Philosophy

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

We Are Free to Change the World, an intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt, is Lesley Stonebridge’s seventh book, and is informed by the author’s expertise in twentieth-century literature, history, law, and political theory. Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, and a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A successful scholar, she is also used to communicating to audiences beyond the academy.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, the bestselling Time of the Magicians (2020), explored the four Germans – Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – who ‘invented modern thought’. The Visionaries keeps to the formula, this time with women in the lead roles. It is described as a group biography, but Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil were very much not a group. Nor is it a biography: there is scant biographical information and no analysis of why they lived as they did. Apart from being born at the same time, writing books, and sharing what Eilenberger calls an ‘honest bafflement that other people live as they do’, the quartet have nothing in common: Arendt was a German Jew escaping the Gestapo; Beauvoir a French intellectual on a mission to enjoy herself; Rand a Russian émigré refashioned as an American neoliberal; and Weil a latter-day Joan of Arc. The closest any of them came to meeting was when Beauvoir, for whom the existence of others was ‘a danger to me’, was introduced to Weil, who had wept at the news of famine in China. It did not go well. The only thing that mattered, Weil announced, was a revolution to feed the world’s starving, to which Beauvoir ‘retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry”, she snapped. Our relations ended right there.’

This is an entertaining family biography of Oxford philosophy from 1900 to 1960. Nikhil Krishnan has mined various autobiographies and reminiscences to craft a series of biographical sketches, anecdotes, and snapshots of philosophy at Oxford during the twentieth century. He has traced the connections, legacies, and disagreements among the philosophers, demonstrating how, over the years, pupils came to inherit the chairs of the professors who had trained them, passing on certain attitudes and practices, characteristic of the Oxford way of doing things. 

Ask anybody to name a philosopher and, chances are, if they can name one, it will be a man. Ask them to name a nineteenth-century British philosopher and they may be stumped, but if they can name one, it will be a man. This book on nineteenth-century women philosophers thus delves into the intersection of two areas of general ignorance.

In one way, this is a book to unnerve the teaching academic: it is so eminently cribbable. As a ‘handbook’ of Wright’s poetry, it ranges widely rather than intensively, offering lucid expositions and firmly delivered judgements. If these latter are sometimes, by the nature of the book, more asserted than demonstrated, they nonetheless seem usually sound and sensible: the lines quoted from ‘The Watcher’ do indeed ‘attempt, and fail, to wrest a response from the stereotyped symbols of the matriarchate’; ‘Christmas Ballad’ is banal; Fourth Quarter does represent ‘a newer and more vigorous poetic world’ than Alive.

'You got a habit, a bad habit. You fell in love with the hard stuff. You fell for the foxy harlot, the vamp who lives around here somewhere, and you’re silly about her, she’s got you hooked.’

In the chapter ‘Revolutionary Terror’ in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), world-renowned Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek briefly discusses Georgi M. Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005). Derluguian’s book traces the extraordinary career of one Musa Shanib, from Abkhazia on the Black Sea, who moved from being a Soviet dissident to a democratic political reformer and, finally, a Muslim fundamentalist, all the while maintaining an unwavering intellectual loyalty to the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.