Amor Mundi

The New Aristocrats

By Roger Berkowitz
Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic rehearses the truth that the top one percent of Americans are villains and the bottom 99 percent are the good guys. The reality, he argues, is more complicated. Stewart divides us instead into three classes. There is the top 0.1 percent who are masters of the universe and the bottom 90 percent who are losing out in a race to the bottom. In between is the top 9.9 percent who Stewart calls “the new aristocrats.”  While it is easy to claim to be part of the 99%, many who do so are part of this new aristocracy who Stewart argues are “accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”

Leadership and Academic Freedom

Roger Berkowitz writes about the Wall Street Journal's coverage of strong leadership and engaged debate at Bard College.

Taking White Interests Seriously?

By Roger Berkowitz
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker  interviews Eric Kauffman about his new book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Kauffman’s book looks analyzes a double insight...

A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux

By Kazue Koishikawa
Jacques Taminiaux, professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Louvain and Boston College, passed away on May 7^th, 2019 at the age of 90 years.  As those familiar with continental philosophy know, he left a tremendous legacy in the field of phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt, and more.

Diversity Index

By Samantha Hill
Thomas Chatterton Williams responds to the SATs new adversity index which will factor in social conditions like neighborhood and crime rates. Chatterton Williams argues that this index is a Band-Aid solution that will not address the structural inequalities that students face. He writes...

A Disjunctive or  Disruptive President?

By Roger Berkowitz
Jack Balkin of Yale Law School recently described Donald Trump as a disjunctive president. Using a model developed by Stephen Skowroneck, Balkin argues that Trump represents the “last gasp of the vanishing Reagan era that began in 1980.” He writes...

Not All Populisms Are the Same

By Samantha Hill
Writing for the Boston Review, Jason Frank argues that we should reassess the popular use of the term populism to describe a wide range of emergent illiberal political regimes from Orban’s Hungary to Trump’s United States.

Friends of Academia

By Roger Berkowitz
Randall Kennedy writes that all “friends of academia” must sound the alarm in response to Harvard University’s decision to remove Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as Faculty Dean’s of the undergraduate college’s Winthrop House.

Why Arendt Matters:
David Brin

Why Arendt Matters is a series of short video interviews with prominent writers and thinkers. This week, we replay an episode with David Brin, science fiction writer and futurist.