New & Noteworthy
The Origins of Arendt
Hannah Arendt was the first American and the first woman to win the Sonning Prize, which she received in Copenhagen in 1975 for her contribution to European civilization. What an irony, she said, for a Jewish woman arrested and rendered stateless by Germany and put in a detention camp in France to be recognized for her contributions to the European world that had spat her out. Arendt wondered why someone “who is neither a public figure nor has the ambition to become one” would be chosen for such an honor.
For someone who so prized her privacy, Arendt’s contemporary renown is unexpected — Isaiah Berlin dismissed her as an overrated journalist who would quickly be forgotten. How wrong he was. She is the subject of numerous documentaries and a popular 2013 biopic, streets are named after her, and her quotable insights — both real and fake — fly around the internet. For over 40 years, the standard intellectual biography has been Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s doctoral student at the New School. Arendt’s circle granted Young-Bruehl access to Arendt’s oldest friends as well as intimates from her New York circle, including Mary McCarthy. As Young-Bruehl explained, she told Arendt’s life as Arendt herself experienced it: as a stateless Jewish refugee who made it to the United States, became known at 45 years of age for The Origins of Totalitarianism, and became controversial after her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Young-Bruehl also revealed certain secrets: for example, that Arendt had an affair with her professor Martin Heidegger. For Love of the World won the Alfred Harcourt Prize for Biography in 1983.
Young-Bruehl’s work spawned a litter of books about Arendt and her life. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World turns to Arendt as a guide for dark times. Samantha Rose Hill’s Hannah Arendt attends to her poetry and friendships. Ken Krimstein’s The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt renders her life as a graphic adventure in thinking. They do not replace Young-Bruehl so much as orbit around her. Each adds a new frame, but the life inside is the story made canonical in For Love of the World. Now, for the first time since 1982, a biography of Arendt claims to have broken new ground. Thomas Meyer, a German intellectual historian who has written on German-Jewish thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer and Leo Strauss, has published Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind. The first question to ask is: Why a new biography?
Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times with Roger Berkowitz
This talk by Roger Berkowitz was delivered on Thursday, October 16th, at the Hannah Arendt Center's 17th annual fall conference on JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times at Bard College. With an introduction by Deirdre D'Albertis, the Vice President and Dean of Bard College.
De Gruyter Conversations, Hannah Arendt in the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Roger Berkowitz
In times of political instability, readers have repeatedly turned to Hannah Arendt, more often for clarity than for comfort. Her work resurfaces whenever democratic norms begin to erode, insisting on the importance of learning how to think when familiar categories collapse. That task feels newly urgent today.
Few contemporary scholars have done more to sustain this conversation than Roger Berkowitz, founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, New York, an international forum for Arendt scholarship and that brings her ideas into direct conversation with the crises of the present.
Enrico Mayor Podcast, Episode 18: How Elites Lost America: The Bargain That Broke Democracy
Roger Berkowitz join Enrico Mayor to discuss why today’s “left vs right” chaos is really a class revolt of the “virtuals” vs the “reals” (and how Arendt helps us rebuild common sense).
Hannah Arendt and Authoritarianism with Roger Berkowitz
Roger Berkowitz joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career as Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights at Bard College, founding the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and writing about the crisis of democracy and free speech.
SRF News —10 vor 10 vom (24.02.2026): Interview with Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt and Truth in U.S. Politics
News story from SRF program 10 vor 10 (aired 24.03.2026) featuring an interview with Roger Berkowitz conducted by U.S. correspondent Pascal Weber. The discussion explores the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s ideas, particularly her reflections on truth and its erosion, in the context of current American politics. The segment forms part of a broader news feature marking the first year of Donald Trump’s second term in office.
Sometimes We Have to Choose Humanity Over Justice
Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt, world alienation, and why we need friendships in which we can tell inappropriate jokes
Hannah Arendt and the meaning of friendship: an interview with Roger Berkowitz
One of the most delicate and profound threads in Hannah Arendt’s thought concerns friendship. Arendt regarded friendship as the foundation of both ethical and political life: a relationship that allows individuals to appear before one another as free and distinct beings. In contrast to love, which fuses two people into one, friendship preserves independence while cultivating respect and trust over time. We asked Roger Berkowitz, an American scholar fascinated by Hannah Arendt, to shed light on her understanding of friendship.
Learning to Think Again
Hannah Arendt warned that real thinking demands courage and solitude. In an age of algorithms, outrage, and fear of speaking out, Roger Berkowitz shows why her voice is more urgent than ever and considers whether Arendt would succeed as an influencer today.
Hannah Arendt taught us that civil disobedience is essential to American democracy
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.
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…”
The Bulletin, Episode 174: The Politics of Tyranny with Roger Berkowitz
The Bulletin starts the week with headline commentary and a conversation with Roger Berkowitz.
The Revolution Against Legitimacy
To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power
Chapter 8: Prejudice and Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Prejudice, Racism, and Politics
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.
Roger Berkowitz’s TEDx talk, Speak Your Mind: Why Free Speech and Listening Matter
Roger’s TEDxBard College talk “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.”
The Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought
I am thrilled to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen.
This annual award was created to honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions. The Hannah Arendt Award is a public prize, and therefore not based solely on academic achievement. It is funded by both the state government of Bremen and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen. The prize is endowed with €10000 and is awarded by an international jury.