Published in 2024, this is by Lyndsey Stonebridge. The subtitle explains why it's here: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience...

I've been on a kind of Arendt pilgrimage since my retirement. It started with Eichmann in Jerusalem (which I read because I had been intrigued by Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 biopic, called Hannah Arendt). Then I read Anne C. Heller's 2015 biography, plus various essays by Arendt, as recorded here.

I'd been seeing favourable reviews of Stonebridge's book for a while. (It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.)

And last month, the inclusion of a couple of references to Arendt in Book notes reminded me I really should get on with this. Ah, so there IS a useful function for Book notes...



It's supremely readable. Stonebridge doesn't patronize you, but she makes no assumptions. All the academic paraphernalia are there (footnotes, index, etc), but they're not intrusive.

And there's PLENTY of food for thought:

1. It's timely

One of Arendt's key works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, became a bestseller in the US after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016: "A politics of the absurd and grotesque, the cruel, mendacious and downright incredible had returned, and Arendt seemed to have something to say about it... Twentieth-century-style totalitarian regimes hadn't returned. But as commentators noted then and since, many of the elements Arendt first identified with totalitarian thinking have crept back into our political culture. A cynical disenchantment with politics characterizes our times as it did Arendt's, as does an inchoate hate ready to be directed at anything and anyone."

And now he's back...

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2. It's different

This is not just a biography. It's an attempt to look at how the life and times of Arendt (1906-75) shaped her thought, and to point to the ways that thought is still relevant today. But it's also a personal interaction, as Stonebridge follows in Arendt's footsteps, looks at the objects and places that influenced her, and attempts to see through her eyes. So far, so good. I liked all that.

I wasn't quite so convinced by the chapter headings... OK, titles like How To Think, or How To Love, or How To Change the World offer contextualizing themes. But this isn't a "how to" book. It can't be. I came away with lots of interesting ideas, but without any clear idea on exactly how I might employ my freedom to change the world... Arendt never spoonfed anyone, after all. She invited us to THINK.

Stuart Jeffries argues that Stonebridge cleverly subverts the structure: "I have the sense that this gripping book has emerged from the wreckage of someone else’s conception... It’s as if the publisher wanted Stonebridge to write another book in that bastard subgenre that involves violating a philosopher’s reputation by converting their thinking into a self-help manual... If so, happily Stonebridge has gone rogue, disregarding the parameters of marketability and presenting us with a Hannah Arendt who is all too human."


The Jewish graveyard, Sarajevo, 2023

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3. It amplifies Arendt's emphasis on pluralism

This is always a favourite theme of mine. Much of the work I did on the English School back in my academic days was spurred by the conviction that pluralism offers a better grounding for international politics than "solidarism", and a pluralist international society, with its focus on consensus-building, pragmatism, and institutions, held more promise for our global future than either inter-state competition or state-transcending ideals. Nothing that has happened since has changed that conviction.

And pluralism backgrounds Arendt's work. Any freedom we might have to change the world, Stonebridge explains, begins "with the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world amongst others". Amongst others... This was Arendt's beef with existentialism: "She worried that an obsessive preoccupation with living an authentically free life meant that people had lost the capacity to see that what had gone wrong was not individual existence but 'our plural existence' -- our politics, in other words. It's not you, it really is us."

This is the essence of Arendt's idea of "natality": "Each time a new person comes into the world," Stonebridge explains, "they come with a capacity to act, to begin something new and a sense of initiative." Natality encompasses the ideas of change, unpredictability, contingency, and vulnerability. Natality and action are indispensible elements of political plurality: "We are not born to make the world in our image or bend it to our will, but to inhabit it with others, to act 'in concert' with, and between, one another."

Stonebridge even advances: "Real freedom -- and I have come to think this is Hannah Arendt's central political insight -- requires the presence of others so that we can test our sense of reality against their views and lives, make judgements, probe and learn."


Arendt as a child (unknown date). The black-and-white pictures are from the book, unless otherwise noted

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4. It cogently connects then and now

In Arendt's childhood and youth, the pace of progress was already making workers rootless, "depriving communities of a place in the world". Resentment was easy to exploit. It still is.

I kept reading bits of this book aloud to my partner, because its topicality just leaps off the page. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist."

But how did they get there? The same way they're getting there now: "The dull grey masses which popular imagination associates with twentieth-century totalitarian rule were never really unified, Arendt tells us. Mass movements were created out of isolated loners and democracy's losers... Nothing, wrote Arendt, 'perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better' than a 'vague pervasive hatred of everyone and everything'..."

We're here. It's now...

Stonebridge glosses: "Directionless hate was a political opportunity. Rabble-rousers and demagogues stepped into the gap left by democratic failure, paving the way for the big men who became such lethal cliches in what followed. The topsy-turvy logic of totalitarian thinking began to take shape. In Europe and America wealthy elites conspired with ideologues to try and persuade the miserable and disenfranchised that civil society and the institutions of law and democracy were the real enemy. 'Truth', they said, was whatever the 'hypocritical' liberal and bourgeois political and social classes wanted hidden -- the global elites, the bankers, the Jews, the citizens of nowhere."



