We Are Free to Change the World

“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