About Roger
Roger Berkowitz is founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he teaches Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights.
Roger teaches a weekly online reading group on Arendt, hosts the podcast Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz, and is a regular panelist on WAMC’s The Roundtable, the NPR affiliate in Albany, NY, and hosts For the Love of the World on Radio Kingston. He writes the weekly Amor Mundi newsletter, edits the annual HA: The Yearbook of the Arendt Center, and hosts many public events including the annual Arendt Forum.
Roger's latest book is A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, just out from Yale University Press.
He is the author of The Gift of Science (Harvard), past editor of the series Just Ideas (Fordham), and co-editor of the series “Thinking With Arendt” (De Gruyter). His edited volumes include Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism (De Gruyter), The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology and the Human Condition (Black Rose Books), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch. For Library of America, he wrote the introductions to On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt and the forthcoming On Totalitarianism.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, Salmagundi, Philosophie Magazine, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The National Review, and many other publications.
Berkowitz is the recipient of the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and Con-solatio’s 2024 Compassion Prize.
Roger’s Books
A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World
A bold rethinking of politics through Hannah Arendt’s life and thought, arguing that friendship—not truth—is the fragile but necessary foundation of democratic life
A World We Share sounds the warning that politics cannot be saved by truth alone. Against a tradition that elevates truth above all else, Roger Berkowitz draws on the life and thought of Hannah Arendt to argue that a politics governed by an objective ideal of truth becomes cruel, coercive, and ultimately anti-political. Friendship—grounded in dialogue, respect, and plurality—offers a more human political bond.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was known to possess a “genius for friendship.” A Jew in Nazi Germany, an exile in Paris and New York, and an uncompromising critic of postwar orthodoxies, she survived and flourished through friendships that were intellectually intense, complicated, and morally demanding. Her tribe of outsiders included thinkers as disparate as Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas, Mary McCarthy, Gershom Scholem, Heinrich Blücher, and Martin Heidegger.
This book explores how these friendships shaped Arendt’s political thinking. Berkowitz weaves Arendt’s life, thought, and friendships into a powerful meditation on our present moment. In an age of mass loneliness, ideological certainty, and civic breakdown, A World We Share connects democracy not to consensus or moral purity but to our capacity to maintain relationships with others we do not agree with—and cannot fully understand. Berkowitz argues that our political crisis is actually founded in a crisis of friendship. Only by nurturing private and also public friendships can we reimagine a truly democratic politics.
Available directly from Yale University Press or through major retailers such as Amazon.
HA: The Yearbook of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Volume 14: Joy
How can we experience joy in dark times, and what does it mean to truly love the world amidst suffering, injustice, and uncertainty? This volume, based on the Hannah Arendt Center’s 17th annual fall conference, explores joy as a complex and vital force. Drawing on philosophy, literature, the arts, and lived experience, contributors examine how joy differs from happiness, how it can foster resilience, and how it connects us to meaning beyond ourselves. Engaging with Arendt’s concept of Amor Mundi, the book offers a rigorous, timely exploration of joy as both ethical and existential practice, providing scholars and students with new insights into human flourishing and the cultivation of hope in fractured times.
Available directly from De Gruyter Brill.
“If… the machine of government… requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Dissent implies consent, and is the hallmark of free government; one who knows that he may dissent knows that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.”— Hannah Arendt
Published in 2024, On Civil Disobedience is available now at your local bookstore or preferred retailer.
The Gift of Science
New & Noteworthy
The World in Time, Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz
On this episode of the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Roger Berkowitz about the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays titled “Civil Disobedience,” one by Arendt and the other by Thoreau, recently collected in a volume he edited. Their conversation explores the writers’ differences, the political upheavals that shaped their work, and the lessons their ideas hold for today.
“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny. In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people so long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different…”
Roger Berkowitz’s TEDx talk, Speak Your Mind: Why Free Speech and Listening Matter
Presented at TEDxBard College, June 2025.
The TEDx Talks description of Roger’s TEDxBard College talk notes that it “argues that democracy thrives on open dialogue and the exchange of differing viewpoints, rather than a commitment to facts or to truth. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s philosophy, he emphasizes that politics is about persuasion, understanding, and civic friendship—where even those who disagree engage in meaningful conversation to build a common world together.”
Hannah Arendt taught us that civil disobedience is essential to American democracy
Published on PBS, July 2025.
“Scholar Roger Berkowitz shares how Hannah Arendt saw civil disobedience as a collective and political act that renews democracy by holding power accountable to justice and constitutional principles.”
Chapter 8: Prejudice and Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Prejudice, Racism, and Politics
Published in Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024)
Roger Berkowitz is a contributor to Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024), which brings Arendt’s ideas into conversation with Caribbean political thought, Africana philosophy, and existential phenomenology.
