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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. 

Review: Arendt on the Political

David Arndt’s Arendt on the Political is an account of Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics. Instead of understanding politics from a philosophical perspective, we should choose to understand what the “nontheoretical forms of thought that prevail in politics,” tell us. He asks us to largely bracket political theorizing and come down from the realm of philosophy to consider the world of action.

Political Hobbyism

By Roger Berkowitz
Eitan Hersh argues that college-educated voters only think they are engaged in politics, while what “they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.” When college-educated voters donate online, follow the polls, and become fans of a candidate, they are less doing politics than participating in a spectator sport as spectators. And these hobbyists, Hersh writes, are hurting American politics. 

The Prejudices of Intellectualism

By Roger Berkowitz
In an essay on Hannah Arendt in a series on the Great Thinkers, Finn Bowring rightly focuses on Arendt’s worry about the power of intellectual elites. At home in abstraction and theories, intellectuals have an uncanny ability to lose themselves in flights of fancy and reject or deny the facts of this world. The philosophical temptation is to live amongst logically coherent fictions and deny those real facts that frustrate their beautiful forms.

The Far Left Joins the Far Right in a Politics of Hate

By Roger Berkowitz
This is not a post about a particular political candidate. Nellie Bowles writes about “The Dirtbag Left,” which is the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, a hate-filled brand of populist outrage that is taking over a large fringe of the progressive movement.

Loneliness and the Nuclear Family

By Roger Berkowitz
What are the great problems facing the country? If one follows the political theatrics these days, it is whether we should have Medicare for all or Medicare for all who want it. Add to that questions about how much to tax billionaires and the middle class, how many immigrants should be welcomed, and National Disclosure Agreements. Arguably, however...

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.

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.