The “actual impulse of astonishment” that sparks all philosophising is “honest bafflement that other people live as they do,” writes Wolfram Eilenberger in his new book, The Visionaries.
It’s a wild ride through ten of the worst years in the 20th century, spanning the period from 1933, the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, to 1943 and the thick of the second world war. It’s told through the occasionally intersecting lives of four brilliant young women philosophers: Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil (both French), Russian-American Ayn Rand, and German-Jewish Hannah Arendt, who spent time exiled in France and New York.
Though very different, they all “experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been”. Eilenberger writes:
