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It’s Political Power, Stupid
Today’s populist revolts against globalization are not only economic in nature—they are fundamentally political. As Hannah Arendt warned, the elevation of economics over politics, especially under imperialism and globalization, leads to the collapse of political judgment and self-determination. Her historical analysis now reads like prophecy: we are witnessing the return of politics in its most raw and terrifying form.04-06-2025
Articles
Making the Empire More Colorful
Roger BerkowitzIn Harpers last week, Christopher Beah talks to Patrick J. Deneen, Francis Fukuyama, Deirdre Nansen McClosky, and Cornell West about Liberalism and whether it is worth saving.
01-29-2023
Doubters and Skeptics
Roger BerkowitzSebastian Veg, who writes about China, has published his introduction to the Thai translation of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”
01-29-2023
The Attack on Academic Thinking
Roger BerkowitzLen Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.
01-08-2023
All Academic Thinking is Conservative
Roger BerkowitzJordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt.
01-08-2023
The Twitter Files
Roger BerkowitzSince Elon Musk bought Twitter and started dismantling the company’s bureaucratic infrastructure, he has also begun a process of coming clean about Twitter’s highly idiosyncratic way of censoring posts and contributors. Instead of releasing the files at once, Musk is letting them out in parts and has tasked the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others with writing about the files on Twitter itself.
12-11-2022
Is Antisemitism a Virus?
Roger BerkowitzDavid Marchese interviews Tom Stoppard about the rising virus of antisemitism.
12-04-2022
Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Michael Eric Dyson has a courageous op-ed in which he moves on from acknowledging both Jewish racism and black antisemitism to recognizing “antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future.”12-04-2022
A Simple Tale that Undid a Totalitarian System
Roger BerkowitzRobin Ashenden writes about the seismic significance of the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared Sixty years ago last week.
11-27-2022
Racism and Institutional Change
Roger BerkowitzJohn McWhorter, very much like Corey Robin, also argues that the left needs to change its focus from questions of recognition to questions of power. For McWhorter, evidence of the mistake made by contemporary leftist politics is the language of “systematic racism.”
11-27-2022