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

This timely and evocatively written book is a sympathetic and profound reflection on the life and work of Hannah Arendt and its relevance to our authoritarian times. Her work is also central to Mattias Desmet's study of the psychology of totalitarianism in which he situates the phenomenon within a framework of mass formation but also traces the influence of the mechanistic way of understanding life and the human being as articulated in the ideology of scientism. Mattias defines mass formation as a kind of ‘group hypnosis that destroys individuals' ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.' He sees it as the narrative of mechanistic science, where we are ‘reduced to a biological organism' while ignoring the psychological, symbolic, and ethical dimensions of human beings. Nor is totalitarianism a historical coincidence, but rather, in the final analysis, ‘it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.'

The reason I highlight this connection is that Arendt's inspiration from Kant – dare to reason and think for yourself – whereby how we think has moral consequences: ‘because we have reason and moral agency we can, indeed we must, act to make the world a good place, whatever the cost. Nobody has the right to obey.' (p. 33) This is a matter of integrity and moral conscience. Arendt wrote that ‘there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself as dangerous.' Her work is seamlessly connected with her biography and experience as a Jewish refugee, and one of her later books is Eichmann in Jerusalem. She interacted with many of the great thinkers of her time, including the perfidious Heidegger who manifestly failed to connect his thought with life. Indeed, Arendt regarded thoughtlessness as a moral obscenity and an incapacity for thinking from the standpoint of somebody else – a failure of both thought and imagination. As we have repeatedly experienced, ideology dehumanises and instrumentalises.

If the French revolution was based on history and justice, it was also rooted in the demand of the human spirit for freedom. Arendt did not believe in violence, but she did believe in protest, dissent and civil disobedience, pioneered in the 19th century by Thoreau. Ultimately, she maintained that authoritarian power can only be maintained by violence and censorship. Temperamentally and morally, I found her very resonant with Simone Weil, whose reflections on love, power and the human condition are equally poignant with piercing moral clarity. Presciently, she argued that the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was an existential threat not only to the Palestinians but for Jewish people too, as it would forever exist in tension with its neighbours (p. 79); also, that the image of the US as a benevolent empire is a lie – ‘if America really still wanted freedom, it had to renounce the fantasy of its own omnipotence.' (p. 245) In these captivating pages, Hannah Arendt is vividly brought to life, while her politics of thinking resonates powerfully into our own troubled times. Highly recommended.