3.5
The Visionaries
ByPublisher Description
A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger
The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.
Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Ayn Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926 and was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the twentieth century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds of millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts that continue to echo today among Silicon Valley’s tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today’s most important liberal ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of Beauvoir’s: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many.
Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy as Wolfram Eilenberger does. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers—indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters—each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war.
The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.
Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Ayn Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926 and was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the twentieth century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds of millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts that continue to echo today among Silicon Valley’s tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today’s most important liberal ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of Beauvoir’s: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many.
Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy as Wolfram Eilenberger does. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers—indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters—each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Visionaries Reviews
3.5
“This collective biography of four of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century (Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil) covers their lives from the period 1933 to 1943. They were all of a similar age, and their ideas took form during a tumultuous period in history.
As an undergraduate I was exposed to the writings of three of them, Arendt, Beauvoir, and Rand. I will confess to being completely put off by Rand after reading The Fountainhead, and nothing I read in this book has changed my opinion on that. In fact, I struggle to classify her as a philosopher; I can't help seeing her as someone who read too much Nietzsche at an impressionable age and used his thoughts to rationalize a self-serving approach to life. Although Eilenberger makes a valiant effort to justify her inclusion in this book, I failed to find in her story the intellectual rigor that distinguishes the others. That said, she certainly left a legacy in the American right wing/libertarian community.
The evolution of Beauvoir's philosophical thinking during this decade was a curious thing. Initially she was guided by her lifelong bond, at both the academic and personal levels, with Jean Paul Sartre. As the years went by and she and Sartre engaged in various relationships with others, both jointly and individually, her philosophical thinking gradually assumed its own identity. This culminated a half dozen years after the end of the period covered by this book with the publication of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/457264.The_Second_Sex , a book that inaugurated the resurgence of feminism, especially in the 1960's. While many criticisms have been leveled at it, there can be no question that it triggered a rethinking of the historic status of each sex, or possibly more accurately, each gender, with respect to the other.
Beauvoir seemed strangely untouched by the events of the pre-war and war years, except perhaps that during the time Sartre was conscripted she was more free to pursue her own lines of thought. Neither was Jewish, both came from well-off families, and neither had any marked interest in real-world politics. Both of them lived comfortably in Paris throughout the war as they pursued their writing projects. I'm not sure I would have classified the 1933-1943 period as "dark times" personally for Beauvoir any more than for Rand.
Not so for Hannah Arendt! She spent the years between 1933 and 1941 essentially on the run from Nazi Germany. Each place she relocated eventually became unsafe. The experience of being stripped of her German citizenship in 1937 while living in Paris and working for various Jewish aid groups stimulated her thinking on the essence of being German-Jewish and the nature of totalitarianism. She escaped from an internment camp in 1941 and made her way to New York, where she worked as an author and academic, developing lines of thought that were distinctly her own and not part of any philosophical or historical school.
One of the books for which she is best known, and the one that so impressed me in college, appeared in eight years after Eilenberger's 1943 bookend: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism . By that time she had already experienced the controversy surrounding her book about the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52090.Eichmann_in_Jerusalem_A_Report_on_the_Banality_of_Evil . I mention that book here only to highlight Arendt's determination to develop her own intellectual approach to world events rather than being part of any "camp".
That brings us to Simone Weil, perhaps known more as a mystic and religious thinker than as a philosopher. Her writings in the early 1930's, while she worked as a trade unionist, reflect what are perhaps the most astute observations anywhere at that time about the inevitable growth of both Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism given the combination of economic circumstances and men anxious to consolidate their power. But in 1937 she underwent an experience of religious ecstasy, followed in subsequent years by other forms of divine intervention, and her thoughts took a more mystical direction. Born into an agnostic Jewish household, she found a close connection to the Roman Catholic religion from this point forward in her life.
Although Weil was frail and prone to health-related crises her entire life, she nevertheless insisted in putting herself in danger by pushing herself to work in a factory to experience the life of workers with no control over their lives, and by volunteering on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, determined to become involved, she returned from a safe haven in New York to London, where she wrote extensively as her health deteriorated further. She died in 1943, possibly from self-starvation.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125076611.The_Visionaries_Arendt__Beauvoir__Rand__Weil__and_the_Power_of_Philosophy_in_Dark_Times is engagingly written, and I enjoyed being introduced to Weil, learning more about Beauvoir, and being reminded that I have wanted for years to read more of Arendt. If only Eilenberger hadn't felt the need to include Rand!”
About Wolfram Eilenberger
Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is the founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and hosts the television program Sternstunde Philosophie on the Swiss public broadcasting network SRF. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in Italy and Spain, and won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It has been translated into thirty languages. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and El País. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, and Berlin University of the Arts, among other schools.
Shaun Whiteside is a prize-winning translator of fiction and nonfiction from German, French, Italian, and Dutch. He also translated Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians.
Shaun Whiteside is a prize-winning translator of fiction and nonfiction from German, French, Italian, and Dutch. He also translated Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians.
Other books by Wolfram Eilenberger
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