We Are Free to Change the World
Hannah Arendt’s Lesson in Love and Disobedience – Lyndsey Stonebridge
A Read for Our Time
Lyndsey Stonebridge’s beautiful book on Hannah Arendt’s thinking invites us on a journey into one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds and the importance she attributed to the act of thinking. In this masterful work, Stonebridge echoes Arendt’s thinking, highlighting how today’s violent unease, uncertainty and Zeitgeist would be all too familiar to the Jewish German-American refugee and influential and political theorist, who did not want to be labeled a philosopher.
Hannah Arendt: Refugee
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-born Jewish philosopher and political theorist best known for her work on the nature of power, totalitarianism and the human condition.
During the rise of the Nazis, Arendt was forced to flee Germany after being arrested and released by the Gestapo. She escaped to Paris where she lived in exile. When Germany occupied France, she was forced to flee once more, ultimately arriving in America as a refugee. There she continued to live with as a stateless refugee for many years, before gaining US citizenship.
Hannah Arendt was a pupil of the German philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a relationship while studying in Marburg. She also studied with Karl Jaspers, who was to have a profound influence on her life and became a close friend.
Her refugee status profoundly affected her life and thinking:
“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.”[1]
Hannah Arendt: Influential and Profound 20th Century Thinker
Hannah Arendt was a prolific thinker and author who disliked being labelled a philosopher, considering philosophy “to be the subject of Man”. Her concern lay with “men”: humanity and the human condition, identifying as a political theorist whose thinking was rooted in the plurality of humanity.
As a German Jew in exile, her experiences of persecution, statelessness and being a refugee deeply influenced her thinking and work. So too did the horrors of the Nazi regime, capable of the terrible act of the Holocaust, persecution and, the cruelty of fascist totalitarianism. Shaped by these experiences, her writing focused on totalitarianism, power, terror, exile, love, the human condition and above all freedom.
These themes resonate skilfully throughout Arendt’s writing and Stonebridge’s beautiful biographically inspired journey of thought and questioning with Hannah Arendt for a world in significant turmoil.
Lessons in Love and Disobedience for Our Unpredictable Times
Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of this beautifully written and profound book on one the 20th century’s most influential political thinkers, “invites us to an urgent dialogue with our troubled present”. She calls on each of us to “think our way, as Hannah Arendt did, unflinchingly, loving and defiantly, through our own unpredictable times”.
Early on, Stonebridge highlights how The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt’s most famous work) rose to the top of the bestseller list, following 2016’s Trump election and Brexit results. The book saw a 1000-fold sales increase during the first year of Trump’s presidency. Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism warned us that although totalitarian regimes invariably fall, their thinking and Zeitgeist can linger and influence our relationship to the future. A warning that most certainly resonates today.
Reflecting on Arendt’s life and ideas, Stonebridge continues to draw lessons for a contemporary troubled world, inviting us to an “enlarged mentality”[2], a fundamental notion for Arendt. She urged people to train and expand our imagination to “go visiting” and engage mutually with different perspectives and viewpoints.
We are Free to Change the World highlights how Hannah Arendt believed this to be the foundation of good judgement, a foundation that not only inspires but guides us through this wonderful read, encouraging us to widen our thinking and questioning.
Stonebridge, like Arendt, invites us to think; not what to think, but how to think. She highlights how Arendt believed thinking to be dangerous and revolutionary, not surprising given the time when she lived and the fascist and racist ideology that forced her into exile. To her, thinking is what brings us freedom, and a free mind gives us the power “to keep possibility alive”, a clear message of hope.
Important to Arendt was not only engagement in thinking, but the act of questioning to protect us from tyranny. Her 20th century writing and thinking couldn’t be more apt for our time in which ‘thinking’ and ‘questioning’ are increasingly subject to the new paradigms of the rise of inorganic intelligence of AI versus a free human mind.
A Biographical Journey for Our World
The power of Stonebridge’s writing is heightened by weaving Arendt’s thinking and work into a biographical journey for our time. Unlike most biographies, its axis is Arendt’s profound thinking and great mind, which has resulted in a prolific compendium that resonates loudly today.
Hannah Arendt did not witness the technological (r)evolutions of the past decades, nor the rise of AI’s exponential strides, introducing new uncertainty into an already uncertain and fragile world. There is no doubt these rapid and exponential evolutions would have led to more urgency in her plea for nurturing a free human mind in dialogue with our troubled present to keep our possibility alive. An urgency and message echoed by Stonebridge’s with an enlarged mentality in this wonderful and highly recommended read.
This is what makes this book so unique: it transports us not only to Arendt’s mind, thinking and concern for humanity, love and freedom. It equally opens a window to Stonebridge’s mind, sensitivity and desire to keep possibility alive, deeply inspired and intertwined with Arendt’s love for humanity. It sends us a warning message and urges us to think and question for our time and our future.
Message for Education
Hannah Arendt considered education to be crucial for nurturing a love for the world. As well as being a prolific thinker and writer, she thought at several elite US universities.
Going beyond the boundaries of Stonebridge’s book, but given my engagement in and passion for education and learning, I could not omit a message from Arendt to Education, to add to my short discussion on this exceptional and profound read.
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world."[3]
[1] Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” (1943)
[2] Term used by Immanuel Kant, adopted by Hannah Arendt
[3] Arendt, Hannah. "The Crisis in Education." The Humanities Institute, 1954, thi.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Arendt-Crisis_In_Education-1954.pdf.
[4] Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) : high-ranking Nazi official and one of the Holocaust’s key architects. He orchestrated mass deportation of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, political opponents to the regime and non-Arian people to the concentration and extermination camps. He was put on trial in Jerusalem in 1961.