And loneliness... Again, this is Stonebridge's summary of Arendt's point: "In free societies laws create boundaries in which liberty can operate. But totalitarianism was a law unto itself, enforced by state violence and a terror that pressed people together like a 'band of iron'. Gone were the spaces between people, and gone too was 'the living space of freedom'. Plurality 'disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimension'. But the big man was a fake (it's hard not to think of Trump here). In reality, he was made of millions of atomized and bereft men and women. Terror was the driver, but the true existential experience of totalitarianism was loneliness... Was loneliness, she now wondered, the 'true predicament of our time' -- was this totalitarianism's most pernicious legacy?"

And if loneliness becomes an everyday experience, so that people no longer feel as though they are together, in a shared world, then the ground is all ready for post-truth politics: "As Arendt eventually wrote, in quite possibly the saddest sentence in The Origins of Totalitarianism: 'What makes loneliness so unbearable, is the loss of one's own self, which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.' As she came to see, the loss of self and mutual trust was not confined to totalitarian regimes, but was becoming a feature of western consumer societies too." It's that lostness and isolation, as though moorings are being slipped one by one, that we see playing out in Adolescence.

Arendt was an Americanophile. But even she grew disillusioned: "In the end, Arendt concluded that America had not lived up to its revolutionary promise... Individualism and the 'monstrous' (her word) belief that capitalism produces unbridled freedom had led to 'unhappiness and mass poverty'... By the early 1960s, American society resembled the situation she had left behind in Europe twenty years before: social atomization and political purposelessness had expanded a void ready to be filled, or rather refilled, with racist fury."

For Arendt, Viet Nam was America's "big lie": "It turned out that you did not need state terror for a country to make murderous stories about itself. PR-driven political manoeuvring and the 'hidden persuaders' of mass media could consign reality to oblivion just as effectively."

Clearly, the lies didn't end. And, of course, it's not only in the US that they're rampant: "Political lying practically isn't even lying anymore. People are not duped. They are positively keen for deceit."


Woman on Straw Sack Reading, by Lili Andrieux, a fellow-detainee in Gurs internment camp, where Arendt was held in 1940

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5. It underlines Arendt's passion for thinking

"Arendt valued perplexity over identity; thinking for oneself, and quite often against oneself, was her touchstone. By thinking, [she meant] the constant work of reflection, questioning and perplexity... Embracing perplexity was Arendt's first line of resistance against the absolutism that so often drives terror and violence."

In the preface to The Human Condition, she writes: "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing."

Ah, if only it were so easy...

But her point is that it's not enough to SEE (because it is so easy to misinterpret what we see). We also need to THINK.

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6. It emphasizes her concern for the refugee

Becoming a refugee, Arendt reminds us, is symptomatic of the way the world is structured.

The Origins of Totalitarianism shows "how the long history that made mass displacement an everyday reality began with racism, imperialism and the seemingly insatiable expansion of global capitalism". It was imperialism's capacity to dehumanize people on racial grounds that boomeranged back to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and caused the wholesale movement of people.

I was interested in this reference to Franz Kafka, in whose writing Arendt identified a "pariah's viewpoint". One of her first jobs when she managed to flee to the US was to edit Kafka's diaries: "She wrote two essays on his fiction in this period..., each demonstrating how what other readers might regard as surreal was in fact a description of Jewish reality in twentieth-century Europe... [K's] nightmare adventures... reveal the lot not only of Jews, but migrants, refugees and strangers everywhere."

In the context of refugees, the views she came to hold on Israel reverberate uncannily in light of the disaster in Gaza: "She predicted, accurately, that the new state would forever exist in tension with its neighbours. Neither would the problem of statelessness have been solved: 'On the contrary, like virtually all the other events of the twentieth century, the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people... We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights... and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights,' she wrote in 1949... The 'right to have rights' guarantees the only right that perhaps matters: the right to be in the political conversation."

Ultimately, says Stonebridge, Arendt's refugee vision explains why she never created any all-encompassing political theory: "To demand a coherent political model from Hannah Arendt is to risk missing her refugee's lesson. Political models look very different to those who are excluded from them."


Woman Reading, by Lebanese artist Diana Al-Halabi. What she's reading is the Arabic translation of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution. Five months after the mural's appearance in Beirut, the 17 October 2019 Revolution began

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7. It highlights what Arendt had to say about love

This was really interesting and thought-provoking.

Firstly, the concept of "volo ut sis" -- I want you to be -- is a wonderful antidote to the hate-filled politics that abounds at the moment. I might not like you, or agree with you, or sympathize with you, or even understand you -- but I want you to be. I want you to be, in the way the Nazis DIDN'T want the Jews to be (or the other categories they'd earmarked for extermination).

Secondly, love is essentially political, because it produces something new (that natality idea again): "Love is singular... the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness... But, precisely because of this singularity, to love is also to affirm the plurality of the world... Because love is unique, because nobody has ever loved as we two, we join the many... When we love we also bring something new into the world: a couple, maybe a child, maybe not, maybe something else, a home, a project, a lifelong conversation, a garden, a repertoire of silly names and petty arguments, whatever, but something undeniably NEW..."

