The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger

The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times
by Wolfram Eilenberger (translated by Shaun Whiteside)
Penguin Press 2023

In his fitfully engaging, exceptionally uneven book about four women who published important essays and books in the 1930s and ‘40s, Wolfram Eilenberger notes that despite their posthumous fame and palpable influence, his subjects were frequently marginalized, their ideas relegated to the periphery of an oft-obtuse public discourse. With war tearing through Europe, Asia and North Africa, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil had plenty to say. But “precisely because they wanted to think primarily about politics, they were pushed to the edge of politics,” he writes. With an almost audible sigh, he allows that theirs wasn’t “a new experience”—nobody listens to philosophers until it’s too late.

The Visionaries closely follows the template Eilenberger employed in Time of the Magicians, his critically admired book about Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and other important thinkers of the post-World War I years. Like its predecessor, his group survey of Arendt et al. is divided into eight numbered sections, which are further divided into dozens of subsections; though the latter are just two or three pages apiece, each gets its own subhead. This can get confusing. The book’s second long section, for instance, begins with a half-dozen generically titled subchapters—“Enlightened,” “Polyphonic,” and so on—about Arendt. The seventh subchapter gets another unmemorable title—“Furious”—but it has nothing to do with Arendt. Without warning or explanation, Eilenberger turns his focus to Weil. It’s a self-interrupting approach that does the reader no favors.

Though Eilenberger doesn’t have a novel thesis—his argument, as the title suggests, is that his subjects were prescient thinkers—the people in his book are so interesting that he can skate without one. He tracks the development of their thinking across the interwar and war years, highlighting moments in which their ideas are particularly insightful—or, in Rand’s case, run counter to the pieces being published in the era’s august opinion journals. The Visionaries is in awe of Weil, has an intellectual crush on Arendt and is almost as smitten with Beauvoir. As for Rand, Eilenberger appears to have great respect for her will and work ethic, but as presented here, she’s the lightweight of the quartet. And a noxious one at that, a so-so prose stylist who perversely contended that the world’s big problem is an abundance of generosity.

Eilenberger aims to illustrate how his subjects dealt with essential philosophical questions. With thousands dying on battlefields every week and countless civilians being murdered in death camps and firebombed cities, how should a thinking person respond? Why, as he puts it, should an intellectual “do something rather than nothing?” In answer, he quotes frequently, and at length, from primary sources. One six-page section includes six block quotes from Rand’s The Fountainhead, in which her proudly selfish architect-protagonist argues that “the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

Though this isn’t a group biography, it can fill that role for those who aren’t inclined to seek out the definitive books on each woman. A brief final section runs through their subsequent achievements (except for Weil, who died of tuberculosis and apparent self-starvation in 1943). And when he’s not focused on the development of their ideas about the era’s crucial matters—the plight of “stateless” refugees, the principles on which a Jewish nation might be based—Eilenberger gives us glimpses of each as a private person. Weil’s crushing headaches are bearable only when she listens to sacred music. Arendt, fleeing Germany and bravely walking across France, carries with her one of her friend Walter Benjamin’s last manuscripts. Beauvoir is unconventional in her romantic relationships, her iconoclasm informing her groundbreaking book The Second Sex. And Rand writes for twenty hours straight, fueled by a few bites of chocolate.

At times, this is a solid and useful book, in part because Eilenberger is excited at the prospect of prophetic ideas finding purchase in hostile terrain. A 1933 essay by Weil, about the notion of a “proletarian revolution,” “struck the intellectual landscape of the French left like a meteor,” he writes. While many on the left still hoped the Soviet Union would become a workers’ idyll, Weil had Joseph Stalin’s number. Three years before Stalin’s political enemies were condemned in fraudulent trials, Weil concluded that Stalin, like Hitler in Germany, was running a “bureaucratic dictatorship.” Weil’s contention was soon confirmed, but in the moment, it “could hardly have caused greater offense,” Eilenberger writes. He makes a similar point when discussing an argument Arendt was developing in various publications in the early 1940s. Her “many raging articles,” Eilenberger writes, characterized as “self-destructive” and “absurd the idea that a majority (Arabs) within a democratic Jewish Commonwealth should be granted only minority rights.”

But he also tends to meander—and pens some big-time howlers that can’t be blamed on translator Shaun Whiteside. In a book surely conceived as a rejoinder to the swinging dicks who’ve dominated Western philosophy for centuries, it’s hard to understand why Eilenberger foregrounds Sartre in several of the sections ostensibly about Beauvoir. There’s more than necessary about Sartre’s novel “Nausea” and way too much about his horniness and hookups with women. We even learn how he felt about going bald—it was “a trauma,” Eilenberger writes, “doubly violent because it hinted at the last and insurmountable insult to his existence.” Male pattern baldness as traumatic violence! This is hilarious—unintentionally, of course. It’s all the more ludicrous when you consider that this passage appears in a book about women whose philosophical project involved thinking about war crimes, genocide and other actual horrors.

Maybe you don’t turn to a book of this kind to be bathed in beautiful language, but the reader should at least understand what the author is trying to say. With Eilenberger, his point isn’t always evident. Weil’s mindset in early 1940, he writes, enabled her to see “that one is one thrown being, and hence one mortal being, among many others.” This seems to mean that life is random and then you die—a truism that Eilenberger restate in a needlessly confusing manner. For a writer who sometimes uses ridiculous jargon (“a thoroughly heteronomous heteronomy”), he can also be overly casual. He describes Weil, in the war’s first days, as “waiting for the expected excess of violence.” Excess? So what’s the acceptable amount of societal violence?

In her 1933 essay, Weil emphasized the importance of precise language. “Nothing in the world can keep us from being clear,” she wrote. It’s an axiom Eilenberger might want to revisit.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.