Articles
Featured Article
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.10-06-2024
Articles
Me Parler
Roger BerkowitzParler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter, has somewhere around 10 million users. This is a far cry from the 330 active Twitter accounts or the 2.7 billion Facebook accounts. And yet Parler has become a “swamp-like ecosystem” in which the likes of Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and leading QAnon acolytes have free reign. In this fact-free reality, the CIA supercomputers changed votes from Trump to Biden, Republicans were given Sharpie pens to vote with...
11-28-2020
Making the World Beautifully Chaotic
Roger BerkowitzRecently the Hannah Arendt Center Race and Revolution lecture series featured a conversation between my former student Juliana Huxtable and Kimberly Foster. Now Philip Maughan pens a profile of Huxtable that offers one way to think about critical thinking: To resist simplicity and to make the world beautifully chaotic.
11-28-2020
An Autocratic Nationalism with Total Domination
Roger BerkowitzIn the United States, there is an industry of people turning to Hannah Arendt to raise the spectre of totalitarianism. Sam Moyn has rightly questioned this approach. But there are places where it is worth worrying about the rise of totalitarianism. China—where reeducation camps for Uighur are leading to detention and torture—is also engaging in an unprecedented use of technology and state-sponsored repression to censor its population.
10-29-2020
The Destruction of Truth
Roger BerkowitzMichiko Kakutani offers another approach to the meaning of the modern lie, what she calls the “destruction of truth.” Turning back to Hannah Arendt,
10-29-2020
Technocracy and the Prejudices of Liberal Democracy
Roger Berkowitz spoke to the Laboratory of Politics, Behaviour and Media at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo on Facebook Live. The talk “Politics Today: A Challenge to Democracy,” traces the crisis of liberal democracy to the entrance of intellectuals and elites into government.10-22-2020
Loneliness in the 20th Century
Roger BerkowitzIn thinking about totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt came to see it is a form of government founded upon a mass loneliness. Samantha Hill writes about the way that loneliness emerged as a mass phenomenon in the 20th century.
10-22-2020
Lying As A Way Of Life
Roger BerkowitzAs the lies pile up, people ask why the President’s lies don’t seem to hurt his standing. Roger Berkowitz argues that lies barely register today because lying has become, simply, a way of life. And he asks, “How Do We Rebuild a Shared American Reality on a Foundation of Lies?”
10-15-2020
Wages of Whiteness
Roger BerkowitzAt the beginning of a conversation with Bill T. Jones this week as part of the Hannah Arendt Center’s “Race and Revolution” lecture series, Bill T. Jones read an excerpt from Hari Kunzru’s essay “Wages of Whiteness.” Kunzru’s essay is a magisterial retelling of the rise of current focus on whiteness, identity politics, and white privilege, one that raises as many questions as it answers.
10-08-2020
I’m Going to Send You
Roger BerkowitzEmily Langer tells the story of Ruth Gruber, “an American journalist who stumbled into one of the great rescue stories of the Holocaust when the U.S. government appointed her to escort nearly 1,000 Jews across U-boat infested waters to the shores of the United States, [who] died Nov. 17 at her home in Manhattan. She was 105.” The story is well worth your time.
10-01-2020