Amor Mundi

A Politics of Meaning

By Roger Berkowitz
In an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory.  For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...

The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science

An essay in Arendt Studies by Roger Berkowitz (2018) written for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) was recently republished in The Abstract Elephant, a publicly available journal.

What We're Reading: Justus Rosenberg

By Samantha Hill
Bard College Professor Justus Rosenberg has written a book about his Time in the Pyenees: Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Mann, and More, working with the Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. 

What We're Reading: George Steiner

By Samantha Hill
When Hannah Arendt went to study with Martin Heidegger, he was known as the “magician from Marbach,” because he made Plato and Aristotle come to life. As Arendt later reflected, people went to study with Heidegger to learn how to think. In an insightful and graceful essay, George Steiner takes on Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger, in a review essay of their correspondence: “The Magician in Love.”

Propaganda and Cynicism

By Roger Berkowitz
McKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.

On Constitutional Disobedience

Christopher Schmidt
In this essay I consider how reform activists use the United States Constitution as a tool of social movement mobilization. I focus in particular on situations in which activists advance a claim on the meaning of the Constitution that diverges from what the courts—and especially the court at the top of the American judicial hierarchy, the U.S. Supreme Court—say the Constitution means.

The Need to Be Right

By Roger Berkowitz
Jon Baskin in The Point identifies a disturbing tone in liberal culture. He recalls Lionel Trilling’s 1947 admission of his “deep distaste for liberal culture.” While Trilling identified with liberalism, he wrote that too often...

Winning Chess, Winning Politics

By Roger Berkowitz

Garry Kasparov argues that those who oppose President Trump from all sides need to come together to defeat him. He warns that,  “As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them.” Witnessing the rise of radicalism on all sides, he writes, “Rage...

Power, Arrest, Dispersal

By Patchen Markell
To read this line from The Human Condition in the wake of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, or in the midst of the Occupations that have radiated from Zuccotti Park across the United States and beyond, might be invigorating: aren’t both of these events expressions of power in Arendt’s sense, instances of the unpredictable human capacity to break out of the daily mire of authoritarianism or of capitalism and, acting in concert, to begin something new?