Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge: ‘Without art and education, we are not going to get politics which can protect the human condition’

Drawing inspiration from her most recent book We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons on Love and Disobedience, Lyndsey Stonebridge presented a thought-provoking lecture which explored Hannah Arendt’s work, and life. Reflecting on the toughness of human vulnerability and its role in helping us to imagine the world from the perspective of others, Stonebridge captured the essence of Arendt’s thinking and its pertinence to the today’s challenges.

In addition to delivering the ICORN Lecture, Professor Stonebridge participated in a panel discussion under the title ‘Freedom of Expression in Times of War’, and gave an interview to ICORN, which you can read below.

ICORN: What is it about Hannah Arendt that intrigues you so much?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: I first read Hannah Arendt as a graduate student in the 1980s. We were all reading post-structuralism and deconstruction, usually very hastily translated from French or German, and nobody was reading Hannah Arendt. I found The Human Condition (1958), and it seemed as though the writing was coming from nowhere, on the one hand—it was like nothing I had seen before. On the other hand, there was a kind of confidence and a sense of place in her voice that was deeply attractive, because nobody else was doing that. Here was someone who was quite certain in her perplexity, quite certain in her unsureness about the world. I read her quietly and secretly for a few years,and then I read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963), which was totally different. After that, and for at least 20 years,Hannah Arendt was a guide to the problems that troubled me.

ICORN:  Hannah Arendt’s most notable works were completed in exile. While some of the writers,artists, and journalists in the ICORN network return to their country of origin, most remain in exile. Do the ways in which We are Free to Change the World differ depending on the context we are in?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Absolutely. As far as ICORN is concerned, it is important to recognise that Arendt was not just a refugee. She adopted this position in her work,always looking from the outside. In the 1970s, late in her life, Arendt shared that she thought that the story of her generation of refugees hadn’t been told properly. Perhaps we are only telling that story now, albeit belatedly.

Arendt never stopped seeing the refugee experience as her issue. Until the end of her life, she chaired the board of an association that supported the children of Spanish refugees—refugees she likely encountered in the camp where she lived in Southwest France. Arendt deeply understood what it meant to be stateless and cast out. This perspective shaped the way she looked at contemporary politics, history, and the problem of totalitarianism.

ICORN: What do you think Hannah Arendt would have thought about the ‘refugee crisis’ today?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: She would have said ‘I told you so’. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt clearly argued that the new rights regime would fail to protect the stateless and the rightless and that these people would become a category for humanitarianism. As she rightly pointed out, nobody wants to be a category for humanitarianism—most people want a home.

When it comes to Israel and Palestine, Arendt warned that the creation of the State of Israel wouldn’t solve the Jewish problem but would instead create a new refugee problem. In her view, the world failed to understand the need to rebuild the nation state after the Second World War. We failed to think about what self-determination meant, we failed to decolonise. Now we are reaping the consequences of those failures.

ICORN: How can we all, and especially the writers,artists, and journalists in the ICORN network, be as acutely responsive to the issues of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and polarisation as Hannah Arendt was?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Years ago, there was a poetry writing workshop for ‘refugee’ poets inthe UK. It paired a British poet with a ‘refugee’ poet, and they were asked to write a poem about home. Naturally, many of the poets expressed that theyidentified as poets, not as refugees.

Of course, writers work through their experiences and inevitably bear witness to their historical moment. There is absolutely no obligation for anyone who has been displaced to write about displacement, and their work should not be confined solely to that category.

As writers, we often live in our heads. One aspect of being displaced is that your whole life is subject to the public, making it difficult to find spaces for private life. I think the virtue of ICORN lies in offering that space and place.

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ICORN: According to Arendt, compassion and empathy in politics can do more harm than good. How does this relate to an organisation like ICORN?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Hannah Arendt was always politics, not pity. She turned inwards to make sense of what was happening to her. She began The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1933 and wrote until it was published in 1951. Political scientists read the book as somewhat incoherent, but Arendt was constantly archiving her experiences,trying to reclaim a political position from an outsider’s perspective.

Arendt always emphasised that instead of charity, what people need are rights—the right to have rights and to be able to appear in the world. In some ways, for Arendt, freedom of expression was the first right. Without the ability to represent yourself, be to be seen, or to speak, no other right scan follow.

ICORN: In today's politics of aggression, where and how can we find the vulnerability that Arendt speaks of?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: It is very hard. This is where Arendt’s experience of statelessness is central to her thinking. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she argues that when you push entire groups of people into statelessness, they are left with nothing except each other. She also speaks of love as important, and you can hear her experience as a refugee in the camp of what it is like to be left with nothing but love. On the refugee trail, there is an acute awareness of humanity- people can be beaten down, but we will always have the drive to realise ourselves, even in the depths of suffering and at our most passive. Arendt thought that it was love that makes this possible.

Arendt, however, didn’t think love has any place in politics.She was very wary of the small difference between love and hate in politics, as thin as a cigarette paper, as she famously described in her letter to James Baldwin. Once you base politics on either love or hate, you end up with generalised abstractions that can only do harm. The job of politics, in her view, was to protect how and who we love.

Getting from where we are now to that place is a tricky question. There is a sense among people of all ages of unwillingness to live in a world this violent. Whether it is the climate emergency, Gaza, or Ukraine, we are looking for something else, but we are unsure what it is- we are in an in-between time, between past and future. Liberal democracy isn’t quite working in the way we want it to. There’s a strong sense that this isn’t good enough- some of it is spiritual, some relates to the human condition, and some is a refusal to live like this. While I am not optimistic, I do think it’s important to keep recognising those of us who feel this way and make space for these conversations to happen.

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ICORN: Is there anything that disappoints you about Hannah Arendt?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Oh yes. Her inability to see America for what it truly was, and her racism- people don’t call this out. Arendt was one of the best historians of colonial imperialism, but she had this smug, white liberal attitude hat because she was anti-racist, therefore, she couldn’t be racist. She couldn’t see the multi-dimensionality of black struggle in America.

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, her political judgement and tone were part of it. It goes back to ‘armour’ and ‘amour’. Arendt loved the world, but she had bristly armour to protect herself. And sometimes there was too much armour.

As many writers in the ICORN network will tell you,there is this horrible ideology within humanitarianism that says that every person who has faced persecution has to, somehow, be perfect. And we all know that one thing that violence does is corrupt- that it doesn’t make people better.  

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ICORN: Do you think Hannah Arendt would have been cancelled today?

Lyndsey Stonebridge: Yes, and she found have fought for that. There’s a right wing, conservative Hannah Arendt, and there’s a left-wing Hannah Arendt. This is reflected in the responses to my book which have come from all quarters. I like that and having these engagements- the conversation needs to happen across divides.

Arendt has something to teach us about that. She taught political theory through fiction and through testimony because she thought it was essential to visit and look at the world from another person’s perspective. You don’t have to like or empathise with it, but you do need to,at least, try to understand it, because we live in a plural world. People will always be different and that’s what makes it so brilliant.

If we are going to preserve that plurality, we need the political imagination that is willing to go visiting. This brings us back to two things: for politics to work, you need education and art, both of which should have nothing to do with politics. Without education and art, we are not going to get politics which can protect the human condition.

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s previous publications include Writing and Righting - Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020), Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), and The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (2011). Stonebridge is the recipient of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2014) and the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize (2018). Her latest book We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons on Love and Disobedience (2024) was a finalist for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing

The interview was conducted by Elizabeth Mashova.