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Get Ready for the Arendt Center Confernce!
Roger Berkowitz, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Uday Mehta joined WAMC Northeast Public Radio's The Roundtable to discuss some of the topics we’ll be delving into at our 16th annual fall conference on Tribalism and Cosmpolitanism this Thursday and Friday!All Categories
Real on Some Deeper Level
Hannah Arendt analyzed racism and antisemitism as secular ideologies that use minorities as scapegoats for societal problems, with antisemitism especially rooted in hatred toward the state. Modern antisemitism, on both the right and left, reflects ideological hatred tied to conspiracy theories, distrust of government, and narratives of state corruption, contributing to rising hostility toward marginalized groups.Between Speechless Horror and Wonder
Hannah Arendt belongs to a generation who lived through the unprecedented violence of the twentieth century, as well as the creation of the postwar international order that underpins our volatile and vulnerable world. In trying to understand the political events of her time, she cautioned against the philosophical tendency to retreat from worldly affairs. Building on the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, and Jaspers, Arendt wrote about wonder as the origin of philosophical questions in various essays and books – e.g., “Philosophy and Politics,” “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind. However, she reflected on the relationship between horror and wonder most directly in “Concern with Politics in Recent European Political Thought.” Originally presented at the American Political Science Association in 1954, a few years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her trips to Europe on behalf of the organization, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the essay offers insights into three areas of Arendt’s interest: philosophy, politics, and the world.Another Cosmopolitanism
Roger Berkowitz explores Seyla Benhabib’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s skepticism regarding the idea of an International Criminal Court. Benhabib proposes a vision of cosmopolitan justice that transcends national boundaries, asserting that global norms should apply to individuals within a worldwide civil society. This perspective highlights the ongoing tension between global cosmopolitan ideals and the preservation of local, bounded communities, advocating for a dynamic balance between the two.Intellectuals Running the Institutions
In an interview on the Quillette Podcast, Zoe Booth speaks with Roger Berkowitz about Hannah Arendt's views on the dangers of intellectuals in politics, her skepticism of metaphysical truths, and her belief that political and moral truths emerge through conversation in a shared world rather than being objective.Action and the materiality of story
Arendt notes that the “hero” in the Homeric sense is not the seemingly “heroic,” but the free participant, “about whom a story could be told.” My research is concerned not only with these actions of free beings, but the way in which they have been archived. The production of stories in the movement for housing justice has led to a brilliant mixture of strategies and aesthetic practices for the recording, reworking, and preservation of stories.