Lyndsey Stonebridge begins We Are Free to Change the World, her illuminating biography of Hannah Arendt, by reminding us of her subject’s continuing relevance.
Arendt is sometimes thought of as a lofty and abstract thinker. Yet her thinking was highly responsive to the shock of Nazism and the rise of fascism, which left her stateless and acutely vulnerable for many years. After World War II, she discarded any ready-made theories. These included comfortable notions that Nazism and Stalinism were aberrations from the eventual global triumph of Western democracy.
As Stonebridge points out, Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. Thinking about our times could reconcile us to the perplexities of the reality we face and help us address our common predicament. There is a need for “thinking what we are doing” – a need to respond to circumstances in a way that is creative, courageous and receptive to the texture of experience.
