Most Cited
The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition
(Harvard University Press, 2005)
Moving from the scientific revolution to the 19th-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law’s claim to moral authority. He finds that the subordination of law to science actually transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends.
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics 2010)
This paper reflects on the political importance of the activity of thinking and suggests that Arendt's space of politics may not be limited to its traditional abode within the public realm. Beyond the public realm of politics, Arendt's defense of political action requires attention to the private as well. What has been overlooked amidst all the attention to Arendt's defense of the public realm of politics over and against the rise of the social is her equally strong insistence upon a vibrant and secure private realm where active thinking is possible. Arendt's private realm is a space of solitude that is the necessary prerequisite for the activity of thinking. Indeed, it is solitude that nurtures and fosters thoughtfulness and thus prepares individuals for the possibility of political action. To create a meaningful politics amidst the loneliness of the modern world, Arendt suggests, requires solitude, which she sees as the cradle of thinking.
Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
in The New York Times (2013)
The movie “Hannah Arendt,” which opened in New York in May, has unleashed emotional commentary that mirrors the fierce debate Arendt herself ignited over half a century ago, when she covered the trial of the notorious war criminal Adolf Eichmann. One of the pre-eminent political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt, who died in 1975 at the age of 69, was a Jew arrested by the German police in 1933, forced into exile and later imprisoned in an internment camp. She escaped and fled to the United States in 1941, where she wrote the seminal books “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition.” When Arendt heard that Eichmann was to be put on trial, she knew she had to attend. It would be, she wrote, her last opportunity to see a major Nazi “in the flesh.” Writing in The New Yorker, she expressed shock that Eichmann was not a monster, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Her reports for the magazine were compiled into a book,“Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” published in 1963.
Drones and the Question of “The Human”
in Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 28, Issue 2, Summer 2014 (2014)
Domino's Pizza is testing “Domicopter” drones to deliver pizzas, which will compete with Taco Bell's “Tacocopter” drones. Not to be outdone, Amazon is working on an army of delivery drones that will cut out the postal service. In Denmark, farmers use drones to inspect fields for the appearance of harmful weeds, which reduces herbicide use as the drones directly apply pesticides only where it is needed. Environmentalists send drones into glacial caves or into deep waters, gathering data that would be too dangerous or expensive for human scientists to procure. Federal Express dreams of pilotless aerial and terrestrial drones that will transport goods more cheaply, reliably, and safely than vehicles operated by humans. Human rights activists deploy drones over conflict zones, intelligently searching for and documenting abuses for both rhetorical and legal purposes. Aid agencies send unmanned drones to villages deep in jungles or behind enemy lines, maneuvering hazardous terrain to bring food and supplies to endangered populations. Medical researchers are experimenting with injecting drone blood cells into humans that can mimic good cholesterol carriers or identify and neutralize cancerous cells. Parents in Vermont are using flying drones to accompany children to school, giving a whole new meaning to helicopter parenting. And Pilobolus, a New York dance company, has choreographed a dance in which drones and humans engage each other in the most human of acts: the creation of art.
in Theory & Event, Volume 14, Issue 1 (2011)
On her first return visit to Germany in 1950, Hannah Arendt went walking in the Black Forest with Martin Heidegger. They discussed revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Upon her return to New York, Arendt began her diary of thoughts, her Denktagebuch. The first seven pages of Arendt’s Denktagebuch argue that reconciliation—and not revenge or forgiveness—is an essential example of political judgment. The connection between reconciliation and judgment means that only reconciliation, and not revenge or forgiveness, can respond to wrongs in a way that fosters the political project of building and preserving a common world. This essay argues that the question—“Ought I not to reconcile myself to the world?”—is, for Arendt, the pressing political question of our age.
Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)
Roger Berkowitz reviews Hannah Arendt’s landmark “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” framing the book within the context of contemporary politics.
Parables of Revenge and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River
in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2005)
This paper offers a reading of Clint Eastwood's film Mystic River. Mystic River differs from archetypal Hollywood revenge movies in one important way: the act of revenge kills the wrong man. Moreover, instead of abandoning its wayward avenger, the movie strives to defend or at least to understand the act of wrongful vengeance as the loving act of a kingly father. To explore the connection between trauma, masculinity, and revenge, the paper follows the stories of the film's three male protagonists. Dave is defeated by his boyhood trauma and never recovers. Jimmy, the film's avenger, forcefully resists the dehumanizing power of the loss of his daughter by taking revenge. Sean neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean –when confronted by his wife's silent departure and with the fact of Jimmy's vengeance –responds by admitting his vulnerability. An upright man struggling to balance his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, Sean's willingness to accept his human finitude is set against Jimmy's rebellious insistence on his superhuman justice based on the prerogative of vengeance.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the Code of Manu, and the Art of Legislation
in The Cardozo Law Review (2003)
This essay explores the emergence of a science of law through a close reading of Nietzsche’s writings on law and art. Against the belief that scientific truth leads to justice, Nietzsche affirms the necessity of illusion and error. The essay argues that Nietzsche’s reconceptualization of law as a work of art opens the possibility of a non-positivist idea of law beyond science, morality, and politics.
From Justice to Justification: An Alternative Genealogy of Positive Law
in UC Irvine Law Review (2011)
The paper traces the genealogy of positive law from its historical roots in legal positivism, primarily through the works of thinkers like Austin and Leibniz. It argues that legal positivism separates law from moral norms, establishing it as a social fact that reflects the will of a sovereign rather than an inherent moral authority. The exploration delves into how this shift influences contemporary understandings of law and justice, ultimately questioning the divine rationality that once underpinned legal authority and examining the implications of this transformation for future juridical thought.
The Singularity and the Human Condition
in Philosophy Today (2018)
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the Modern Age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being. The transformation Arendt describes is the loss of our human plurality to a technological singularity. She argues, however, that we can choose to hold on to our humanity if persist in thinking, and thus preserve our human spontaneity and freedom.
in The Good Society (2014)
A review of Betina Stangneths’s Eichman Before Jerusalem: the Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.
Disorderly Differences: Recognition, Accommodation, and American Law
in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
In January 1992, People magazine ran a story entitled "Die, My Daughter, Die!"' describing the murder of sixteen-year-old Tina Isa, the daughter of Zein and Maria Isa, Palestinians who emigrated with their seven children to the United States from the West Bank in 1985. Opposite a half-page photo of Zein in a bloodstained sweater, the People article explained that he had hoped to arrange a marriage for Tina, as he had for her three older sisters. He wanted Tina to return to his native village and marry a relative of one of his sons-in-law. Tina resented and resisted her father's plans concerning her marriage and defied the strict, traditional values of her parents by taking a job and dating an African-American schoolmate. As a result, Tina and her father had frequent fights during which he warned her about her "offensive" behavior (e.g., allowing herself to be seen in public with her boyfriend) and threatened to vindicate the family's damaged honor. On the night of Tina's death, Zein again confronted her and accused her of shaming the family by virtue of her allegedly promiscuous behavior. Then, while Tina's mother held her down, Zein stabbed Tina to death with a seven-inch knife. Charged with first-degree murder, the Isas presented a "cultural defense." They claimed that they should not be found guilty since what they did to Tina would not have been treated as a serious crime in their homeland. They maintained that they were obeying the law as they (and Tina) knew and understood it, and that Tina's disobedience called for her punishment. The Isas' cultural defense failed, as it generally does, and they were each convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.