Lindsey Stonebridge: 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.