THE VISIONARIES: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, by Wolfram Eilenberger. If hell is other people, then so, too, is this world. “Around us other people circled, pleasant, odious or ridiculous: They had no eyes with which to observe me. I alone could see.”It’s a quote that Wolfram Eilenberger uses to potent effect in “The Visionaries,” which traces the lives of four philosophers in the tumultuous decade before 1943. 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.

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Persons: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside, Simone de Beauvoir, Otherness, ”, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand, Eilenberger, ” Arendt, Red Simone Organizations: Dark Times, Magicians, Gestapo Locations: France, Rouen, Berlin, Nazi Germany, Paris, Russian, Hollywood and New York