The Visionaries

Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times

By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside

Narrated by: Hannah Curtis

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.

©2023 Wolfram Eilenberger (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Hannah Curtis narrates accounts of the lives of Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand, who, among others, helped to lay much of the intellectual framework for the post-WWII Western world during the decade before that war.... Curtis's British accent gives an air of authority to this work, and she is appropriately expressive throughout. She narrates at a pace that is easy to understand, making this a welcome production for those interested in philosophy and intellectual history." (AudioFile)

"“Potent . . . [Eilenberger’s] previous book, the marvelous Time of the Magicians was about Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer in the decade after World War I; his new book, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, can be read as a sequel of sorts. The quartet this time is composed of four women, all in their 20s when the book begins in earnest, in 1933, their most productive years still ahead of them. Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand: Each addressed the foundational question of the relationship between the self and others, between “I” and “we,” only to arrive at wildly different conclusions . . . Eilenberger is an energetic guide to these philosophers’ ideas.” —The New York Times

"Eilenberger is a German philosopher, writer, broadcaster and a gifted storyteller. His previous book, the luminous Time of the Magicians (2018) deftly wove together the lives and thought of four male 20th-century thinkers . . . If you think that Eilenberger is simply balancing his earlier study with a quartet of women, you reckon without their bold originality . . . All four women walked on the outside of power, politics, and philosophy, which is why their vision of what the world had become by the middle of the 20th century is so acute. If we want to keep our minds free in our own our own age of war and ideological absolutism, we could do worse than to retrace their steps.” —Financial Times

“[Eilenberger's] energetic, multilayered group portrait reveals that these celebrated thinkers were real people whose ideas, as contradictory as they may seem, developed in response to shared social or political circumstances. This fascinates.” —Publishers Weekly

Satire and Beauvoir’s problematic behavior; Simone Weil’s problematic self-immolation

It shed light on the life and ideas of women whose names are well-known but whose works and ideas are less recognized by the general public.

Very pleased at the treatment of these 4 women

The author does a great job of explaining what philosophical insights these women expounded during the critical period before and during WWII. I was so fascinated during the first full listen that I started the book over immediately afterwards to listen to the whole book again to catch anything I might have missed on the first pass.

A fascinating listen

An excellent mix of biographies, over an extraordinary period in history, and philosophy, and excellently narrated

Long deep dive into the lives of writers

Very deep dive into the life of writers during the age of facism and communism in the 1920