Inaugural lectures are a landmark in academic life, held on the appointment of new professorships. Professor Stonebridge spoke at the University's Exchange building in Birmingham City Centre on 12 March 2024.
Totalitarianism once seemed like a fairly safely historical word, belonging to the grim regimes of the twentieth century, to another time, and another mindset. To talk of totalitarianism in the twenty-first century seemed, at best, an anachronism, or at worst, alarmist. Yet over the past ten years artists, writers, and activists are now regularly using the word totalitarian to describe not just regimes, but current modes of thinking and ideology.
Drawing on her new book, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience, in this lecture Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, FBA, returns to the work of the most famous theorist of totalitarianism, the political-philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Woman, Jew, refugee, and pariah - and interdisciplinary thinker par excellence - Arendt looked at the world from outside of conventional academic and political categories. What can we learn from her anti-totalitarian thinking today?