Review of The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger

*The Visionaries* by Wolfram Eilenberger (2023). Published by Penguin PRess.

The first time I saw this book was on one of my many different sites I read for book reviews and news. I couldn’t tell you which one it is for the life of me, but I know I saw this book for a fact on one of those because when I read that, I put in a hold immediately for my library to get my a copy of it three months in advance of its release date.

It’s pretty ironic that I did this, because the reason that got me to pick up the book when I drove over to the library and had it sitting on my shelf was the spark of newest aggression happening against Palestinians.

I was quite distraught by the second week of the loss of life, and I turned to this book because guess what? These philosophers turned to philosophy in dark times.

Anyways, I’m really glad I read this kind of book during this time. I’m writing this in November 2023, and while I know it’s scheduled way in advance because of how my editorial blog calendar works, I’ve begun to have a deeper appreciation for philosophy and how people come up with ideas, especially women like the ones outlined in this book.

This definitely is not the book for everyone because of this, but it certainly is a light for those who are trying to sort through the messes of the world.

Let’s get into the review.

The stories of four iconic women philosophers in the World War II era.

This is a book that does an excellent job of broadly tracking each of the women and what influenced them to do XYZ in a certain moment of their lives. If you’re looking for a serious deep dive into their work, I don’t think this is the book for you.

I enjoyed this one because of how it broadly goes over their work as well, getting somewhat nuanced first impressions so that if you wanted to go back into their work after the fact of reading this, then you could go in with a basic understanding of certain texts.

But, above all else, you really get an understanding of what inspired them to do this. Several of the women in this text are Jews living in Europe and the USSR, and Beauvoir is working within France as the upcoming invasion of it is happening.

She’s also struggling with her relationship with Sartre, as the text describes her hurt when he does certain things that she wouldn’t do back to him in return.

So this text goes through several periods of their lives, juxtaposing what each woman was doing at the time against each other. Each was working in very different circumstances and came to their respective conclusions in different ways, but the core of what led them there is extremely similar.

War, suffering, and learning how the conditions of humanity can lead to such conditions can really haunt a person, and I think we see that deeply in the philosophies of these women.

I believe a text like this is important when coming to realize and contextualize these women in conversation with each other, but by lining them up by time period comes across as a bit too forceful in my eyes. This becomes more obvious when comparing Simone Weil to the other women, as she dies in 1943 (tragically young) when she unfortunately had cardiac failure while in England.

While Weil’s life’s work was tragically cut short because of this, the other women in the book are just getting started with the body of work they would become known for. Beauvoir is the more direct example of this.

I think the book structurally fails to account for this kind of happenstance, and we begin to stray more into the territory where it begins to find fluff to make up for it at times.

Overall Thoughts

As I implied before, I think this would be a great text to start out with if you’ve never read any of these women. I’ve dabbled here and there in their work, but never have gone full force into what they had to say (although I’ve been forced to read many quotes and research implementing their theories into them as a graduate student), so I could appreciate the book in this way.

Despite its shortcomings, there is immense value in books like these.

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