This kind of utterly unique newness is the totalitarian's nightmare.

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8. It doesn't gloss over Arendt's mistakes

Arendt, says Stonebridge, failed to come to terms with either American racism or black resistance to it. Which is curious, given her recognition of the role played by racism in feeding totalitarianism: "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... Race was the red thread that connected the camps in Africa with those in Europe, the butchery executed in memorandums and recorded on index cards in imperial London and Paris to those later in Nazi Berlin."

But Arendt's pronouncements on Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine turned out to be tone-deaf. Which is a cogent warning that it's all too easy to look at a problem, and assume it's like a problem WE have experienced. In which case, you might be sympathetic, but you can still be just WRONG: "The one thing, perhaps the most important thing, Hannah Arendt's life and writing teaches us is to take NOTHING for granted. Don't assume, don't accept, test your thoughts against reality, question -- do the WORK. Think. But she didn't. Hannah Arendt secretly saw herself in Elizabeth Eckford, that much is true, but it remains the case that she did not see Elizabeth Eckford."

But at least Arendt could admit her mistakes. Ralph Ellison was upfront in pointing out what she was just not getting, and she later wrote to him, admitting that her "failure to understand" had caused her "to go into an entirely wrong direction".

Then there's Heidegger... Stonebridge doesn't understand it either... Heidegger had been dismissed from Freiburg University in 1945, only to be readmitted in 1951 (which reminded me of Hans's father in Kairos): "He never once acknowledged the victims of the Holocaust -- nor would he for the remainder of his career." But after the war, incomprehensibly, Arendt writes to him, and they meet again. His wife is "an unrepentant anti-semite".

And Eichmann... While much of the criticism directed against her over the Eichmann trial was unjustified, Stonebridge argues, Arendt's tone was unwise. What was intended might have been "moral irony"; what was heard was "ironic contempt".


A typical Arendt look

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9. It nuances some of the Eichmann controversy

The designation of the "banality" of evil had its origins, it seems, with Karl Jaspers, Arendt's teacher and friend. Answering the post-Holocaust question of HOW evil had become so commonplace, he replies: "It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that is what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria."

By associating Eichmann with the idea of banality, Stonebridge says, Arendt is not in the least minimizing what he did. Nor was she fooled by what Bettina Stangneth's later study showed was a carefully prepared facade (the unimaginative bureaucrat). "'Eichmann was not stupid, but rather intelligent,' Arendt explained [in an interview with Joachim Fest]. 'But it was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There's nothing deep about it -- nothing demonic! There's simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.'"

Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to Stonebridge, "is a broadside against moral relativism and an early attack on the culture of ethical posturing". Arendt was already calling out "a culture that was very happy with sweeping concepts of collective guilt and innocence, of absolute badness and a virtue beyond signalling, but conspicuously resistant to the complex difficulties of real human experience".

Arendt would certainly have recognized the features of our age, 50 years after her death... The outrage, the bullying, the unwillingness to grapple with complex realities: "'I don't know if we will ever get out of this,' she'd written to Karl Jaspers in 1946 when he told her that it was the banality of evil that she really needed to pay attention to. She was right to worry."



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10. It offers pointers as to what freedom might mean...

The final chapter -- What Is Freedom? -- is a wide-ranging one.

And, of course, there can never be any simple definition of freedom. For a start, though, according to Arendt, it's clear that you don't get it by clinging to "sovereignty"...

Furthermore, we need to recognize that freedom is exercised "within a sea of contingency". That's one of the prices to be paid, along with the plurality we noted above: "Freedom cannot be forced;" Stonebridge explains, "it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it."

This idea is filled in a little further in the addendum about the Hannah Arendt House (a community library in Hannover that's stocked with books that migrants and refugees have brought with them to Hannover, or have had sent to them): "The human world is built on little more than the necessities and hazards of living, speaking and being human together. The little more, of course, is also everything there is. It is on this precious ground, Hannah Arendt believed, recognizing both our powerlessness and our courage, our banality and our splendour, that we are free to start something new in the world."

Jeffries suggests that if we want to interrogate our freedom to change the world, we need to go back to Eichmann, and his claim that he was only obeying orders. Arendt, referring to Kant's categorical imperative (the dictum that our actions must be such that they could pass the test of being applicable to everyone), once commented that this is the complete opposite of the requirement for obedience: For Kant, nobody has the right to obey... That's a sentence that resounds down the years, says Jeffries: "We are free only to the extent that we are capable of disobeying..."

And all her life, Arendt disobeyed, not only by refusing to be railroaded by existing norms and expectations, but also by supporting the principle of civil disobedience, which she saw as neither the lawlessness that drives criminals nor the wholesale rejection of the system of law that drives terrorists: "Instead, in civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt saw how the moral act of individual conscience -- I cannot live with myself if I consent to this -- could sometimes also become a political act.

I guess that's the ultimate challenge of this book. The writing is on the wall all over the world. How soon will each of us be left with no choice except to disobey? And if we don't, what kind of freedom will be left to us?


Arendt in 1975