In the popular imagination, Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the foremother of contemporary feminism, and as the turbaned, chain-smoking, glamorously intellectual companion of Jean-Paul Sartre.
“The Visionaries,” by Wolfram Eilenberger, examines the divergent theories of self and other developed in a time of crisis by Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil. By Jennifer ...