Featured

The Classics for All

Roger Berkowitz
When Roosevelt Montas immigrated to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic, he found a copy of Plato’s Dialogues in a garbage dump and took it home. It changed his life. Thomas Chatterton Williams writes on the importance of the classics for the underprivileged.

Gullibility and Cynicism

Roger Berkowitz
Rebecca Solnit asks why Republican voters keep believing the lies about the election told by Donald Trump. And to answer that question she turns to Hannah Arendt.

Join us for another year of risky thinking...

A Letter from Roger Berkowitz asking for your support

Between Languages

Roger Berkowitz
When asked by Günter Gaus what was irretrievably lost when she had to flee the Nazis and leave Germany and Europe behind, Hannah Arendt answered: “The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains.” In a profile of the writer Lydia Davis, Wyatt Mason dives into this question of how knowing many languages changes and enriches a writer.

Thinking is Out of Order

Roger Berkowitz
In her last book The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt writes that “thinking is out of order.” Thinking frees us from the world of appearances and allows us to think things beyond our common sense that we share with others. In this way, thinking is not about the pursuit of truth but it is, Arendt argues, about the pursuit of meaning. Thomas Bartscherer meditates on Arendt’s characterization of thinking as out of order.

The Soul Lit Suddenly From Within

Roger Berkowitz
Wyatt Mason writes about translating poetry and specifically Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Amidst long ruminations on Baudelaire’s rhythmic syllables, Mason highlights the poet’s fight against all that is common.

A Failure of Leadership

Roger Berkowitz
There may be no more dangerous trend in higher education than the epidemic of administrators. For over ten years we’ve been reading articles about administrative bloat—spending on administration now nearly equals spending on faculty at many major universities.  Philip Mousavizadeh writes about the “proliferation of administrators” at Yale University, where in the last 20 years “the number of managerial and professional staff... has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.”

Great Circles

Roger Berkowitz
The idea that inequality emerges with civilization is often attributed to Jean Jacques Rousseau. But today it is simply an accepted fact. Yet, in their new book The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that archaeological evidence shows that the rise of urbanization did not inevitably lead to hierarchical and unequal societies. 

Racism and The Great Replacement

Roger Berkowitz

At the 2019 Arendt Center Conference, Ian Buruma moderated a panel on The Great Replacement, a popular right-wing theory in France that immigrants and other minorities are replacing the Catholic French. Now, one of the leading French presidential candidates, Eric Zemmour is embracing the theory.