Articles

What We Are Reading: Academic Freedom and Twitter

By Roger Berkowitz
Adam Steinbaugh reports on the decision by Babson College to fire an adjunct faculty member after complaints were made about social media posts he wrote in response to President Trump’s tweet threatening to bomb Iranian cultural sites. After Asheen Phansey suggested that Iran might offer a list of American cultural institutions to attack, Babson was criticized widely for supporting an anti-American professor who was calling for attacks on American cultural sites.

What We Are Reading: Nonviolence 
 

By Samantha Hill
Masha Gessen interviews Judith Butler for The New Yorker.  Butler’s new book, “The Force of Nonviolence” tackles the way we can imagine “an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world.” In the interview, Butler addresses questions of nonviolence, equality, and the liberal notion of individualism.

A Politics of Meaning

By Roger Berkowitz
In an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory.  For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...

The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science

An essay in Arendt Studies by Roger Berkowitz (2018) written for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) was recently republished in The Abstract Elephant, a publicly available journal.

What We're Reading: Justus Rosenberg

By Samantha Hill
Bard College Professor Justus Rosenberg has written a book about his Time in the Pyenees: Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Mann, and More, working with the Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. 

What We're Reading: George Steiner

By Samantha Hill
When Hannah Arendt went to study with Martin Heidegger, he was known as the “magician from Marbach,” because he made Plato and Aristotle come to life. As Arendt later reflected, people went to study with Heidegger to learn how to think. In an insightful and graceful essay, George Steiner takes on Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger, in a review essay of their correspondence: “The Magician in Love.”

Propaganda and Cynicism

By Roger Berkowitz
McKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.

The Need to Be Right

By Roger Berkowitz
Jon Baskin in The Point identifies a disturbing tone in liberal culture. He recalls Lionel Trilling’s 1947 admission of his “deep distaste for liberal culture.” While Trilling identified with liberalism, he wrote that too often...

Winning Chess, Winning Politics

By Roger Berkowitz

Garry Kasparov argues that those who oppose President Trump from all sides need to come together to defeat him. He warns that,  “As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them.” Witnessing the rise of radicalism on all sides, he writes, “Rage...