Amor Mundi

Reading Arendt in the Era of #MeToo

By Kate Bermingham
More often than I would like, my work on Hannah Arendt and my work as a feminist theorist and activist seem to pull in different directions. I sometimes find myself frustrated not only by Arendt’s relative silence on questions of gender and her occasional sexist remarks (among other things, she once remarked that it was unbecoming for women to occupy positions of authority), but also, like many feminist readers before me...

What We're Reading: Standing On His Own

By Roger Berkowitz
George Packer won the 2010 Hitchens Prize given annually in honor of Christopher Hitchens. In his acceptance speech, Packer explores why it is highly unlikely that another writer like Hitchens might emerge in our time. “Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?...

Oikophilia

By Roger Berkowitz
Roger Scruton died earlier this month. In obituaries, he was frequently called a conservative philosopher. The Guardian wrote that he “was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual’ who “dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.”

What We're Reading: A Monumental Effort

By Roger Berkowitz

Ulrich Baer writes that three new sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker offer a new and important way to engage the debates about what to do with historically meaningful but offensive monuments. 

Whistleblowers

By Roger Berkowitz
This piece was originally published October 27, 2019.
It is still too early to draw the lesson of the whistleblower who came forth this month to report that President Donald Trump has been running a covert and shadow foreign policy aimed at using United States foreign aid to further his personal and political aims.

Journal Feature: The Destiny of Freedom

This essay was oringally published in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.

How Education Divides Us

By Roger Berkowitz
Our societies are coming apart. This is true not only in the United States, but also in Europe and around the world. As technological bubbles enable alternate factual universes, we witness a growing divide amongst people that threatens to undo the common sense that unites us as citizens.

What We're Reading: Incoherence

From Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about the need to embrace incoherence against this political moment, which has fallen toward ideological imperatives. Citing Arendt, Williams argues: 

The Need for Analogy 

Peter E. Gordon writes a defense of historical analogy in the New York Review of Books. Gordon situates his considered argument against the backdrop of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issuing a blanket statement, refusing historical comparison to the Holocaust in response to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez calling the detention camps on the U.S. boarder “concentration camps” last year. — Samantha Hill