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

A timely guide on how to live—and think—through the challenges of our century drawn from the life and thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s foremost opponents of totalitarianism

“[We Are Free to Change the World] is vibrant and original, embodying Arendt’s approach to thinking as an imaginative act.”—The New York Times Book Review

Don't miss Lyndsey Stonebridge in the PBS American Masters documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.

“We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.”—Hannah Arendt

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY • FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING

The violent unease of today’s 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 influential—and controversial—public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all, about freedom. Questioning—thinking—was 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 Arendt’s 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 did—unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly—through our own unpredictable times.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience, which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Award for Biography. She is featured in the PBS/American Masters documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny as one of the leading authorities of Arendt and her writings. Stonebridge's previous books include Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster. She is currently working on a new book, Old Women: A History of Our Future (2027). She lives in London and France.