## Metadata - Author: [[Lyndsey Stonebridge]] - Full Title: We Are Free to Change the World - Category: #books ## Highlights - Watching and reading Hannah Arendt, I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present. But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now? ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=259)) - Adolf Eichmann’s lifetime was also Hannah Arendt’s lifetime. The career Nazi and the Jewish political theorist were born barely seven months apart. Their lives were already twisted around one another’s before her famous book bound their names together forever. He had spent his life in the service of a monstrous regime that had murdered millions and decimated Europe’s politics and morality. She had spent hers working to defy, escape, and destroy that same regime using the only weapon she knew she could rely on: her mind. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=292)) - She had been gathering material on anti-semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism since she had left Berlin aged twenty-seven (although up until the late 1940s relatively few, including Arendt, used the word totalitarianism, which was first coined by the Italian “philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile, in the 1920s). The end of the war, the Nuremberg trials, and the Nazi mania for self-archiving had created a superabundance of evidence and documents with which she could complete her book in 1949. But back then her formidable scholarship was not enough to capture the deep human sense of the questions she knew were key to understanding the nature of totalitarianism. How—how—had men become so inhuman? And, as importantly, had they really stopped being so? These were the questions that she hoped going to Jerusalem might help her answer. ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=316)) - Eichmann’s was a new kind of crime: a crime against humanity itself. With others, he had murdered Jews, the Roma, disabled and queer people simply because of who they were. His crime was both against large groups of people and against the very idea of human plurality—that, to Arendt’s mind, was what made it a crime against humanity. Eichmann could not tolerate the existence of different kinds of people in his world, so he exterminated them. ([Location 323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=323)) - Arendt had written about how ordinary people were capable of unspeakable cruelties in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Much of this began, she said, with Western imperialism, with racism, conquest, and greed, and with an organized brutality that then leaked back to a Europe wrecked by war, unemployment, and poverty. But she had not understood then just how far-reaching, and how deeply permanent, the legacy of this ordinariness was. Devils you can fight. It is comforting to imagine that Nazis and totalitarians can be put back in a box simply by vigorously reasserting moral and traditional norms. But as we know, they do not tend to stay in those boxes. An evil that has seeped into human experience like this (like a virus, Albert Camus had suggested in his 1947 novel The Plague) needed new ethical, political, and legal instruments to counter it. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=345)) - She believed that reality required responsiveness, not dogma. There are coordinates—thinking, love, the importance of moral responsibility, and political visibility are constant mantras throughout her thought. But as the contemporary political philosopher Martin Jay once remarked, Arendt’s writing is more of a “force field” than a coherent political theory.[1] ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=407)) - There is no authority, no ready-made meaning, that can be passed down through the generations. We skate on thin ice. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=446)) - The error which she claimed many of her existentialist contemporaries made was to assume that the modern catastrophe was now a personal problem and that the dilemma about how to survive can now only belong to individuals. She was not so much concerned about “bad faith,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous description of how we habitually deny that we are, in fact, free to make choices about our inauthentic lives. Instead, 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 (PP 202). It’s not you, it really is us. ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=464)) - The danger lies in becoming a true inhabitant of the desert and feeling at home in it, she wrote in her notes as she prepared to teach a class at Berkeley in 1955. She had her eye on the easy enchantment of her students by the existential glamour boys of both American and European post-war culture, many of whom appeared to be rebels with no evident cause save to rebel some more (PP 201). Totalitarianism thrived in desert conditions, she warned them. There is nothing like a political and existential void for making an atrocious idea welcome. If nothing makes sense, then anything is possible. As populists and propagandists know, whipping up fake storms in the wastelands gives the appearance of action, meaning, purpose, salvation. This is pseudo-action only (as today’s social media storms again illustrate), yet with each passing tempest people become less, not more, sensitive to suffering, and less able to judge. Life, politics, and suffering itself become tedious. Then the big men with the big “impossible” ideas move in and suddenly the world is at war with itself again. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=469)) - We cannot help being born, where we are born, and in what time. That beginning is not our responsibility. But we can learn to respond to the world we are born into, however fast-moving or bewildering that experience might be. Thinking, Hannah Arendt came to argue, is how you get your second, third, and fourth birth and so on, according to whatever changes you are confronted with. