We Are Free to Change the World

Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 16 2024 | Archive Date Apr 30 2024

Talking about this book? Use #WeAreFreetoChangetheWorld #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

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

“We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.”—Hannah Arendt

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.
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...

Advance Praise

“A lively, engaging portrait of the eminent thinker and the ongoing relevance of her work. . . A splendid, ever-so-timely consideration of Arendt and her thoughts on how nations sink into tyranny.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“In this extraordinary book, Lyndsey Stonebridge details the life and thought of Hannah Arendt in ways that speak to our troublesome times. We get a sense of the expansiveness of Arendt’s thought—her vulnerabilities and her complexity—with stories and intimate details that reveal Stonebridge’s love of her. Beautifully written, We Are Free to Change the World is biography at its best.”

—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“An invigorating and fresh invitation into the world of Hannah Arendt's life/work connection. Stonebridge has great facility with a complex range of sources, and her accessible and thoughtful writing allows the reader to glide into a complex engagement with ease and joy.”

—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

“Exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original; an iconic twentieth-century figure brought to life in all her facets.”

—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Last Colony

“Lyndsey Stonebridge walks the world in Hannah Arendt’s footsteps, reaching back a hand to bring us along. One feels Arendt is still with us, still commenting on events, still cross, ironic, or ebullient, still brilliant, but also always a person. The politics and philosophy of one of the twentieth-century’s great thinkers unfold through well-told stories whose details enflesh the ideas: the persistence of race thinking, the refugee perspective on politics, the joy of revolutionary activity, the responsibility to cultivate judgment, and the need to resist the ambitions of autocrats intent on demolishing the plurality and equality that are the keys to real freedom… A brilliant and wonderful book.”

—Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair and A Feminist Theory of Refusal

“In this brilliantly imagined and compulsively readable book, Lyndsey Stonebridge reveals how Hannah Arendt’s life and thought across the twentieth century matter to our own time–how she dramatized the interplay of love and loneliness, teaching us how not to miss what is under our noses, and that no freedom survives without the presence of others. For its contemporary relevance and exquisite prose, this is a breathtaking triumph.”

—Professor Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

“The book about Hannah Arendt I’ve always wanted to read, that only Lyndsey Stonebridge could write. A passionate, original defense of the politics of thinking, and especially of women thinking in public, We Are Free to Change the World is witty, moving, and inspiring, at once fiercely angry and a work of deep moral wisdom. An extraordinary book that I wish everyone would read—especially those who wonder if they have anything to learn from it.’

—Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold America and The Wrath to Come

“Bold and exhilarating. . . sparkles with ideas and plumbs new depths in the great Hannah Arendt’s thinking. Stonebridge brilliantly brings our own troubled times face to face with Arendt’s to wake us into urgency and a greater appreciation of an iconic woman.”

—Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness

“Expertly analysed and beautifully written, Stonebridge on Arendt is a rare gem, combining painstaking, complex history and stark contemporary resonance with sparks of hope that we really are free to change the world.”

—Baroness Shami Chakrabati, former Director of the human rights pressure group Liberty and author of On Liberty

“Both a warmly engaging intellectual biography and a tract for the times, this is a needful reminder of what political thinking looks like when it is humane, literate and radical all at once.”

—Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury


“A lively, engaging portrait of the eminent thinker and the ongoing relevance of her work. . . A splendid, ever-so-timely consideration of Arendt and her thoughts on how nations sink into tyranny.”...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780593229736
PRICE $32.00 (USD)
PAGES 368

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (EPUB)
Send to Kindle (EPUB)
Download (EPUB)

Average rating from 3 members


Readers who liked this book also liked: