We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons In Love And Disobedience

Description

This bold new take on the life and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt explores her lessons for living in an age of uncertainty

Exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original
PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street

Beautifully written... Biography at its best
EDDIE GLAUDE, author of Begin Again

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, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of the world s 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. In place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it.

Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge s We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt s life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present. It calls on each of us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did - unflinchingly, lovingly and defiantly - through our own unpredictable times.

About the Author

Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (2024); Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018); winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London.