The HA Journal

Our annual publication presents new scholarship on Hannah Arendt.

The HA Journal embodies the desire to remain true to Arendt’s irreverent, provocative, and vibrant spirit. As such, we publish essays that provoke, surprise, and enlighten as they speak to and about the common world.

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Use our Journal Order Form to choose our current volume or choose from past volumes. Copies are $35/ea. International orders are $45.

Membership to the Hannah Arendt Center of $100 or more includes a a copy of the most current HA Journal and our newly designed tote bag!

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HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center Vol. XII

Volume XII of the Hannah Arendt Journal delves into the intricate relationship between friendship and politics, offering fresh perspectives on how personal bonds can influence and shape political landscapes. In an era of polarized discourse and distrust, this volume explores whether friendship can counterbalance partisanship, fostering dialogue and understanding across ideological divides.
The contributors include a diverse array of scholars, thinkers, writers, and practitioners, such as Leon Botstein, Roger Berkowitz, Niobe Way, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anne Norton, and Schuyler Playford. The journal also features creative contributions by Wyatt Mason and Daniel Mason, as well as in-depth analyses of specific friendships by Marie Luise Knott, Alex Cain, Barbara von Bechtolsheim, and Marion Detjen. Additionally, several essays examine correspondences related to Hannah Arendt by Thomas Wild, Jana Schmidt, Thomas Bartscherer, and Ann Lauterbach. Marisa Franco and Esther Perel discuss the power and broader implications of friendship, while Michael Weinman explores Claudia Baracchi’s work on the future of friendship as an ancient gift. The fiction section includes a poem by Jonathan Asiedu and a short story by Nick Franceschi, both Bard College students.
The essays, conversations, and creative pieces in this volume collectively explore the multifaceted dimensions of friendship within political contexts, offering rich and varied perspectives on how personal relationships can influence and reflect broader societal dynamics.

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Past Volumes

Volume XI

Volume XI of the Journal explores the power of rage and social media in today’s world. The flip-flopping, nonscientific nature of our collective responses to travel bans, vaccines, masks, and lockdowns make clear that public discourse is driven by emotions rather than reason.

Volume XI
At a moment when materially comfortable societies are teetering and the visceral attraction of tribalism is rising all around us, we must ask how our liberal democracies can survive and thrive amidst intensifying partisanship and the decline of public reason. The Journal includes contributions by Myisha Cherry, William Davies, and Pankaj Mishra who confront the apparent triumph of rage-fueled provocation over reasoned dialogue in contemporary American politics. Volume XI also includes thoughtful talks from the past year by Catherine Liu and the artist known as V and an essay based on archival research in the Arendt Library by our visiting fellow Anna Aguiro on Arendt’s concept of natality. This issue marks the passing of eminent Arendt scholar and editor Ursula Ludz (1936-2022) with a tribute by her friends, collaborator, and readers Jerome Kohn, Ingeborg Nordmann, Wolfgang Heuer, Antonia Grunenberg, Marie Luise Knott, Patchen Markell, Thomas Wild, Jana Schmidt, Alexander R. Bazelow, and Roger Berkowitz.
Volume X

Volume X of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College focuses on how we can reinvigorate democracy. The journal includes seven essays that were originally given as talks at the Arendt Center's 2021 Conference, Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.

Volume X
Essays by David Van Reybrouck, Schmuel Lederman, Michael MacKenzie, Hollie Russon Gilman, and Roger Berkowitz look specifically at citizen assemblies and deliberative models of democratic governance as new tools with which to bring new energy to modern democracy. Tracy Strong and James Barry Jr. situate modern democratic strategies within a larger history of democrat thinking in the United States. This volume of HA also includes an essay by Matthew Longo on Hannah Arendt as a storyteller and reviews of Samantha Hill's biography Hannah Arendt ( by Shaan Sachdev) and Marie Luise Knott's meditation on Arendt's thinking about race 370 Riverside Drive, 730 Riverside Drive: Hannah Arendt und Ralph Ellison (by Roger Berkowitz).

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Volume IX

Volume IX of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College offers space for a discussion that was impossible to have in person in 2020/21. Prompted by the Caribbean Marxist scholar C. L. R. James’ response to Hannah Arendt in a lecture series from 1960, the volume gathers a number of responses-to-the-response in a virtual debate that traverses historical and ideological divides.

