The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

Hannah Arendt

Oct 2018 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

This lecture is a brilliant encapsulation of Arendt’s widely influential arguments on revolution, and why the American Revolution—unlike all those preceding it—was uniquely able to install political freedom.

“The Freedom to be Free” was first published in Thinking Without a Banister, a varied collection of Arendt’s essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials—which, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind and character and contain within them the articulations of wide and sophisticated range of her political thought.

A Vintage Shorts Selection. An ebook short.

About the author

HANNAH ARENDT was raised in Königsberg, in East Prussia, the city of Immanuel Kant. To Arendt, Lant was the clearest of all the great thinkers; she said she sensed him looking over her shoulder while she wrote. In 1933, as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, Arendt was briefly arrested—happily not by the Gestapo—for working with the Berlin Zionist organization. She escaped Germany and settled in Paris, where she worked with Youth Aliyah, an organization that enabled Jewish children, mainly from Eastern Europe, to go to Palestine. In Paris she became a friend to Walter Benjamin and married Heinrich Bluecher, who had also fled Germany, for political rather than racial or religious reasons.
 
After the German invasion of France in May 1940, Arendt was imprisoned in the Gurs Internment Camp as an enemy alien. She escaped when it was possible to do so; those who did not ended up in Auschwitz, shipped there under the direction of Adolf Eichmann. With visas provided by Hiram Bingham and funds from Carian Fry, Arendt and Bluecher traveled from France to Spain to Portugal and from there to New York City in 1941. After eighteen years of statelessness, she became an American citizen in 1951. Arendt taught at Notre Dame, Berkeley, Princeton, and Chicago, and, for the last seven years of her life, at the New School for Social Research. She died suddenly on December 4, 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. None of her books has ever gone out of print.