HANNAH AND HER RESISTERS: Nathan Pinkoski reviews We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s 2016 election was Hannah Arendt—or at least, her literary estate. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, sales of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism soared by 1,000 percent. New editions of Arendt’s works appeared, in which intellectual celebrities argued that Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism anticipated all the great ills of the present, from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia. These commentators saw themselves as engaged actors, using Arendt to launch a new political resistance.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, owes the inspiration for her book to this post-2016 moment. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience begins by invoking the 2016 election and the renewed interest in Arendt’s work prompted by this purported crisis. In the first few pages alone, there are several familiar references to “climate apocalypse,” “post-truth,” and “the age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.” Stonebridge writes earnestly about the importance of “combating populism” and “jump-starting social democracy.” America takes center stage as a country “that is reckoning (or refusing to reckon) with its violently racist history.” The book also contains cameo appearances from the contemporary leftist canon of heroes and villains, with some curious glosses. Elon Musk’s ambitions to relaunch space exploration make him an imperialist, a new Cecil Rhodes. Volodymyr Zelensky is rebranded as “Jewish-Ukrainian,” a spokesman for hyphenated identity and pluralism. Joe Biden turns up as an intellectually curious young senator requesting a copy of one of Arendt’s speeches—a hopeful hint that under his presidential leadership, America might finally turn a corner.
From its early pages, one might expect We Are Free to Change the World to be yet another tedious distillation of leftist clichés, but Stonebridge mostly spares her readers. Although her book belongs to the genre of #Resist, it is elegantly written. Instead of a clumsy “If Arendt were alive today . . .” tract, Stonebridge offers a conversational, personal reflection on Arendt’s life and work. She generally distinguishes her own conclusions from Arendt’s and avoids straightforward political commands. As befits the genre, the book has an obvious political angle, but because Stonebridge largely takes for granted an ideologically sympathetic audience, she is not heavy-handed. As exposition, We Are Free to Change the World renders Arendt legible, mesmerizing, and relevant to those beset by the anxieties of contemporary leftism. Yet the book has a greater significance. It inadvertently exposes the fault lines between Arendt’s thinking on the totalitarian phenomenon and that of the contemporary left.
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