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Get Ready for the Arendt Center Confernce!
Roger Berkowitz, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Uday Mehta joined WAMC Northeast Public Radio's The Roundtable to discuss some of the topics we’ll be delving into at our 16th annual fall conference on Tribalism and Cosmpolitanism this Thursday and Friday!All Categories
Arendt, Freedom, and Protest
Arendt Center Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz speaks with Toby Buckle in the Political Theory Podcast on Arendt’s idea of freedom and protest. The conversation includes discussions of constitutionalism, lottery-based citizen assemblies, the revitalization of democracy, and the basic question of “What we are fighting for?”
Bare LIfe and the Animal Laborans
By Roger BerkowitzIn the last Amor Mundi Newsletter we linked to an essay by Giorgio Agamben where he embraced a rightly discredited theory that the Corona Virus was not worse than the flu, and that governments were hyping the dangers of the virus in order to justify repression and discipline. Agamben has since recognized his mistake and has now published a follow up called “Clarifications.”
What We Are Reading:
The Rule of Law Under Siege
By Roger BerkowitzWe live in irregular times and the President and members of the Executive branch of government are pushing the bounds of Constitutional norms. But there are lines that should not be crossed if we are to preserve the virtues and benefits of limited government. One of those norms is quite simply the rule of law and authority of the Federal judiciary.
What We Are Reading:
Impotent Bigness
By Roger BerkowitzMatt McManus writes about a dimension of Hannah Arendt’s work that he believes is given short shrift: Arendt’s critique of bigness and of “political leaders who embody the traits of “impotent bigness,” as she framed it.” Bigness in politics for Arendt is a danger to freedom. It goes together with the rise of bureaucracy and centralized government.
What We Are Reading:
Los Angeles
By Samantha HillAlex Ross writes about “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile.” Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, found refuge in Los Angeles during the war years, and turned the city into “the capital of German literature in exile.”
Lisbon
By Samantha HillHannah Arendt Center NEH fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams write about his travels in Lisbon, Portugal, reflecting on Hannah Arendt’s own time there for three months in 1941, as she fled Nazi-occupied France. Williams observes that “According to legend, it was Odysseus himself who, during his meandering trip around the Mediterranean and past the Pillars of Hercules—guided by a thunderbolt from Zeus—founded Olisipo...
What We Are Reading:
Longyearbyen
By Roger BerkowitzWe are all learning about the year 1918 when the last influenza pandemic swept across the world leaving millions dead in its wake. Most of all we have learned the difference in the impact of the flu in Philadelphia, where rallies and crowds were allowed, and in St. Louis, where public health officials banned such gatherings. But there are other lessons to learn from the last great viral pandemic.
From Our Members:
A Necessary Element in the Solution of Our Existential Problems.
By Howard GoldsonI would like to share an ancient wisdom story still told by the indigenous peoples of North America as it has been for over a thousand years. It so happened that on a particular day, a day like most other days, the hunters returned to the village without a single deer for food. Not only were they unable to kill a deer, in fact they had not seen a single deer during the entire day.
When Philosophers Are Blinded By Theory
By Roger BerkowitzThe European Journal of Psychoanalysis has published a symposium “Coronavirus and Philosophers.” It begins with an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish about the quarantine of a town during the plague in the 17th century.