Amor Mundi

Arendt, Brecht, and Bowie

Last week Roger Berkowitz inaugurated the reading of The Human Condition in the Virtual Reading Group (amidst a record 185 attendees) with a short lecture about Arendt’s addition of an epigraph by Bertolt Brecht to the Prologue of the German edition of the Vita Activa. The epigraph consists of the first and last paragraphs of Brecht’s opening hymn to his play Baal.

Seyla Benhabib on “Tradition and the Modern Age”

As part of the “On Hannah Arendt” year-long art exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Seyla Benhabib joined Roger Berkowitz in a discussion of Arendt’s essay “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Moving from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Benhabib shed light on Arendt’s claim that Karl Marx represents the end of the western tradition of political thought.

Old Letters From Loved Ones

Jacob Rivers
The latest issue of Poetry Magazine, guested edited by poets Tara Betts and Joshua Bennett, focuses on work written by currently and formerly incarcerated poets, bringing a systematically suppressed chorus of voices to the forefront of the poetry community’s publishing landscape. Editor Tara Betts writes in her introduction to the issue, “The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human.

The QAnon Conspiracy is Still Here

Politics is about opinion not truth. This is one of Hannah Arendt’s central insights. At the same time, however, every political community must have some truths that it shares, that it holds in common, that unites it as a collective political body. These truths are not “objective,” but they are shared stories and ideals that form, in Arendt’s words, “the ground on which we stand and teh sky that stretches above us.”

Seeing the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province

Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter report on first hand accounts coming out of the horrific camps where Uighur’s are being tortured, raped, and dehumanized in China. We need to stop calling the camps run by the Chinese government in Zinjiang province internment, concentration, or re-education camps. They are rather genocidal camps for torture and rape.

Can Moral Life Survive Dictatorship?

Roger Berkowitz
Peter Baehr asks: “Can moral life survive dictatorship?” It is a question that many in politics think secondary. The rise of dictatorship—not to mention fascism—is said to justify resistance at all costs. The message of groups like Antifa is that in the fight against dictatorship and fascism, all means are acceptable and even necessary.

We All Should Have Something to Hide

Roger Berkowitz
One repeated argument against apps that allow for encryption and privacy is that those who have nothing to hide should not worry about the loss of privacy. But who is it that has nothing to hide? The human heart and mind is a factory of fantasies that remind each of us of the darkness that lurks within us.

Hannah Arendt and C.L.R. James

Roger Berkowitz
In 1958 in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt published an Epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Two years later, the Caribbean intellectual and activist C.L.R. James  delivered a series of public lectures in Trinidad that would be published as Modern Politics.

National Solidarity

Adam Rothman and Barbara J. Fields tell the story of Hannah Fizer, a young woman shot by the police after she was pulled over for running a red light. This is a familiar story today, but for the fact that Fizer was white. This fact does not take away from the fact that there is a problem with racism in law enforcement that needs to be addressed.