Amor Mundi

Heinrich Bluecher 

Ringo Roesener
Hannah Arendt’s husband Heinrich Bluecher was an exceptional and much admired teacher of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Bard College. Bluecher came from a different generation. He never earned a doctorate, or published. He was what Arendt called a “Socratic character.”

On Not Being Silent

Roger Berkowitz
George Orwell was one of the greatest anti-fascists of the 20th century. Not only did he satirize and expose fascism and totalitarianism in his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, but also he enlisted and fought fascists in Spain with the Spanish Republicans. Orwell risked his life to oppose and counter fascism wherever he found it. And yet, in 1941, Orwell wrote one of his classic essays defending the English writer P.G. Wodehouse against charges of fascism. 

Solitude and Hope

Roger Berkowitz
Jennifer Stitt  finds herself turning to Hannah Arendt amidst the pandemic, protests, and democratic danger. In such “dark times,” Stitt writes, Arendt’s meditations on the relations between isolation, loneliness, and solitude are meaningful. Above all, Stitt is attracted to Arendt’s idea of solitude, “the thinking activity” that “made moral judgments...

What We Are Reading
The Self-Interest of White Fragility

Roger Berkowitz
Ross Douthat offers one of the best and most original explanations of the attraction of the new ideology of white fragility. 

Power Politics

Roger Berkowitz

In an essay “Power Politics Triumphs” from 1945, Hannah Arendt argues that the “obsoleteness of this book” is a  “consequences of the author’s pathetic faith in the validity of economic arguments.” Over and again, in modern politics, it has been shown that “nobody cares” about economic arguments and that politics is not driven by economics.

A Letter from Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt cannot solve the problems of our world.  But her bold, provocative, and  fearless  thinking  is a model for how we can think about the problems we confront today. At the Hannah Arendt  Center we don't worship Hannah Arendt. But we seek to nurture the kind of worldly, humanities-based  thinking about ethics and politics that Arendt so fully embodied. 

Special Contribution: Our Space 

Dariel Vasquez
Dariel Vasquez is a first generation college graduate from Harlem, NY. Dariel graduated from Bard College (Class of 2017) with a joint degree in History and Sociology, and a concentration in Africana-Studies. He is the founder and director of Brothers@. Youth development and mentorship is Dariel’s passion, and he’s been working with young men of color since he was 16 years old.

The Canceler in Chief

Roger Berkowitz
There is an apparent myth going around that cancel culture is a phenomenon of the political left. One sees this in the reaction to the Open Letter in Harpers that I signed last week. There was in that letter no mention of “the left.” The letter explicitly mentioned the danger from illiberalism from both the political right and Donald Trump as well as from cultural intolerance for curiosity and experimental thinking.

What We Are Reading:
The Universal Editor

Samantha Hill
Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times this week in an open letter, citing the effect social media has had on traditional publishing platforms.