Selected Press & Reviews
in The New Yorker
Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
Hannah Arendt never developed a general theory of friendship, yet the concept, as this study shows, anchors much of her political thought. Combining Arendt’s written reflections with portraits of her relationships, Berkowitz offers a model of mutual understanding for our era of epidemic loneliness and polarization. For Arendt, friendship required only respect, duration, and ongoing conversation; ideological agreement wasn’t necessary, as her own friendships bore out. Her correspondence records heated debates on contentious issues, including Zionism, and it’s these encounters that give the book its force, revealing the effort needed to maintain intimacy across profound differences.
L’amitié, une ressource à l’ère de Donald Trump ?
in Philosophie Magazine
À la veille des élections américaines de mi-mandat (« midterms »), le politologue Roger Berkowitz, qui vient de signer l’essai A World We Share (« Un monde en partage »), éclaire le climat qui règne aux États-Unis et voit dans la culture de l’amitié un remède démocratique.
“His recommendations may help us restore civility to our discourse and strengthen our social bonds.”
— Former Congressman Chris Gibson
“This is the central insight of A World We Share: As admirable as it is to be dedicated to what you believe is true, it can be more noble to know when to favor loyalty, generosity, and grace.”
—Suzannah Murawski, The Dispatch
“It’s a loving treatment of something that Berkowitz is one of the country’s foremost experts on, written at a time when he’s seeing the collegiality and good faith of academia melt away. It’s a teacherly book… because he’s trying to remind faculty and students alike about the importance of mutual respect and the ability to disagree while still respecting each other and showing love and friendship for each other. And to that extent I’m totally down with it.”
—Jonah Goldberg
“Wow! What a provocative book on friendship! Most books about friendship stay on one shelf. They end up staying in a particular section on a book shelf. Some are politics. others, about finding your tribe. Others about intimacy. Still others about spiritual friendship. In my reading, Roger Berkowitz’s A World We Share refuses to stay put. It refuses to put friendship in this box or that box. Whether or not Arendt or Berkowitz would agree with me (and I don't need them to) this book takes a deep dive into friendship, eros, intimacy, and politics together. Simultaneously deep and yet, accessible to a broad spectrum of readers.
As Berkowitz shows, Arendt didn't fit in this box or that. Friendship was one of her chief passions. Passion is typically not typically linked with friendship. I have read many books on friendship written by philosophers, therapists, theologians, and other deep thinkers. Berkowitz takes us into her friendships. And what friendships! In my limited knowledge of Arendt before this book, I would have said Arendt keeps passion out of friendships and politics. I don’t need Arendt to agree with me to be profoundly moved by her. In my intimate reading of Arendt in this book, several of her friendships were deeply intimate, passionate, and affectionate.
What happens to our most cherished theories of friendship when we bring them face-to-face with people whose moral, political, or religious convictions we find profoundly troubling? For sure, there are some great books on friendships exploring different personalities, temperaments, passions, and interests. There are remarkably rich friendship theories highlighting attachment, vulnerabilities, shared values, emotional safety, and mutual flourishing. But as a common ground for forging a shared world? You can’t force a friendship across a deep divide. And you can’t force a new kind of intimacy into being. Both happen only where two people are free, free to come close, free to remain different, free even to walk away. Coercion can produce compliance, alliance, even a kind of closeness. It can’t produce friendship.
Read this book if you’ve lost a friend over politics, if you’re afraid you might, or if you’ve ever been told you have to pick a box. Friendship, it turns out, is bigger, riskier, and more passionate than any of them.”
— Dan Brennan