Amor Mundi

The Rule of Nobody

This is episode 9, “The Rule of Nobody,”  It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz in a Zoom conversation with Philip K. Howard, lawyer and activist. Howard has written five books including “The Death of Common Sense” and “The Rule of Nobody,” a reference to Hannah Arendt’s description of bureaucratic rule.  He also started Common Good, a nonpartisan...

20-20 Foresight 

Roger Berkowitz
Seth Cotler points us to a book review written in 1983 by Samuel T. Francis that makes clear how much of the politics of populism and racism we are experiencing today was already visible to those with eyes to see it. The review of a book by Kevin Philips argues that the frustrations with America’s obsolete constitutional and political system will bring about a racially charged right-wing revolution in the United States. 

Solidarity

Roger Berkowitz
When Li Wenliang saw the danger posed by the Corona Virus and tried to sound the alarm, he was forced to remain silent by the Chinese police. Dr. Li died from Covid 19, alongside thousands of others in Wuhan. During this time as the world learned of the ravages of the virus first in China and then in Italy, the United States refused to act to protect its citizens. With no national plan, no national testing strategy, no effort to acquire supplies, and no leadership...

The American Dream 

Our friends at The Point are publishing a “Quarantine Journal.” Samantha Hill has an entry about how she is experiencing the plague. 

What We Are Reading: Jana Schmidt Looks at the Complete Hannah Arendt

Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt Center Associate Fellow Jana V. Schmidt writes about the publication of the first Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works. Schmidt’s ranging engagement reaches out to the broader reception of Arendt’s work and the posthumously published volumes of her work. 

The Thrill of Democracy

This is episode 7,”The Thrill of Democracy.”  It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz in conversation with Olivia Guaraldo, a political thinker, Professor of Political Thought, and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Verona in Italy.   

The Triumph of Cynicism

Roger Berkowitz
Jane Mayer’s profile of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offers essential political insight into our times. One of the mysteries of the phenomenon that is Donald Trump is his capacity to lead a successful mass political movement without any obvious political beliefs or ideology. President Trump seems to have loyalty to few causes outside of himself and his own interests. What President Trump cares about, above all, is winning...

Intuitionist Mathematics and Common Sense

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt worried greatly about the rise of science. She took Niels Bohr seriously when he argued that “causality, determinism, and necessity of laws belonged to the categories of ‘our necessarily prejudiced conceptual frame’.” The new physics “defies description in terms of the ‘prejudices’ of the human mind[and] defies description in every conceivable way of human language.” Which is one reason why Albert Einstein...

What We Are Reading:
Small Things

Samantha Hill
In The Point’s “Quarantine Journal” Dawn Herrera Helphand reflects upon Hannah Arendt’s observation of the “infectious charm and petit Bonheur of the French way of life.” Herrera Helphand argues that Arendt’s reflection is a critique of petit bourgeois materialism to make the case against “coziness” in late capitalism.