WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

A lively, engaging portrait of the eminent thinker and the ongoing relevance of her work.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), novelist Mary McCarthy once noted, was "one of those people who you could actually see thinking.” Arendt was always thinking, and, as humanities professor Stonebridge notes in this agile intellectual biography, it was always with a moral dimension at its base. Having fled Germany in 1933, Arendt was a scholar of the authoritarian impulse. As Stonebridge astutely observes, it was no accident that Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, became a surprise bestseller during the Trump presidency. “Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history,” writes the author, “about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence.” Thoughtlessness is the key word here, for Trump and company’s “big lie”—a term Arendt coined—relies on an audience willing to accept obvious falsehoods; she, too, “lived in a post-truth era.” This notion feeds into another famous concept of Arendt’s, “the banality of evil,” applied first to the murderous Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Banality concerns the everyday monstrosities committed by fascists, abetted by their silent enablers as business as usual. Interestingly, Stonebridge reveals that after Arendt’s last public address, in which she urged that “if America really still wanted freedom, it had to renounce the fantasy of its own omnipotence,” a young senator named Joe Biden wrote to ask her for a copy of her speech. Stonebridge adds that it’s an open question whether America is reckoning with both its bad and its good history, but the culture wars raging around such things as critical race theory and ethnic studies suggest that we’re working on it.

A splendid, ever-so-timely consideration of Arendt and her thoughts on how nations sink into tyranny.