In 1975 a young senator named Joe Biden heard of a lecture that Hannah Arendt had recently given at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on America’s need for a reckoning after the Vietnam war, now that the “big lie” about the extent of the country’s powers had been exposed by a humiliating defeat. He wrote to her saying that, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he would be most keen to receive a copy of her paper. Such interest says something about the future president’s curiosity—and a lot about the then 68-year-old Arendt’s formidable reputation as a public intellectual.
Arendt was said to be someone you could actually see thinking. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in an absorbing new biography, conjures up the image of Arendt forming her body “into a single question-mark incarnate”. And the questions she asked were big ones: why did the great evil of the 20th century come about; how could totalitarianism have happened; how can freedom and plurality be protected?