Each book should be understood on its own terms, and The Visionaries is no exception. The difficult task for me is that The Visionaries does not attempt to intervene into contemporary political theory in the way that most books reviewed in this publication do. Rather, it styles itself (effectively) as a book for general consumption, a book to be devoured at a café as its subjects often read books in their time. Indeed, unlike most books in academic political theory, The Visionaries can currently be found at Subterranean Books, my local independent bookstore here in St. Louis. To mark the significance of the book’s own terms, I will focus my review on the style of The Visionaries and then offer a few concluding notes on its implications for political theory today.

The Visionaries, as its subtitle betrays, tells the story of four mid-century political theorists: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. I would like to note at the outset that I have read almost all of Simone Weil, much of Hannah Arendt, a good deal of Simone de Beauvoir, and—in what is surely a rejection of my rural, conservative childhood milieu—absolutely none of Ayn Rand. Further, I regularly publish about Weil and Arendt, and I have taught Beauvoir. As a socialist who has adopted perhaps too much of the partisan logic Weil criticized, I have also never taught Rand.

Eilenberger’s gift is his ability to translate the key concepts of each political theorist for a contemporary audience, while illuminating the specific context in which the theorist’s concept originally emerged. Consider for instance how he summarizes Arendt’s critique of the nation-state as an inherently limited political form, given its tendency to promote violent nationalism:

For months Arendt had been concerned that the Zionist movement might harden internally in the face of the terrible situation of the Jews, and above all become nationalistically narrow. To fight against those forces, which were threatening an idealistic kidnap of her journalistic campaign on behalf of a Jewish army, in March 1942 she established a political debating circle under the name Young Jewish Group. With Arendt as the circle’s intellectual initiator, the debates revolved around the question of ‘what kind of … political body Palestine Jewry was to form’. Arendt approached this question first and foremost as a political theorist, not as a Jew. This may be explained by the fact that the problem of the Jews in Palestine could be seen only as an exemplary concentration of an arrangement that actually affected any people or ethnic group that, as a minority within an existing national state, strove for appropriate representation and self-determination, for the preservation of their identity and language, their religious and cultural properties, their tradition (p. 288).

This is marvelous writing that lets its clarity guide the reader to its obvious relevance for contemporary theories of wars, minority rights, genocides, and nation-states. Such a clear summary paragraph is par for the course in The Visionaries. This clarity complements Eilenberger’s energetic portraits of each theorist, such as how he describes Weil’s mystical revelations as part of the ‘reality-opening power’ of philosophy; he goes on to present Weil as ‘an archaeologist’ who returns to ‘the great source texts of humanity’ as part of a practice of ‘revealing layer by layer those values and primal impulses that had been so plainly scattered and repressed’ (pp. 171, 173).

To read such lines in The Visionaries is to wonder why so much contemporary political theory is written so inaccessibly. It is also to wonder why many of us tend to write about philosophy without trying to find in the authors we are reading the intense vigor that often accompanied their political, intellectual, and spiritual lives, even in the face of tremendous oppression, persecution, and physical pain. Page after page, Eilenberger allows his reader to get lost in the ideas he is writing about, and his often playful presentation reminds his reader that philosophy is fun.

Clear, enthusiastic writing is so much the norm in The Visionaries that when Eilenberger does stray into more academic form, those instances stand out with great prominence:

As with the phenomenon of the ‘second hander’—which Ayn Rand used with reference to her neighbor Marcella Bannett as the key to her Nietzsche-inspired critique of alienation—the type of the outwardly successful (Jewish) assimilationist became for Arendt the prime example of a thoroughly heteronomous heteronomy (the state of being governed by external forces), which in extremis could penetrate so far into people that they no longer perceived it as such (p. 189).

Here, it is as if the needed parenthetical explanation of the esoteric philosophical concept flags the need for a clearer summary. And yet, such a breach of Eilenberger’s contract with his reader—to tell the story of four mid-twentieth-century political philosophers in a way that can be devoured at the café—is noticeable only because the rest of the book reads so cleanly. I am afraid that in many books published with university presses, the one-sentence example here would unremarkably blend into a paragraph filled with similar labyrinthine sentences, spiraling clauses, and gratuitous Latin terms.

What Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, and Weil (as well as Eilenberger) share is that political theory was more or less their profession, in that they were teachers or writers, yes, but it was not so in the way that academic political theory has taken shape in our century. As Eilenberger brings into great relief, all were theorists who wrote on the margins of their society for various intersectional reasons of gender, persecution, and ideological alienation with their time. They often wrote without job security and without the stability that a ‘permanent’ academic position offers today. Amid these constraints, ‘the only freedom’ they ‘unconditionally experienced’ was ‘that of writing as creation’ (p. 296).

While Beauvoir has become canonical in feminist philosophy and Arendt can now be found on many departments’ graduate reading lists in political philosophy, Weil’s status has also recently increased. While Rand certainly does not have the academic status as a political philosopher in the contemporary Anglophone academy as Arendt or even Weil does, it is noteworthy that Rand is arguably the most influential of the four political theorists Eilenberger chose to highlight. In 2003, before he became Speaker of the House and then Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential pick, Paul Ryan told The Weekly Standard, ‘I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it’ (Weiner, 2012). Where I grew up in rural central Minnesota, in the philosophy section at the nearest town’s Barnes & Noble, of the four authors in this book, only Rand could be found.

I accepted this book review largely in order to comment on a ‘non-theoretical,’ published-with-trade-press book in this important academic journal. My suggestion is not that Eilenberger’s book contributes to contemporary political theory in the sense that he illuminates a thorny context of ethnic tension in a new way, offers a new concept to describe an electoral process, re-frames a long-standing interpretation of constitutional law, or otherwise makes an intervention into political theory in the usual sense. I suggest, instead, that Eilenberger’s contribution is twofold: (1) the style of his book reminds those of us who write for academic journals that, at its best, theory is a story about the world; and (2) his inclusion of Rand serves as a corrective for political theorists (myself included) who would rather leave out influential theorists we disagree with or repress, but who in fact have greatly shaped the terrain into which we are intervening, and therefore whom our students would benefit greatly from studying.

Indeed, if you agree with me that, of the four theorists in The Visionaries, it is Rand’s vision that has been the most politically influential in the Unites States (and perhaps in the world, given our increasingly neoliberal global context), then, in addition to writing our articles and books about authors we want to celebrate and have learned the most from, we might also need to consider more assiduously how political theory can respond to popular philosophy that makes dark times even darker.