The Visionaries — the women who fought totalitarianism with their minds

Wolfram Eilenberger on the existential thinkers Arendt, de Beauvoir, Rand and Weil, who squared up to the true horrors of their time and explored what freedom meant.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for the FT.com

(French philosopher Simone Weil wih her staff number when she worked in the Renault factory c1934-35 © Bridgeman Images)

‘There “is another way of fighting for freedom without arms,” Virginia Woolf wrote in the autumn of 1940. “We can fight with the mind.” The four women at the centre of Wolfram Eilenberger’s new book fought totalitarianism with their minds as though their lives depended upon it. Three are pretty well known: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ayn Rand all went on to have brilliant intellectual careers. The fourth, Simone Weil, died in 1943, aged just 34, and is only now beginning to get the recognition she deserves. The Visionaries focuses on their early years and the damned decade between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1943, when the world was ablaze...’

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