I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source calling on Hannah Arrant for the 21st century.

Could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare?

Hannah Arrant wrote the book for all the out of the authoritarian nightmare.

Hannah Arrant wrote the book for all time

on Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

And then she famously covered the trial in Israel

of Adolf Aikman, the Nazi Minister of Death.

Her study of the origins of totalitarianism keeps her current 50 years after her death and pointedly in our own rancorous presidential campaign of

2024. The surprise for me in this podcast turns on finding a warm humanity and hope, believe it or not, in the collected wisdom of Hannah Arrens.

She noted in one essay, we are free to change the world.

Our guest, Lindsay Stonebridge, lifted that mind for the title of

her gripping fresh take on Hannah Arrant. We are free to change the world, is her title.

And thinking has everything to do with it.

Let's change the world, Lindsay Stonebridge, while there's time, if there is time.

But first, set Hannah Arrant in her own time, born 1906 in Kernigsburg, where

Emmanuel Kant had founded the philosophy of reason. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Arend is on the run, first in Germany, then to Paris,

and then in 1943 to New York.

Your younger listeners will probably know her through this image, this

incredibly beautiful woman smoking with her dark eyes, tweetable quotations that

she has. There's no such thing as dangerous

thinking itself as dangerous, the banality of evil. Her comment on, you know,

the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced communist or Nazi but for the person

...