Amor Mundi

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. 

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.

The Flight from Reality

Roger Berkowitz
Last 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...

Revitalizing Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
In 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.

The World According to Arendt

For Hannah Arendt, the world is born out of human activity—the vibrant panoply of fabricated
things, 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).

Curricular Disputes

Roger Berkowitz
Abstract 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.

The Mythic Arendt

Roger Berkowitz
Felix 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. 

The 500 State Project

Roger Berkowitz
The United States of America was created not as a democratic state but as a federal constitutional republic with democratically elected representatives. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, the spirit of American democracy came out of the townships in New England. And Hannah Arendt argues that the greatest innovation and central idea of the United States Constitutions was the dispersion and expansion of federated powers alongside a rejection of central government and sovereignty.

A Failure of Leadership

Nikole Hannah-Jones has published a letter explaining her decision to first fight to get tenure as the Knight Chair Professor at the University of North Carolina and then her decision to decline the offer and take a new chair at Howard University.