Amor Mundi

Context Matters

Roger Berkowitz
One big lie today is that intent does not matter. Another is that context doesn’t matter. Harvey Silverglate, during a lecture on free speech, spoke about his colleague’s Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, published in 2002 and recently updated. I have taught Kennedy’s book, which is excellent, but the students at Silvergate’s lecture were unnerved at his use of the word. And the Public Issues Board at Milton Academy sent out an email to the entire student body, apologizing for Silverglate’s purported infraction.

Hypocrisy? So What?

Roger Berkowitz
N.S. Lyons shows why the claim that “it is hypocrisy” doesn’t work.

Thinking Without a Banister

Roger Berkowitz
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave a major foreign policy speech last week in which she began and ended her speech by referencing Hannah Arendt’s idea of “thinking without a banister.”

The Great Replacement in Hungary

Roger Berkowitz
Hungarian President Viktor Orbán has advocated illiberal democracy. In a recent speech, however, he has gone further and explicitly embraced what is called the “great replacement” theory, the idea that ethnic Europeans are being replaced by non-whites and explicitly Arabs and Jews. An article in Politico showed that European leaders, and even some of Orbán's supporters, are worried that the Hungarian President has gone too far. 

The Dictatorial Workplace

Zephyr Teachout paints a dystopian picture of workers monitored, oppressed, and harmed by constant tracking, monitoring, and supervision. At the end of this drive to watch workers is, in the end, the desire to fully understand workers that they can be manipulated and exploited.

A letter from Roger Berkowitz

This week, Italy's government fell apart and two far-right parties are favored to win upcoming elections. A war of aggression in Europe has upended basic assumptions about the liberal world order. And, in the United States, former President Trump threatens to run again for President even as a Congressional Committee has painstakingly demonstrated his efforts to illegally subvert a democratic election. It is at times like these that we must remember Hannah Arendt's warning: totalitarianism is now an ever-present possibility in our world. In such a world, Arendt argues, the fear of concentration camps and total domination invalidates all political differentiations and serves as "the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not."

About Face:
A Portrait of David Schorr’s “Hannah Arendt Center: The Centenary Prints”

In 2011, the Hannah Arendt Center commissioned the artist David Schorr to create an original engraved series of 50 prints of Hannah Arendt based on his iconic drawing that graces the cover of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of the World. These prints were lost for a decade, but were found and are now being made available through the Arendt Center. Learn more and join the center here.
Steven Maslow, then the Chairman of the Arendt Center’s board, a student and later friend of David Schorr’s, offers reflections below on the prints, their connection to Arendt’s writing and thinking, and his friendship with David Schorr.

The Eichmann Tapes are Discovered (Again)

Roger Berkowitz
Few books have defined an entire world-historical event as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Not only has Arendt’s book dominated the reception of Adolf Eichmann and his trial, but also her account of the banality of evil has become a cultural, moral, and legal touchstone, an insight perennially invoked (rightly or wrongly) to explain how and why everyday people engage in genocidal and other evil acts.

Now Yariv Mozer, an Israeli filmmaker, has created and directed a new documentary series The Devils Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes that played recently in Israel. Transcripts of the tapes have existed since before the Eichmann trial, and Arendt read many of them. But the actual tapes had long been thought lost. Mozer uses excerpts from these tapes to argue that Eichmann was in fact an ideological Nazi and was hardly banal.

Richard Bernstein in Memoriam

Roger Berkowitz 
Richard Bernstein died this week. He is the author of Praxis and Action, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, and Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? amongst many other books.  He arrived at the New School for Social Research in 1989, where he taught courses on Hannah Arendt, amongst other interests. His obituaries are here,  here and in German here. Dick spoke at the first Hannah Arendt Center Conference Thinking in Dark Times in 2006. At that conference, I asked Dick to respond to the question, “Is Evil Banal?” In typical fashion, his response was to challenge the question. His talk is transcribed and published in the volume Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.