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=538)) - Words mattered for Heidegger. Everything we could possibly know about existence, he argued, we know only because we are speaking beings. The key text for his classes in that autumn semester of 1924 was Plato’s Sophist. The sophists were skeptical about the existence of gods and other big metaphysical claims, but very good on rhetoric. Only man is the measure of man, they taught, and at its root, that measure is made up of language. The fact that we are wordy creatures is one of the essential romantic tragedies of Heidegger’s philosophy. We can never say it all; there is always something that remains unsayable, uncommunicable; an unspoken part of us that is always alone. The only certain thing we can know about ourselves is that we will die, but only time will tell us that and what we were. As we live, we keep our words, like our thoughts, moving. ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=773)) - She was one of the first, in fact one of the few, European intellectuals to grasp that the organized barbarity of modern totalitarianism was not an aberration belonging only to Nazi Germany or Soviet Bolshevism, but was of a piece with a longer imperial and colonial history of dog kicking and dog burying. ([Location 1039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1039)) - Anti-colonial thinkers in the later mid-twentieth century, such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and the late Albert Memmi, also pointed out that from where they were standing the tearing of people from their land and homes, pushing them into camps and slave labor, turning lives into commodities and wars into a means of ethnic cleansing, appeared neither novel in their coolly administered execution nor unprecedented in their cruelty. ([Location 1044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1044)) - As we do now, Arendt lived in a world where there was far too much passionate intensity of the worst kind, and not nearly enough neighborly love. Today, howls of injured outrage fill our timelines, while policy advisers keep daily watch on the barometers of the inchoate rage that they believe, correctly, is the cheapest source of political power. ([Location 1502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1502)) - Augustine was modern history’s first semiotician. He saw the world as a concatenation of signs, all mysteriously connected, buzzing with wonder and grace. To be a good Christian was to interpret the signs correctly as evidence of God’s love. ([Location 1599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1599)) - Love, but be careful who you love, Augustine famously instructed. Love, but be careful how you love, Hannah Arendt added: you don’t want to be loving people to death. ([Location 1608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1608)) - In Augustine’s work, love is also the meaning of being, that for Hannah Arendt was his most important message. ([Location 1615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1615)) - We are all strangers in need of welcome, which is why I want you to be remains one of the most powerful statements in her thought. ([Location 1651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1651)) - Arendt simply didn’t believe that charity should be a political principle. Far better to fix things so that people did not end up in death and detention camps, exiled and vulnerable, in the first place. Charity, as she would later argue, as is also the case with violence, is a failure of politics. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1683)) - “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant,” Baldwin writes, “birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.” It was a passage Arendt might have written herself. ([Location 1724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1724)) - The only way [the white man] can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark.[20] ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1739)) - All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are the well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free. ([Location 1751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1751)) - we must will one another to be; it won’t stop us dying, it won’t transform our politics, but it might keep us human. ([Location 1778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1778)) - Hannah Arendt’s turn to politics in the 1930s did not make her doubt the importance of love, it had made her more committed to the idea that love is a guarantee of plurality. The love of human difference, the love that makes us all of the world, is a condition of designing a better politics, but it cannot be a political aim itself without wrecking that very premise. Questions of power and difference, of who is deserving of love or not, or of who is lovable or not, are not and never should be questions of politics for the simple reason that the answers to those questions can only be kinds of tyranny. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1780)) - For Arendt, if you don’t want people to die in camps or suffer in poverty, exile, and indignity, instead of loving them you would do better to engage directly with the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics: to act, in other words, and take political moral responsibility in a crooked world ([Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1785)) - The first modern superfluous people, Arendt argued, were created by the desire for superfluous wealth. If you want to understand the origins of totalitarianism, look to the origins of Empire. “I would annex the planets if I could,” the English vicar’s son, mining magnate and whiteness ideologue Cecil Rhodes declared at the height of his mission to turn Africa’s resources into pure wealth and its people into the pure labor necessary to produce it. ([Location 1870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1870)) - The reason why Europeans were so appalled by Hitler, wrote the Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism, first published in Paris a full year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, was because he “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively” for people in Algeria, Africa, and India.[6] ([Location 1886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1886)) - In Britain and France, imperial and colonial myths of white supremacy had helped to shore up a sense of a coherent national identity in countries that in reality were far from secure in themselves. