We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

A timely guide on how to liveand thinkthrough the challenges of our century drawn from the life and thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth centurys foremost opponents of totalitarianism We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.Hannah Arendt The violent unease of todays world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration: She lived through them all. Born in the first decade of the last century, she escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of its most influentialand controversialpublic intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all, about freedom. Questioningthinkingwas her first defense against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience. We Are Free to Change the World is a book about the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century. It tells us how and why Arendt came to think the way she did, and how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. Both a guide to Arendts life and work, and its dialogue with our troubled present, We Are Free to Change the World is an urgent call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt didunflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantlythrough our own unpredictable times.