Volume IX
Beginning with Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts’ take on the relationship between the two thinkers and their views on the Hungarian Revolution, critics Cameron Cook, Angela Maione, Nikita Nelin, William Paris and Allison Stanger reflect on revolution, postcolonial politics, violence and Arendt’s critique of Marxism. The Journal features a trenchant exchange on the possibility of social change in a pandemic between Roger Berkowitz, postdoctoral fellow Chiara Ricciardone and activist Micah White and book reviews by Dawn Herrera and H. L. Onstad. Also included are two original essays on the “thinking activity” in Arendt and Kant by Yasemin Sari and on the ethics of phenomenology by Clara Carrillo Fernández.
Volume VIII

Volume VIII of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College includes essays by Eric Ward, John McWhorter, Etienne Balibar, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Marc Weitzmann, and others from the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2019 annual conference, “Racism and Antisemitism.”
Volume VII

Volume 7 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College features talks given at the 2018 Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Citizenship and Civil Disobedience.”
Volume VI

Volume VI of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center includes essays from our 2017 conference: “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times.”

Volume VI
This year’s conference marked the 10th anniversary of the Hannah Arendt Center. The essays by Micah White, Zephyr Teachout, Yascha Mounk, Linda Zerilli, Walter Russell Mead, Roger Berkowitz, Marc Jongen, and Ian Buruma approach the global rebellion against liberal democracy from plural political and experiential viewpoints. Additionally, this volume includes an open letter which was penned against the Arendt Center, addressing the invitation of Marc Jongen, along with a number of public responses that followed. Reflecting on the concept of natality in Hannah Arendt’s writing, Volume 6 also features essays by Drucilla Cornell, Lori Marso, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek on the question: Is the Private Political?
Volume V

Volume 5 offers a collection of essays designed to think provocatively on how we speak about the most difficult questions that divide us and why it is important to do so.

Volume V
These essays were originally given as talks at the Arendt Center’s October 2016 conference “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex, and Religion" by noted scholars and humanists including Göran Adamson, Roger Berkowitz, William Deresiewicz, Mary Gaitskill, Janet Halley, Erica Hunt, Greg Lukianoff, Uday Mehta, Deroy Murdock, and Judith Shulevitz. Taken together these essays begin a project of speaking about issues that are too often passed over in awkward silence. Additionally, this volume includes three essays on Donald J. Trump's election as President of the United States. In the aftermath of the election, we asked leading thinkers to think about Trump's victory in light of Arendt's writings. These essays by Roger Berkowitz, Leon Botstein, and Marianne Constable are attempts to do just that. Finally, Volume 5 of HA republishes “Useless Freedom,” an essay by Mary McCarthy adapted from a speech first given at Bard College in 1987. Collectively, these essays begin to find a language through which a new and more plural conversation on race, sex, and religion might spring forth.
Volume IV

Volume 4 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College draws principally on talks given at the 2015 Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Does Privacy Matter?”

Volume IV
Volume 4 features contributions from Edward Snowden, Robert Litt, David Brin, Ben Wizner and Dr. Anita Allen, among others. As with the three previous issues, readers of the new issue of HA will experience the Hannah Arendt Center’s unique approach to thinking about politics today, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s bold and provocative embrace of the humanist tradition to illuminate pressing political issues.
Volume III

Volume 3 of HA is a jam-packed double issue. It includes talks and essays given at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2013 and 2014, including at two of our annual conferences, “Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis” and “The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?”

Volume III
The essays manifest the Hannah Arendt Center’s unique approach to thinking about politics today, one inspired by Hannah Arendt’s bold and provocative embrace of the humanist tradition to illuminate pressing political issues.
Volume II

Volume II includes four essays based on talks given at the 2012 Arendt Center Conference, “Does the President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of Political Disrepair.”
Volume I

Includes 12 essays based on talks originally given at three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences. “Human Being in an Inhuman Age” was held in 2010; “Lying and Politics” and “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts” took place in 2011 and are combined here in “Truthtelling.

The HA Journal

Journal Orders

Now Available

Past Volumes

Volume XI

Volume X

Volume IX

Volume VI

Volume V

Volume IV

Volume III