10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

The Visionaries

View All Editions

£30.00 £27.00

Temporarily Out Of Stock. Usually available in 3-5 working days.

Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

The Visionaries Synopsis

A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger

The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century-at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.

Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Ayn Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926 and was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the twentieth century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds of millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts that continue to echo today among Silicon Valley's tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important liberal ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of Beauvoir's: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many.

Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy as Wolfram Eilenberger does. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers-indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters-each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780593297452
Publication date: 1st August 2023
Author: Wolfram Eilenberger
Publisher: The Penguin Press an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 400 pages
Genres: European history
Western philosophy from c 1800
Biography: philosophy and social sciences