We are Free To Change The World by Lyndsey Stonebridge

This is partly a biography of Hanna Arendt and partly an attempt to contextualize her thoughts and theories for a new generation. She was a German Jew who was steeped in the philosophical and cultural traditions of her homeland. When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, she fled. Her first stop was France, where when Germany started on the clear path to war, she was detained in a prison camp as an enemy alien. Lucky for her, because once Germany invaded France it was chaos and she and other female prisoners escaped and walked over the mountains and ultimately to the United States. Over her life she questioned whether the traditions she had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which Europe was living. She was unique in that she was determined to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them to look at how totalitarianism rises and how it could (and is) rising again. The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. While he and Putin clearly have an autocratic agenda that is crystal clear, Arendt would say the same was true of Hitler, so seeing it and stopping it are two very different things, and the question is are we up to the task? White supremacy has a frighteningly persistent grip on America, as an avowed criminal who is an openly racist candidate will be on the ballot in 2024.