We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge delves into the life and work of the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Stonebridge’s deft unpacking of underexamined facets of Arendt’s thought (from love, to femininity, to race) and analysis of why her work resonates today makes this a masterful study of one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, writes Jake Scott.

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey Stonebridge. Vintage. 2025 (Paperback); 2024 (Hardback).

Hannah Arendt famously protested at being called a philosopher, 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 – 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, 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” – 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, “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 – through to her final unfinished work Life of the Mind to 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.

Image: Hannah Arendt photographed by Barbara Niggl Radloff in 1958. Credit: Munich Stadtmuseum, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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