Amor Mundi

What We're Reading: Antisemitism & Free Speech 

By Samantha Hill
Ken Stern, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, writes about Donald Trump’s Executive Order that was signed this week. Stern was responsible for drafting the working definition of antisemitism used in Trump’s order when he worked for the American Jewish Committee, and is now worried that it is being used to silence free speech on college campuses.

A Letter from Founder and Academic Director Roger Berkowitz

The work we do at the Hannah Arendt Center depends on the support of our members. From our diverse group of student and senior fellows to our annual conference, Amor Mundi to the HA Journal, your contributions are vital and deeply appreciated. During this holiday season, we hope you will consider helping us continue to foster bold and provocative events, publications, and academics in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.

America: What Are We Fighting For?

By Roger Berkowitz
The Hannah Arendt Center Conference “The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideas Worth Fighting For?” posed a simple yet controversial question: Is America an exceptional country? In other words, Is there an American Idea? And if yes, what is the idea on which America is founded? Those of us who care about the collective American project— the idea of building a common constitutional democracy—have an imperative to ask: What is...

On Walter Benjamin’s Legacy: A Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno

THE 1967 CORRESPONDENCE between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno followed Walter Benjamin’s death by nearly 30 years. The acrimony that grew between Arendt and Adorno during the intervening decades is present in these letters. Who had the right, ethically and intellectually, to edit and publish Benjamin’s work?  — Susan H. Gillespie and Samantha Rose Hill write in the L.A. Review of Books.

What We're Reading: Arendt on the Political 

By Samantha Hill
In an Interview with the Cambridge blog fifteen eightyfour, David Arndt discusses his new book Arendt on the Political. The book addresses the questions of politics and the political sphere while thinking about the underlying problems of democratic politics. 

Walter Benjamin's Last Work

WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. — Samantha Hill writes this week for the L.A. Review of Books

Roger Berkowitz on the Hannah Arendt Center

Roger Berkowitz, academic director and founder of the Hannah Arendt Center discusses the Center's origins and continuing mission in Rural Intelligence.

Below the Surface.

Underlying beliefs that most of us share

By David Brin
Take the lesson of the Greatest Generation. Our Roosevelt-era parents and grandparents overcame a mélange of would-be plutocrats, populist tyrants and communist commissars to craft a social contract that unleashed a confident, burgeoning middle class, spectacular universities and science, vast infrastructure and entrepreneurship — plus a too-slow but ponderously-growing momentum toward justice.

Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience: Leaks in the Era of Trump and the Deep State

By Allison Stanger

Writing in the March–April 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, the political philosopher Michael Walzer, whom some of you may know as the author of Just and Unjust Wars, identified several types of leaks and whistleblowing and explored their ethical implications. Walzer defined whistleblowing as conveying what a person “believes to be immoral or illegal conduct to bureaucratic superiors or to the public,” and he implied that there was no way to make...