Articles
Featured Article
Only Power Can Check Power
Hannah Arendt saw America’s strength in its dispersion of power, rooted in civic engagement and local governance. As executive authority expands, the true challenge is not just legal resistance but the reinvigoration of collective action. Can we reclaim the founding spirit of self-governance, or will we cede our power to those who seek to consolidate it? 02-02-2025
Articles
The Friendship Recession
Addie Page describes her search for new friends amidst what is increasingly being seen as a crisis of friendship.02-19-2023
Our Friend/Enemy Politics
Roger BerkowitzIn my seminar on “Truth and Politics” this semester we are grappling with the pure weaponization of claims to truthfulness and lying. And this this weekend I’m at colloquium on federalism where one theme is how federalism is embraced by whichever party or group doesn’t control political power. Principled ideas of governance and politics are fully sacrificed to the overriding goal of winning. These ideas are grounded in a larger nihilist worldview, and one thinker who understood the full implications of nihilist politics was Carl Schmitt.
02-19-2023
Theory Has Deconstructed Objectivity
Mark Goldblatt argues that academia is heading for a showdown between the STEM fields that believe in objectivity and the social sciences and the humanities that do not. But Goldblatt’s real concern should be the loss of impartiality in the humanities and social sciences, not the loss of objectivity.02-12-2023
Impartiality and Objectivity
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt reminded us of the importance of impartiality in history, journalism, and scholarship. For Arendt, every selection of facts is, as a selection, partial. Bret Stephens writes about the crisis of confidence in journalism.
02-12-2023
The Stranglehold of Relevance
Roger BerkowitzRobert Boyers interviews Jed Perl about the place of freedom and authority in art.
02-05-2023
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