WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge

WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD
What do Hannah Arendt’s lessons in love and disobedience mean for us?

What a combination: Love and Disobedience. The author Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, is choosing this combination on purpose. Especially now, when nations vote for authoritarian leaders and democracy is threatened, Stonebridge focuses on Arendt’s writing and these two crucial ingredients for effective and powerful defiance. Love was for Arendt, as Stonebridge writes, “the infinitely precious pleasure in human otherness. Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place”.

And disobedience? In her 1970 essay "Civil Disobedience" the leading public intellectual of her time defended the right of American citizens to dissent from the laws and policies of the government. It was Hannah Arendt’s experience from resistance to totalitarian rule in her first home country Germany which lead her to conviction that every person must decide for themselves when injustice calls for disobedience. Following Immanuel Kant Arendt emphasised that independent thinking is the first defence against tyranny. Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” became a bestseller when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. In 2024 it is even more relevant. Trump 2.0 is Trump Unleashed.

“We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience” is one of the most relevant publications of 2024” The New Statesman 

Lyndsey Stonebridge is professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of 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.
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience was published by Jonathan Cape and C. H Beck in January 2024, and was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing.  She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London.

Tessa Szyszkowitz is an Austrian journalist and author. A UK correspondent for Austrian and German publications such as Falter or Tagesspiegel, she curates Philoxenia at Kreiskyforum and she is a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London.