We Are Free to Change the World<\/strong> by Lyndsey Stonebridge<\/em> delves into the life and work of the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Stonebridge\u2019s deft unpacking of underexamined facets of Arendt\u2019s thought (from love, to femininity, to race) and analysis of why her work resonates today makes this a masterful study of one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest thinkers<\/em>, writes Jake Scott<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt\u2019s Lessons in Love and Disobedience.<\/em> Lyndsey Stonebridge. Vintage. 2025 (Paperback); 2024 (Hardback).<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Hannah Arendt famously protested at being called a philosopher<\/a>, preferring the label of \u201cpolitical theorist\u201d because, as she said, the subject of philosophy was \u201cMan\u201d, while she was concerned with \u201cmen\u201d. A product of the tragic intertwining of historical forces, a life disrupted, and the grand political projects of the 20th century, Arendt\u2019s extensive works revolved around the study of how men \u2013 and women \u2013 really lived and, perhaps more importantly, were forced<\/em> to live.<\/p>\n Arendt was a thinker deeply in love with humanity, disappointed and shocked at its perversion, but hopeful for the fact that \u201cmen, not Man\u201d have power over their own lives and destinies<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As Stonebridge reminds us in the opening pages, Arendt\u2019s most famous work \u2013 The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em><\/a> \u2013 shot to the top of the bestseller list in late 2016, following Donald Trump\u2019s (first) victory, the Brexit vote, and the seemingly unstoppable rise of populist and nationalist rhetoric across the European continent. The gloomy warnings Arendt issued in her own lifetime were, it seemed, being ignored at a time when they were most relevant: the emergence of \u201cthe mob\u201d as a political force, the tactics of demagogues, and the political use of deliberate falsehoods to make the truth unknowable.<\/p>\n But Arendt, Stonebridge shows us, has more to teach us than doom and gloom. In fact, Arendt was a thinker deeply in love with humanity, disappointed and shocked at its perversion, but hopeful for the fact that \u201cmen, not Man\u201d have power over their own lives and destinies, if they embrace the circumstances in which they have been placed. More than anything, Stonebridge insists on taking Arendt seriously as a \u201cphilosopher, existentialist and theologian\u201d recounting how she originally intended to call her 1958 text The Human Condition<\/em><\/a>, Amor Mundi \u2013 The Love of the World<\/em> (89).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Stonebridge deftly intertwines Arendt\u2019s thought with her life, and in turn Arendt\u2019s life with Stonebridge\u2019s own. The book peppers insights into the life of one of the 20th century\u2019s most important thinkers with the quiet, personal reflections of the author alongside the panoply of characters who drifted in and out of Arendt\u2019s life, from Martin Heidegger to Mary McCarthy to Wystan Hugh Auden.<\/p>\n A particular triumph of the book is its engagement with Arendt\u2019s femininity, especially the historiography surrounding it, and Arendt\u2019s own ambiguity towards the feminine subject and political femininity<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Stonebridge takes us through the painful early half of Arendt\u2019s life, so dictated by circumstances. She was raised in interwar Germany, arrested in 1933 for research into the emerging persecution of the Jewish people, before fleeing Berlin for Paris, escaping occupied France through Spain, and was secreted away to Portugal before finally departing for America. But Stonebridge is at pains to show how, in response to this as well as a conviction that it was her existential duty to do so, Arendt takes control of her own life in its latter half. She did so across her university career, wide travelling, socialite tendencies and \u2013 above all \u2013 her persistent mind.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A particular triumph of the book is its engagement with Arendt\u2019s femininity, especially the historiography surrounding it, and Arendt\u2019s own ambiguity towards the feminine subject and political femininity. Arendt was never a thinker all that concerned with the question of gender, but that does not mean she was ignorant of its role: Stonebridge\u2019s use of Arendt\u2019s own anecdotes reveal her awareness of her gender through the patronisation she experienced, whether Martin Heidegger\u2019s condescending \u201cadvice\u201d to retain her \u201cinnermost womanly essence\u201d before \u201cforcing academic activity\u201d (42), or being described as a \u201cstudent of Karl Jaspers\u201d long after she was an established thinker in her own right (46).