Amor Mundi

What We Are Reading:
Longyearbyen

By Roger Berkowitz
We 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.

Review: Arendt on the Political

David Arndt’s Arendt on the Political is an account of Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics. Instead of understanding politics from a philosophical perspective, we should choose to understand what the “nontheoretical forms of thought that prevail in politics,” tell us. He asks us to largely bracket political theorizing and come down from the realm of philosophy to consider the world of action.

Political Hobbyism

By Roger Berkowitz
Eitan Hersh argues that college-educated voters only think they are engaged in politics, while what “they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.” When college-educated voters donate online, follow the polls, and become fans of a candidate, they are less doing politics than participating in a spectator sport as spectators. And these hobbyists, Hersh writes, are hurting American politics. 

The Shared World of Adversaries 
 

Nikita Nelin shares observations and more from the HAC's 11th Annual Conference, "Citizenship and Civil Disobedience." this piece was originally published in print in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, Vol. VII

The Prejudices of Intellectualism

By Roger Berkowitz
In an essay on Hannah Arendt in a series on the Great Thinkers, Finn Bowring rightly focuses on Arendt’s worry about the power of intellectual elites. At home in abstraction and theories, intellectuals have an uncanny ability to lose themselves in flights of fancy and reject or deny the facts of this world. The philosophical temptation is to live amongst logically coherent fictions and deny those real facts that frustrate their beautiful forms.

What We Are Reading: Normal

By Samantha Hill
Writing for The Point, Becca Rothfeld critiques the work of Irish novelist Sally Rooney. Rothfeld’s analysis reflects upon the distinction between Rooney’s public persona as a writer, and what her novels reveal about this political moment. 

Member Essay: Trials and Tribe-ulations: The Dangerous Degeneracy of Trump’s Amerika

by Phil Burpee
    My people on my father’s side first came on record on this continent in the person of one Thomas Burkby who was put in the stocks in Boston in 1632 for ‘taking of strong waters whilst on watch duty’. Thomas seemingly sobered up enough to go on to have five sons from whom was spawned the misspelled diaspora that was to become Burpees.

An Office of Denaturalization is a Dangerous Step

By Roger Berkowitz
The  Department of  Justice announced last week the creation of a special section to denaturalize American citizens. The sovereign right of a nation to control who is nationalized or denationalized is unchallenged, and yet in practice the rise of mass denationalization first emerged in Europe in the 1930s.

The Far Left Joins the Far Right in a Politics of Hate

By Roger Berkowitz
This is not a post about a particular political candidate. Nellie Bowles writes about “The Dirtbag Left,” which is the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, a hate-filled brand of populist outrage that is taking over a large fringe of the progressive movement.