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PORTSIDE CULTURE

“A THINKER DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH HUMANITY” – UNDERSTANDING HANNAH
ARENDT  
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Jake Scott
April 30, 2025
LSE Review of Books
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_ This book looks at previously under examined aspects of Arendt's
thinking, especially regarding issues of love, gender, and race, in
order to probe more deeply into the work of one of the 20th century's
most celebrated political thinkers. _

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_We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and
Disobedience_
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Hogarth
ISBN: 9780593229736

Hannah Arendt famously protested at being called a philosopher
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preferring the label of “political theorist” because, as she said,
the subject of philosophy was “Man”, while she was concerned with
“men”. A product of the tragic intertwining of historical forces,
a life disrupted, and the grand political projects of the 20th
century, Arendt’s extensive works revolved around the study of how
men – and women – really lived and, perhaps more importantly,
were _forced_ to live.

Arendt was a thinker deeply in love with humanity, disappointed and
shocked at its perversion, but hopeful for the fact that “men, not
Man” have power over their own lives and destinies

As Stonebridge reminds us in the opening pages, Arendt’s most famous
work – _The Origins of Totalitarianism_
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shot to the top of the bestseller list in late 2016, following Donald
Trump’s (first) victory, the Brexit vote, and the seemingly
unstoppable rise of populist and nationalist rhetoric across the
European continent. The gloomy warnings Arendt issued in her own
lifetime were, it seemed, being ignored at a time when they were most
relevant: the emergence of “the mob” as a political force, the
tactics of demagogues, and the political use of deliberate falsehoods
to make the truth unknowable.

But Arendt, Stonebridge shows us, has more to teach us than doom and
gloom. In fact, Arendt was a thinker deeply in love with humanity,
disappointed and shocked at its perversion, but hopeful for the fact
that “men, not Man” have power over their own lives and destinies,
if they embrace the circumstances in which they have been placed. More
than anything, Stonebridge insists on taking Arendt seriously as a
“philosopher, existentialist and theologian” recounting how she
originally intended to call her 1958 text _The Human Condition_
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Amor Mundi – The Love of the World_ (89).  

Structurally, the book delivers its central messages in a logical and
enticing fashion, alternating between chapters unpacking Arendt’s
rich thought across her career and life (though, as Stonebridge
continually reminds us, for Arendt they were one and the same) and
chapters unpacking the relevance of that thought for the circumstances
in which we find ourselves today. For instance, the first two
substantive chapters, “How to think” and “How to think like a
refugee” take the wisdom Arendt accumulated across the first half of
her life and reminds us to try and view every circumstance as
holistically as possible, such as the perspectives of Jewish refugees
in the 1940s who, from a Palestinian perspective, “were also a
generation of colonialists, coming to settle on their land” (79).

Stonebridge deftly intertwines Arendt’s thought with her life, and
in turn Arendt’s life with Stonebridge’s own. The book peppers
insights into the life of one of the 20th century’s most important
thinkers with the quiet, personal reflections of the author alongside
the panoply of characters who drifted in and out of Arendt’s life,
from Martin Heidegger to Mary McCarthy to Wystan Hugh Auden.

A particular triumph of the book is its engagement with Arendt’s
femininity, especially the historiography surrounding it, and
Arendt’s own ambiguity towards the feminine subject and political
femininity

Stonebridge takes us through the painful early half of Arendt’s
life, so dictated by circumstances. She was raised in interwar
Germany, arrested in 1933 for research into the emerging persecution
of the Jewish people, before fleeing Berlin for Paris, escaping
occupied France through Spain, and was secreted away to Portugal
before finally departing for America. But Stonebridge is at pains to
show how, in response to this as well as a conviction that it was her
existential duty to do so, Arendt takes control of her own life in its
latter half. She did so across her university career, wide travelling,
socialite tendencies and – above all – her persistent mind.  

A particular triumph of the book is its engagement with Arendt’s
femininity, especially the historiography surrounding it, and
Arendt’s own ambiguity towards the feminine subject and political
femininity. Arendt was never a thinker all that concerned with the
question of gender, but that does not mean she was ignorant of its
role: Stonebridge’s use of Arendt’s own anecdotes reveal her
awareness of her gender through the patronisation she experienced,
whether Martin Heidegger’s condescending “advice” to retain her
“innermost womanly essence” before “forcing academic activity”
(42), or being described as a “student of Karl Jaspers” long after
she was an established thinker in her own right (46).  

For Arendt the great threat was the revocation of political identity
and the reduction of man to what Giorgio Agamben called “bare
humanity”
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in the superfluity that characterised the political exiles she lived
amongst (93). The question of gender was not so urgent. Nevertheless,
Stonebridge makes it very clear that the historiography of Arendt has,
both in her own life and since, often been patronising and dismissive
– being “frequently admonished to “stay in her lane” or, more
aggressively, to stay out of whichever lane she was seen to be
encroaching on” (20) – a product of seeing Arendt the thinker as
created by historical forces, and Arendt the person as created by her
relationship with men. 

Stonebridge engages critically with Arendt at her most controversial
in Chapter Five, “How to Think – and How Not to Think – about
Race” recounts Arendt’s highly controversial 1959 essay
“Reflections on Little Rock” in response to the famous Brown v.
Board of Education case and preceding protests. This essay troubles
otherwise “neat” histories of Arendt’s work, as it is often
castigated as regressive in the anti-racist movement.

The questions she wrestled with at the beginning of her life stayed
with her until the end – what is love? And why does it matter?

But, as Stonebridge points out, “Arendt was clear that racism was
not only an accessory to the catastrophe that befell the West in the
twentieth century: it _was_ the catastrophe” (113). She shows that
Arendt was not attempting to erase African-American experiences
through segregation, but she feared that desegregation _would_ erase
the identity of African-Americans and prevent their living
authentically as themselves (120-122). Ironically, in attempting to
put herself in the shoes of the mother of the iconic Elizabeth
Eckford
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“Arendt secretly saw herself in Elizabeth Eckford… but it remains
the case that _she did not see_ Elizabeth Eckford” (126, emphasis
added). 

Particularly, Chapter Four exemplifies Stonebridge’s ability to
reach across Arendt’s work and find a consistent thread binding
together her thought. “How to Love” considers Arendt’s work from
her PhD thesis – _Love and Saint Augustine_
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through to her final unfinished work _Life of the Mind_
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show how the questions she wrestled with at the beginning of her life
stayed with her until the end – what is love? And why does it
matter? Because, “as she understood it, it is only through
relationships with other people that it is sometimes possible to exist
at all” (90). In this, the relevance of love for politics becomes
clear, because “love is the _pre-political condition_ of us being
in the world together in the first place” (99).  

Overall, _We Are Free to Change the World_ is a magisterial
introduction to Arendt’s life, thought, work, and interminable
wisdom. It draws deftly from Arendt’s oeuvre and private letters to
give us a full, rounded view of a woman often obscured by her own
thought and by her biographers’ tendency to always see her
accompanied by the men of her life.

_NOTE:__ This review gives the views of the author and not the
position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of
Economics and Political Science._

Dr Jake Scott is a political theorist specialising in populism,
democratic constitutionalism and the formation of popular identities.
He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in December 2022
and has worked as the director of research for a number of think tanks
and research organisations.

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