Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

We Are Free to Change the World

Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

ebook
0 of 0 copies available
0 of 0 copies available
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 opponents of totalitarianism
Don't miss Lyndsey Stonebridge in the PBS American Masters documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.
“We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.”—Hannah Arendt
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY • FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
The violent unease of today’s world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration: She 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 of 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 defense against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience.
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 dialogue with our troubled present, We Are Free to Change the World is an urgent call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt did—unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly—through our own unpredictable times.
  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Accessibility

    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

    Summary

    Accessibility metadata derived programmatically based on file type.

    Ways Of Reading

    • No information about appearance modifiability is available.

    • Not all of the content will be readable as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

    • Has alternative text descriptions for images.

    Conformance

    • No information is available.

    Navigation

    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

    • Index with links to referenced entries.

    Additional Information

    • Page breaks included

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from November 15, 2023
      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading