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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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An Attack on the Soul
Roger BerkowitzIn response to news that Howard University is disbanding its Classics Department, Cornell West reminds us that Frederick Douglas and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. were inspired and nurtured by the classics. West argues that the attack on the classics is an attack on the soul and symptom the moral and spiritual rot of American culture.
04-22-2021
To Think What We Are Doing
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is not about human nature. Arendt says little if anything about what it means to be human in the sense of our natural humanity. Her inquiry is premised on the fact that we humans are conditioned beings, that we are born into an already existing world. That world is made through human artifice; it also conditions us humans insofar as we must live and die in a humanly built world.
04-15-2021
First Amendment on Campus
Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya found himself suspended and dismissed from the University of Virginia Medical School after he raised questions during a panel on microagressions. The case is now in the courts and Judge Norman K. Moon of the Western District of Virginia has allowed Bhattacharya’s freedom of speech suit to go forward. The opinion is well worth reading.04-15-2021
“Faith Changes Its Object, It Does Not Die”
Roger BerkowitzIn Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy secures and fosters political and civil liberties, religion nurtures a “civic religion” that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism.
04-08-2021
Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom Part I
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?04-06-2021
The Courage to Be Lecture Series:
Steven Zeidman
Valentina Flores '22There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, a reality that makes the United States notorious for being the world's leader in incarceration. In recent years, however, this phenomenon—mass incarceration, has gained momentum as a matter of discussion in conversations about criminal justice.
04-02-2021
The Classroom as Public Space
Scott Newstock turns to Shakespeare and Hannah Arendt to reflect on the loss of the classroom space over the last year.04-01-2021
The Humanities, Science, and the Soul
Roger BerkowitzSara Cederberg looks at the now perennial “crisis of the humanities” and writes that one reason for the crisis is “the fact that there is no longer a case to be made for the cultivation of the soul.” If the humanities emerged as a project of national storytelling so that humanists were engaged in the “preservation and cultivation of the nation’s soul,” the turn to science as the dominant cultural force has left the humanities adrift.
04-01-2021
Arendt, Camus, and Comte
David Langwallner writes about Hannah Arendt as a public intellectual and highlights her connections with Albert Camus and their joint worry about the rising power of scientists in public life.04-01-2021