“We Are Free To Change the World” by Lyndsey Stonebridge
Synopsis– A timely guide on how to live–and think–through the challenges of our century drawn from the life and thought of political-theorist Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s foremost opponent of totalitarianism and a “prophet against conformity” (The Nation).
The violent unease of today’s world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all.
Born in the first decade of the last century, she escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential–and controversial–public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Questioning–thinking–was her first defence against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, and she knew that this also meant having the courage to defy and disobey.
We Are Free to Change the World is a book about the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century. It tells us how and why Arendt came to think the way she did, and how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. Both a guide to Arendt’s life and work, and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present, We Are Free to Change the World is a clarion call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt did–unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly–through our own unpredictable times.
Or read this review from Maria Popova at The Marginalian
“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality.
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation…”
