The Flame of Freedom. The Light of Philosophy in Dark Times. 1933–1943

1933. Hannah Arendt flees Berlin to join other exiles without means and documents seeking refuge in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir seeks answers to the challenges of a cruel world in Rouen. Ayn Rand works in Hollywood exile on a novel that she believes will rekindle the flame of freedom in her adopted homeland. Simone Weil, disillusioned by the outcomes of the revolution in Russia, devotes all her thoughts and energies to the heavy fate of the oppressed. Over the next decade, one of the darkest in European history, these four women, devoted to thought, will develop ideas that will circle the globe and change the world in the latter half of the century. They confront injustice, unfreedom, and the incomprehensible violence of their time as women, refugees, activists, participants in the Resistance, but above all as thinkers. Following the forging of their radical ideas in the relentless crucible of time, we, along with them, become convinced of the redemptive power of thought.