Skip to main content.
Bard HAC
Bard HAC
  • About sub-menuAbout
    Hannah Arendt

    “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

    Join HAC
    • About the HAC
      • Our Staff
      • About Hannah Arendt
      • Our Location
  • Programs sub-menuPrograms
    Hannah Arendt
    • Our Programs
    • Courage to Be
    • Campus Plurality Forum
    • Race and Revolution
    • Virtual Reading Group
    • Citizens' Assemblies Summer Workshop
    • Affiliated Programs
    • Hannah Arendt Humanities Network
    • Democracy Through Sortition
    • Meanings of October 27th
  • Academics sub-menuAcademics
    Hannah Arendt

    “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

    • Academics at HAC
    • Undergraduate Courses
    • Practice of Courage Courses
  • Fellows sub-menuFellows
    HAC Fellows

    “Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.”

    • Fellows
    • Student Fellowships
  • Conferences sub-menuConferences
    Hannah Arendt
    Conference 2021
      
    Watch the Recording

    Fall Conference 2021
    “Revitalizing Democracy”

    Thursday, Thursday, October 14 – Friday, October 15
    • Conferences
    • Past Conferences
    • Registration
    • Our Location
  • Publications sub-menuPublications
    Hannah Arendt
    Subscribe to Amor Mundi

    “I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”

    • Publications
    • Amor Mundi
    • HA Journal
    • Further Reading
    • Video Gallery
    • From Our Members
    • Podcasts
  • Events sub-menuEvents
    Hannah Arendt

    “It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

    —Hannah Arendt
    • HAC Events
    • Upcoming
    • Archive
    • Citizens' Assemblies Summer Workshop
  • Join sub-menu Join HAC
    Hannah Arendt

    “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

    • Join HAC
    • Become a Member
    • Subscribe
    • Virtual Reading Group
    • Join HAC
               
  • Search

Amor Mundi

Amor Mundi Home

Featured


Featured Article

Making Distinctions in Thinking About Racism

Roger Berkowitz 
Hannah Arendt is a thinker who insists that we make distinctions. One of Arendt’s most controversial distinctions is that between racism and what she alternatively will call “race thinking” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and then "prejudice" in many of her later essays. In the wake of the shooting in Buffalo last week, John McWhorter made his own distinctions while trying to understand the place of racism in U.S. society. McWhorter argues that we use the word racism today to mean too many things. He states that we need to distinguish between different aspects of what we call racism in order to think more clearly about the problems and prevent such tragedies as the shooting in Buffalo.
05-22-2022

Featured

Featured

Revitalizing American Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
On Hannah Arendt’s 115th birthday on October 14th, the Hannah Arendt Center convened its Annual Fall Conference, Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom. The effort was to explore the movement for citizen assemblies from a wide plurality of perspectives from activists, artists, public intellectuals, business persons, and students. Watch a recording of the webcast here.
10-22-2021
Featured

Experts and Citizen Governance

Roger Berkowitz
Recent years have not been kind to experts, technocrats, and specialists in government. Amidst our hyper-partisan politics, there is a desire for policy to be made by experts who are thought to be neutral, objective, and informed. But experts have continually proven mistaken in their response to Covid-19, leading to the politicization of expert-driven policies. The experts in the U.S. military bungled the pullout from Afghanistan.
09-30-2021
Featured

Dangerous Neighbors

Roger Berkowitz
One feature of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is their use of informants and every-day citizens to enforce ideological conformity. Unlike the police that must follow rules and regulations, neighbors can simply let their fantasies run wild and report on those they dislike, find suspicious, or want to discipline.
09-09-2021
Featured

Reconciliation and Justifying the World

Roger Berkowitz
The locution “Amor Mundi” was Hannah Arendt’s shorthand for the effort and at times the failure—but above all the ambition—to learn to love the world as a gift of fortune in spite of the evil and tragedy that inform that world. In Arendt’s writing, the question of how and whether to love the world goes by the title reconciliation.
09-02-2021
Featured

Institutional Values

Roger Berkowitz

James Kirchick writes about Matthias Döpfner, the CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, who recently ordered that the Israeli flag be flown for a week at corporate headquarters in solidarity with both Israel and European Jews after a spate of anti-semitic attacks in Germany. When some Springer employees complained and accused Döpfner of taking sides in a geopolitical conflict, Dopfner responded sternly...
08-26-2021
Featured

Masters Degrees and the Bureaucratic Boom in Bullshit Jobs

Roger Berkowitz
William Deresiewicz asks after the boom in Masters programs--“From 1991 to 2019, the number of master’s degrees awarded rose by 143 percent. That’s 70 percent faster than bachelor’s degrees and 84 percent faster than doctorates.” These programs are cash cows for universities and are frequently financed by huge amounts of debt by students seeking to invest in their futures.
08-20-2021
Featured

The New Class War

Roger Berkowitz
David Brooks revisits what he got right and wrong about the rise of the creative class. Above all, he admits that he was wrong when he wrote in 2000,  “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste. Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That view that the creative elite was benign and open to all was, he writes, “one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.”
08-06-2021
Featured

A Full-Text Search Tool for the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress

On June 16th the Hannah Arendt Center hosted a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of the new Library of Congress Hannah Arendt Papers digital archive. You can watch it here. Rob McQueen, one of our members, has now created a supplemental search tool that enables full-text searches of the archive. McQueen explains his new search tool below. 
07-29-2021
Featured

From Roger Berkowitz, Our Founder and Academic Director

Three events dominated the last year. The Covid-19 pandemic spurred online life and online education to an extent few could have predicted. Confined to our homes, many of us could nevertheless teach classes over Zoom, socialize with friends on House Party, and talk over Facetime. When the pandemic struck, the Arendt Center didn't close down. We pivoted.
07-22-2021
<<  <  1  2  3  [4] 5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  >  >> 
Footer Contact
Contact HAC
Bard College
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
845-758-7878
[email protected]
Join the HAC
Become a Member
Subscribe to Amor Mundi
Join the Virtual Reading Group
Follow Us
Image for Twitter
Image for Facebook
Image for YouTube
Image for Instagram