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1890)) - 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. Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization, she wrote. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death ([Location 1896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1896)) - The entire idea of race was a myth. Race thinking turned that myth into the ideological wing of a politics of unprecedented administrative savagery. 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. ([Location 1900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1900)) - For Hannah Arendt, miscegenation laws are a foremost mark of tyranny because they attempt to prevent even the possibility of a politics of plurality. Without love’s children, there can be no new beginnings. ([Location 1923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=1923)) - When people leave their homes, take the bus, walk up to the gates, when they challenge society, they lose their privacy, expose themselves, risk everything, and they do not do this simply for themselves, because they want to be heroes (although this, too, can be the case), but out of a tacit, sometimes even unconscious, understanding of their position in relation to others. Such, at least, was Hannah Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition, the book she wrote after The Origins of Totalitarianism. If her first major book told the story of how hell was made on earth, her second was a description of the kind of political humanism that might remove it—or at least diminish its scope. ([Location 2135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=2135)) - When I reread The Origins of Totalitarianism in 2022, the passage I found most chilling was one in which Arendt predicts how the legacies of totalitarianism might be experienced long after the fall of totalitarian regimes: The crisis of our century…is no mere threat from the outside, no mere result of some aggressive foreign policy of either Germany or Russia, and…will no more disappear with the death of Stalin than it disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form—though not necessarily the cruellest—only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past. ([Location 2240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=2240)) - Conspiracy theories proliferated because they offered a coherence and a consistency that was lacking in the real world. The most famous conspiracy theory of all, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, vividly detailing a Jewish plot for world domination, first emerged in Russia in 1902. After the revolution, anti-communist exiles brought the document with them to the West where it began to circulate. The fact that it was revealed to be fraudulent in 1921 did not stop Hitler and Goebbels from championing it as evidence of a Communist-Jewish threat later. In the United States, Henry Ford published and distributed over 500,000 copies of the Protocols, which were also discussed on national radio by Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic leader of the National Union for Social Justice. The current American right-wing movement QAnon developed its own version of the Protocols in 2017. America, they claimed, was being run by a cabal of satanic pedophile cannibals, funded by Jewish financiers. ([Location 2316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=2316)) - Twenty-first-century propagandists similarly pitch their battles as epic and existential. Race and historical destiny remain popular themes; so, too, are gender absolutism, sexuality, the family, God, and a vague but passionately hawked “greatness.” This kind of “politics” is meant to be mad because the madder the theory, the more distant from a commonly despised reality it is possible to become. The masses’ escape from reality, Hannah Arendt observed in a sentence that rears up from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist ([Location 2328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=2328)) - “At every meal we eat together,” Char wrote in another aphorism, “freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set” ([Location 3441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3441)) - If men wish to be free, she had written in an essay ten years before called “What Is Freedom?,” it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce ([Location 3909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3909)) - The famous sovereignty of political institutions has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical ends ([Location 3916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3916)) - True political power comes only with the active assent of the people. The empty power offered by authoritarians, fantasy nationalists, and sovereignty fanatics, by contrast, can only be maintained by violence. In an essential twenty-first-century update of Arendt’s argument, the British feminist critic Jacqueline Rose has argued that it is now women who are the main targets of this violence.[8] ([Location 3918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3918)) - She knew that you could not will a broken heart into fixing itself. Active patience—a title she first used for an article on the patience demanded of stateless refugees when she first arrived in New York in 1941—was required. She looked across the valley, noted the lizards hatching in the late spring sun, and, once again, waited.[9] ([Location 3934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3934)) - She shared just the same sense of “wonder and enthusiasm” for Portugal’s revolution as Kant once had for the French Revolution.