A Letter from Roger Berkowitz

I graduated college in 1990, hoisted a pack on my back, flew to Istanbul, and made my way up through the cities of Eastern Europe: Skopje, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Prague, Pecs, Budapest, Cracow, Warsaw, and finally East Berlin. In these cities, newly liberated from the Iron curtain, I encountered and boarded with people hungry for contact with young Americans. 
 
Those were heady times. The wall had fallen and the Velvet Revolutions brought the Cold War to an abrupt conclusion. A year earlier, Francis Fukuyama wrote "the end of history" and declared the victory of liberal democracy. The world seemed free, open, and full of possibility. Democracy had triumphed over the quasi-totalitarian tyrannies of the Soviet Bloc.
 
The world feels different now in 2020. The promise that liberal democracy would bring freedom and wealth has collided with the reality of corruption and inequality. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue in their book The Light that Failed, the peoples of Eastern Europe "rankled" under the "imperious and futile demand that" they "imitate an idealized image of the West." Instead, these countries experienced western liberal democracy to be oppressive and corrupt. They saw the demand to live according to western democratic norms as arrogant. And they came to "mirror" not the ideal of liberal democracy, but the illiberal norms they saw to be the reality of liberal democracy. Thus did the countries of the East turn against liberalism—partly, yes, out of xenophobia and racism—but also because liberal democracy did not offer them the meaningful lives they had hoped for. 
 
As illiberalism spreads to democracies around the world, the hypocrisies of elite-driven liberal democracy have been unmasked. People everywhere have come to mistrust managerial and political elites who mouth democratic and egalitarian platitudes even as they bend the system to advantage themselves and their children. Instead of the worldwide victory of liberal democracy, we are now witnessing what Martin Gurri calls the "revolt of the public"—really a revolt of multiple and often opposed publics. We are seeing the birth pangs of a revolution against all manner of elite liberal authority.
 
But the promise of a free and open society persists. In the face of rising illiberalism, people have become politically engaged. For the past four years we have been witness to a massive wave of resistance across the world to structural inequality and discrimination. From the student protests in Hong Kong to the Black Lives Matter movement in America and from the Tea Party to the Resistance to President Trump, people are coming together to fight for a more just world. Amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that disproportionately impacts black and indigenous Americans and people of color, the Black Lives Matter movement shows that Americans of all races and backgrounds are alive with a sense of moral responsibility and a reborn faith in political action.

The protests in cities across the country and around the world are best understood to be inspiring acts of civil disobedience, acts that Hannah Arendt understood to be deeply political. Civil disobedience, which for Arendt is a fundamental constitutional right in the United States, is an action undertaken by “organized minorities, bound together by common opinion, rather than by common interests.” It is a political opinion that inspires the ongoing protests. Namely, that rogue policing, magnified by conscious or unconscious racism, combined with longstanding social inequalities, have made it dangerous and ruinous to be a black person in the United States today.  It is a political opinion that these indignities and inequalities can and must change-now.

By risking their lives—both in the face of police violence and the coronavirus—these civil disobedients are engaging in the kind of courageous political action that Hannah Arendt so valued. What is going on is neither protest nor riot: it is a mobilization of political action through civil disobedience, and it is unfolding on a scale not seen in my lifetime. 

Revolutions happen when the breakdown of a current system becomes so palpable that political and social institutions lose their legitimacy. Hannah Arendt argues that when governments lose their legitimacy, power is lying in the streets waiting to be picked up. And yet, Arendt cautions, such a revolutionary situation will only become a revolution when revolutionaries can articulate a new common sense, a vision of a shared world that would emerge on the ruins of the old. 
 
In an interview with Adelbert Reif in 1970, Hannah Arendt argues that a revolutionary re-founding demands "a group of real revolutionaries" who can offer a compelling answer to the question, "what are we fighting for?" Absent such a meaningful vision of what holds a people together, no break with the past is possible.
 
What we need now is the clear articulation of a new ideal. What would a world be in which justice and equality include racial justice and racial equality? How can we revitalize democracy so that we can once again give birth to a freedom in which all citizens are part of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people?
 
At a moment of revolutionary foment, Hannah Arendt's work is more potent and more needed than ever. This potential rebirth of a new common world depends on the courage to speak honestly and openly with one another absent ideological rigidity. Arendt holds a fundamental belief in the power of talking. She writes: "We become more just and more pious by thinking and talking about justice and piety." But why is this so?
 
In talking about the world, we make the world visible in its complexity. But even amidst discord, the act of speaking with one another about the crises of our times will, "eventually lay the groundwork for new agreements between ourselves as well as between the nations of the earth, which then might become customs, rules, [and] standards that again will be frozen into what is called morality." In talking with one another we create the kinds of shared experiences and common points of connections that might, over time, become the building blocks of a new shared world that can give birth to new traditions and thus a new moral order.   
 
The Hannah Arendt Center is dedicated to the open, vigorous, and honest talking with each other that can and will help re-imagine our world. Our last conference on Racism and Antisemitism included talks from Ibram X. Kendi, Eric Ward, Reverend Jacqui Lewis, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and others. Many of the talks from that conference will be published in Volume 8 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.    

 

 
In light of the extraordinary revolutionary fervor that promises a second Civil Rights movement, the Arendt Center will sponsor over the next nine months a broad series of online lectures and events on the theme Race and Revolution. The series asks leading African American activists and thinkers "What Should We Be Fighting For?"  
 
Also, in 2020-2021, The Arendt Center annual conference will focus on the revitalization of democracy through the use of citizen assemblies. Now in use around the world, citizen assemblies are like juries for politics instead of law. They bring randomly selected nonexpert citizens together with experts to study, deliberate, and make recommendations about intractable political questions. In France and England, national citizen assemblies have recently led towards policies dealing with global warming. In Canada, local and federal citizen assemblies are widely in use. In Ireland, citizen assemblies led to constitutional amendments allowing abortion and gay marriage. Citizen assemblies breathe energy into corrupt and failing representative institutions and nurture democratic virtue amongst citizens. They are one way to address the deficit of democratic participation that plagues modern democracy.
 
And yet, in the United States-the birthplace of modern self-government, citizen assemblies have not yet caught on. The 13th Annual Arendt Center conference-now postponed until April 15-16-will gather leading scholars, activists, politicians, and artists to ask: how can we revitalize our democracy?
 
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.