Articles

What We Are Reading:
The Plague And the Literary Cure

Roger Berkowitz
Jill Lepore writes about the literature of epidemics, looking back at great works about plagues by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Stephen King, Albert Camus, and Jose Saramago. What all plague literature shares is, first, the knowledge that the plague threatens the human world, that is “cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal.”

Corona Loneliness

By Samantha Hill
Before the Corona pandemic we were already facing a loneliness epidemic. And now, with mandatory self-isolation, many are worried about what kind of impact this enforced aloneness will have for individuals. Hannah Arendt draws an important distinction between solitude and loneliness.

Dialogue with One’s Self

Roger Berkowitz
Kate Bracht turns to Hannah Arendt to find a silver lining to our need to be by ourselves during the Corona Virus pandemic. We are all increasingly spending more time by ourselves. One answer is to reach out for companionship through on-line dinner parties and courses.

Grimm Lecture 2020: Thinking Itself is Dangerous

Acting Assistant Director and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies Samantha Rose Hill gave the annual Grimm Lecture, the premiere event of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, a research institute at the University of Waterloo. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Dr. Hill livestreamed her lecture, entitled “Thinking Itself is Dangerous. Reading Hannah Arendt Now.”

From Our Members:
A Necessary Element in the Solution of Our Existential Problems.

By Howard Goldson
I would like to share an ancient wisdom story still told by the indigenous peoples of North America as it has been for over a thousand years. It so happened that on a particular day, a day like most other days, the hunters returned to the village without a single deer for food. Not only were they unable to kill a deer, in fact they had not seen a single deer during the entire day.

When Philosophers Are Blinded By Theory

By Roger Berkowitz
The European Journal of Psychoanalysis has published a symposium “Coronavirus and Philosophers.” It begins with an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish about the quarantine of a town during the plague in the 17th century. 

What We Are Reading:
The Rule of Law Under Siege

By Roger Berkowitz
We live in irregular times and the President and members of the Executive branch of government are pushing the bounds of Constitutional norms. But there are lines that should not be crossed if we are to preserve the virtues and benefits of limited government. One of those norms is quite simply the rule of law and authority of the Federal judiciary.

What We Are Reading:
Impotent Bigness

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt McManus writes about a dimension of Hannah Arendt’s work that he believes is given short shrift: Arendt’s critique of bigness and of “political leaders who embody the traits of “impotent bigness,” as she framed it.” Bigness in politics for Arendt is a danger to freedom. It goes together with the rise of bureaucracy and centralized government. 

What We Are Reading:
Los Angeles

By Samantha Hill

Alex Ross writes about “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile.” Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, found refuge in Los Angeles during the war years, and turned the city into “the capital of German literature in exile.”