[11] Like Kant, she recognized that she was watching one of those rare moments when, politically speaking, everything had been thrown up into the air. For a few precious months in Portugal, it was not clear who was ruling and who was being ruled. What she saw resembled the ancient Greek political system of isonomia founded on the principle of equal freedom. Arendt wrote twice about isonomia, once in The Human Condition and again in On Revolution (HC 32, OR 23). The isonomiac societies were pre-democratic and had briefly flourished in settler and migrant communities away from established centers of power in ancient Greece. Neither authority nor tradition governed these communities. The principle was simply that each citizen had the right to act in the name of freedom of equality. Disobedience was built into daily political living since the only “rule” was that freedom was to be maintained for everyone. Responding to injustice was simply part of the political contract. In isonomiac societies, such as we might like to imagine them—and imagining them is probably as close as most of us are going to get to equal freedom in our lifetimes—citizens are made equal through their responsive commitment to one another’s freedom. That’s the theater, and that’s the point. ([Location 3944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3944)) - When democracy was established in Athens, the unwieldy freedoms of isonomia were suppressed. Henceforth, majority rule would govern. In the last decade of her life, Hannah Arendt became increasingly convinced that the decline of opportunities for direct political participation was contributing to a genuine and perhaps terminal crisis in democracy. Eichmann had also taught her, yet again, about the importance of maintaining spaces where political action could also be moral action. (Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.) But in the late twentieth century, the spaces in which this was possible were contracting under the domination of big government and big business. And as they contracted, the violence against those who wished to claim those spaces back increased. ([Location 3956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3956)) - Nowhere was political disintegration quite so profoundly heartbreaking for Hannah Arendt than in the United States. When she had arrived from Lisbon in 1941, what had most impressed her about America was precisely the freedom of becoming a citizen without having to pay the price of assimilation.[12] Her new country seemed to offer what Europe had so violently shut down: a plural politics of active citizenship. ([Location 3963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3963)) - crooks. It was as though, she said of Richard Nixon and his cabal, a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves, the government of the “mightiest power on earth.”[15] ([Location 3980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=3980)) - Read the Pentagon Papers carefully, she said, and they reveal that there was little real purpose in the war other than the need for a super power to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed the “mightiest power on earth.”[17] ([Location 4023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4023)) - The political storytellers we need the most right now, perhaps, are those who are most skilled at persuading us to share a world of facts. ([Location 4049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4049)) - Hannah Arendt had started her thinking life with Kant in Königsberg and she would end it with him in America. In lectures at both the University of Chicago and the New School in the 1970s, she spoke about how Kant, perplexed by the events of the French Revolution, had turned himself into history’s spectator, pivoting to look backward, identifying the historical particulars from the events that swirled about him and judging history from a distance; interested but also apart. In her final years she did the same. It was Kant who had first taught her that thinking was a moral consideration, that how we think has consequences for the world we live in. Fifty years later, she was still trying to work through how that thinking self could make judgments in a world that had so tragically lost its moral and political bearings. ([Location 4067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4067)) - Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition. ([Location 4089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4089)) - The Hannah Arendt Haus is a library of survival. Separately, each collection conserves a small piece of national tradition, culture, and history. But the books are there in the first place because of political, economic, and now, environmental catastrophes. Violence, seen and unseen, fast and slow, blew these volumes off their former bookshelves and into the Hannah Arendt Haus. It is a library of, and for, the modern uprooted. ([Location 4134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4134)) - What really makes life in the library meaningful is what goes on between the people, and between their books, themselves. Nobody knows the meaning of the storybook of mankind, but without it life would be unbearable (HC 184). 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 splendor, that we are free to start something new in the world. ([Location 4144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4144)) - Humanity can be neither wished nor willed into existence, she told her audience. Pleading humanity did no good for the Jews of Europe. Humanity, such as it is, is what we make of it together when faced with the facts. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking it we learn to be human, she said, in one of her most beautiful sentences.[2] ([Location 4168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4168)) - It is not big abstract ideas about humanity that will defeat totalitarianism, Arendt concluded in her lecture. A genuinely plural politics requires the kinds of friends who not only grant one another their own truths, but who know exactly what they are up against politically and historically when they do so. For a German and a Jew under the Third Reich it would scarcely have been a sign of humanness for the friends to have said: Are we not both human beings? It would have been a mere evasion of reality and the world common to both at that time: they would not have been resisting the world as it was.[3] Resist the world as it is—it is hard to imagine a better summary of Hannah Arendt’s lesson, nor one more relevant to us now. ([Location 4177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C3ZKYBKH&location=4177))