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Hannah Arendt and the Constitution of Freedom
This week I gave a lecture at the University of São Paulo in Brazil that asked, Why Law Alone Can’t Defend Democracy—and why Only Power Can Check Power.03-30-2025
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The Power of Science
Roger BerkowitzFour years ago after the election of Donald Trump, protesters around the country held rallies for science. Few in those rallies noticed the irony, that by engaging in political protests in favor of science they were contributing to the politicization of science. Now Tunku Varadarajan asks how science has become politicized.
07-29-2021
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
In AI We Trust
The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network of OSUN partnered with the Central European University (CEU) and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to award Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, the first annual Yehuda Elkana Fellowship.07-29-2021
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
The Flight from Reality
Roger BerkowitzLast week I linked to an essay by Felix Heidenreich questioning Arendt’s mythic status in Germany. This week Rebecca Panovka publishes an essay arguing that “Hannah Arendt’s fans misread the post-truth presidency.” Panovka, who clearly counts herself one of Arendt’s ardent readers, begins by noting Arendt’s well-known disdain for the famously picayune fact-checkers at The New Yorker...
07-22-2021
Revitalizing Democracy
Roger BerkowitzIn October the Hannah Arendt Center will host its conference, “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” We will host activists, thinkers, and scholars from around the world thinking about new ways of reimagining democracy, especially around the idea of sortition—the use of randomly selected citizens to engage in participatory democratic citizen assemblies to suggest and even make legislative changes.
07-22-2021
The World According to Arendt
For Hannah Arendt, the world is born out of human activity—the vibrant panoply of fabricatedthings, the humanly cultivated land, the body politic, and so on. It is the arena for exercising
human capacities and newness, and the forum for politics and the vita activa. It is both “given”
to us (through history) and “created” by us (through action in the present).
07-19-2021
Curricular Disputes
Roger BerkowitzAbstract debates about critical race theory or antiracism curricula often lead nowhere. It is imperative that we engage in specific efforts to develop meaningful curricula that address the reality of racial inequality in our history and our present. And that is proving difficult, as is shown by the case of Deemar v. Board of Education of the City of Evanston/Skokie.
07-17-2021
The Mythic Arendt
Roger BerkowitzFelix Heidenreich writes about how Hannah Arendt has become an iconic and even mythic thinker in Germany today, and one might say also outside of Germany as well. He argues that “The fascination for Arendt is comprehensible and fertile as long as Arendt is taken seriously as a philosopher” or at least as a political thinker.
07-16-2021