personal take on Arendt through her interactions with places. Lindsay is there in the archive, or visiting a somewhere Arendt visited or lived. It’s not an impersonal book in that sense. It’s also an excellent book in the way that it doesn’t presuppose that you know almost everything about 20th century history. When she introduces ideas, she explains the context as she goes. Not in a patronizing way, but so that you don’t have to be a historian to understand references to, I don’t know, the revolution in Portugal, or who a particular thinker was. This is a very accessible book, even though it’s informed by deep scholarship. It complements Samantha Rose Hill’s book on Arendt as well. So, just as I’ve said: if you want two books on Bergson, get Emily Herring’s and Mark Sinclair’s; if you want two on Arendt, get this and Samantha Rose Hill’s. Well, one is Agnes Callard’s book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life . Agnes Callard is an unusual, independent thinker. She’s a Classicist as well as a philosopher, and she’s passionate about the ideas she discusses. She’s quirky, and an excellent writer. That book is coming out in January and is one I’m looking forward to. Jonathan Webber has edited a collection The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy— that’s due out at the end of February in the UK. I definitely want a copy of that. And, further ahead, I’m looking forward to David Bather Woods’ new book on Schopenhauer . He’s written several very interesting essays on Schopenhauer, a philosopher who is not so much discussed these days. I’m not sure if that will be out next year, but I know it’s in the pipeline. Like Emily Herring’s book on Bergson, this should be another young writer breaking into the mainstream with an interesting take on a major thinker."