We Are Free to Change the World, by Lyndsey Stonebridge

A few years ago Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism surged up the bestseller charts, propelled by the online buzz at how appallingly relevant it seemed. Arendt was writing about the collapse of politics that happened in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and there were troubling echoes in the performative cruelty of the new Trump administration.

I didn’t read Arendt at the time because she seemed like a complex and interesting writer, and I wanted to understand her own life and c...