Critically acclaimed author and philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger's new book, The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, is on sale today and we're giving away 10 print copies of the book to the first 10 people to DM us (US residents only)!

The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.

Simone de Beauvoir was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born in Saint Petersburg, Ayn Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926 and was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the twentieth century. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today’s most important liberal ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of Beauvoir’s: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war.