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For Arendt the great threat was the revocation of political identity and the reduction of man to what Giorgio Agamben called \u201cbare humanity\u201d<\/a> \u2013 in the superfluity that characterised the political exiles she lived amongst (93). The question of gender was not so urgent. Nevertheless, Stonebridge makes it very clear that the historiography of Arendt has, both in her own life and since, often been patronising and dismissive \u2013 being \u201cfrequently admonished to \u201cstay in her lane\u201d or, more aggressively, to stay out of whichever lane she was seen to be encroaching on\u201d (20) \u2013 a product of seeing Arendt the thinker as created by historical forces, and Arendt the person as created by her relationship with men.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stonebridge engages critically with Arendt at her most controversial in Chapter Five, \u201cHow to Think \u2013 and How Not to Think \u2013 about Race\u201d recounts Arendt\u2019s highly controversial 1959 essay \u201cReflections on Little Rock\u201d in response to the famous Brown v. Board of Education case and preceding protests. This essay troubles otherwise \u201cneat\u201d histories of Arendt\u2019s work, as it is often castigated as regressive in the anti-racist movement.<\/p>\n The questions she wrestled with at the beginning of her life stayed with her until the end \u2013 what is love? And why does it matter?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But, as Stonebridge points out, \u201cArendt was clear that racism was not only an accessory to the catastrophe that befell the West in the twentieth century: it was<\/em> the catastrophe\u201d (113). She shows that Arendt was not attempting to erase African-American experiences through segregation, but she feared that desegregation would<\/em> erase the identity of African-Americans and prevent their living authentically as themselves (120-122). Ironically, in attempting to put herself in the shoes of the mother of the iconic Elizabeth Eckford<\/a>, \u201cArendt secretly saw herself in Elizabeth Eckford\u2026 but it remains the case that she did not see<\/em> Elizabeth Eckford\u201d (126, emphasis added).\u00a0<\/p>\n Particularly, Chapter Four exemplifies Stonebridge\u2019s ability to reach across Arendt\u2019s work and find a consistent thread binding together her thought. \u201cHow to Love\u201d considers Arendt\u2019s work from her PhD thesis \u2013 Love and Saint Augustine<\/em><\/a> \u2013 through to her final unfinished work Life of the Mind<\/em><\/a> to show how the questions she wrestled with at the beginning of her life stayed with her until the end \u2013 what is love? And why does it matter? Because, \u201cas she understood it, it is only through relationships with other people that it is sometimes possible to exist at all\u201d (90). In this, the relevance of love for politics becomes clear, because \u201clove is the pre-political condition<\/em> of us being in the world together in the first place\u201d (99).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Overall, We Are Free to Change the World<\/em> is a magisterial introduction to Arendt\u2019s life, thought, work, and interminable wisdom. It draws deftly from Arendt\u2019s oeuvre and private letters to give us a full, rounded view of a woman often obscured by her own thought and by her biographers\u2019 tendency to always see her accompanied by the men of her life.<\/p>\n Note:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.<\/em><\/p>\n Image:<\/strong><\/em> Hannah Arendt photographed by Barbara Niggl Radloff in 1958. Credit:<\/strong> Munich Stadtmuseum, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Enjoyed this post?\u00a0<\/em>Subscribe to our newsletter<\/em><\/a>\u00a0for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.<\/em><\/p>\n
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<\/a>Structurally, the book delivers its central messages in a logical and enticing fashion, alternating between chapters unpacking Arendt\u2019s rich thought across her career and life (though, as Stonebridge continually reminds us, for Arendt they were one and the same) and chapters unpacking the relevance of that thought for the circumstances in which we find ourselves today. For instance, the first two substantive chapters, \u201cHow to think\u201d and \u201cHow to think like a refugee\u201d take the wisdom Arendt accumulated across the first half of her life and reminds us to try and view every circumstance as holistically as possible, such as the perspectives of Jewish refugees in the 1940s who, from a Palestinian perspective, \u201cwere also a generation of colonialists, coming to settle on their land\u201d (79).<\/p>\n\n
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