Amor Mundi

Hannah Arendt and The Poetics of “The Pursuit of Happiness”

Clifford Brooks
“The pursuit of happiness” must be the most poetic phrase in the Constitution. Of course, the language throughout is elegant, the “felicity of pen” of Thomas Jefferson. However, his way about the pursuit of happiness grabs me by the heartstrings. No doubt this term lifted from Kant’s, “life, liberty, and property’ drew Arendt’s attention.

Reading Arendt

Sumit Chakrabarti reviewed a new book on Hannah Arendt titled, Hannah Arendt: Between Ideologies, by Rebecca Dew for The Telegraph. Chakrabarti argues that Dew’s work is an important caveat for serious readers of Arendt, because it addresses one of the most common mistakes reading Arendt’s work: Attempts to place her within any kind of ideological tradition. 

On the publication of the anthology “Denkräume”:
Hannah Arendt’s spaces of thinking and on ours today

Jana Marlene Mader
In “The Life of the Mind”,  Hannah Arendt argues that thinking is a rebellion against the tyranny of time and a safeguard against the terror of our own finiteness. She notes that cognition removes us from the present while pondering where the thinking ego is located:

Our Mob Moment

Roger Berkowitz
Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by three police officers as he was reaching into his car with his three children in the back seat. All cautionary rhetoric aside—we don't know the full story, he may have been reaching for a weapon, he was clearly not listening to the police—one fact is not in dispute to anyone watching the video of the attempted murder: Jacob Blake did not deserve to be shot seven times from behind and paralyzed. 

Existentialism 

Samantha Hill
Carmen Lea Dege writes about the resurgence of interest in existentialism amidst the Covid crisis. Tracing the history of existentialism in the 20thcentury, Dege looks at Hannah Arendt’s two essays on the problems of German and French existentialism while thinking about how Heidegger and Jaspers influenced her understanding of evil..

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard: Challenging Us as Political Beings in the World

“Academia, stuffy lectures, silos of thought, ivory towers—these visions of scholarly pursuits are not the pillars of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. In contrast, the Center dedicates itself to open, bold and diverse thinking, active questioning, and deepening an understanding of our collective political lives,” writes Mary B. O’Neill in this spotlight on the Center for Main Street magazine.

Facebook’s Holocaust Alogrithms

Roger Berkowitz

Politics and truth, Hannah Arendt reminds us, have never been on good terms. "Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade." And yet, Arendt raises the question of "what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth."

When Joe Biden Wrote to Hannah Arendt

Roger Berkowitz
On May 28, 1975, then Senator Joe Biden wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt. 
Dear Miss Arendt, I read in a recent article by Tom Wicker of a paper that you read at the Boston Bicentennial Forum. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, I am most interested in receiving a copy of your paper. Thank you. Sincerely, Joseph R. Biden Jr. United State Senator. 

 

The Canceling of Adolph Reed

Roger Berkowitz

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.