On Friendship
A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World
forthcoming from Yale University Press (2026)
Hannah Arendt and the meaning of friendship: an interview with Roger Berkowitz
from re/visions, issue 6: friendship (2025)
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.
Montez Press Radio: The Politics of Friendship with Uday Mehta | Bonus Episode
from Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz (2025)
This week we're sharing a recording from our friends at Montez Press Radio, an experimental broadcasting and performance platform founded in 2018 with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio. In the first of their new series, Love Thy Network, one of three excellent new segments on friendship, gossip, and public discourse, Roger Berkowitz and Uday Mehta, a scholar of political philosophy, engage with Hannah Arendt's insights on the intersection of friendship and politics.
Arendt, known for her "genius for friendship," believed that true friendship is where we reveal both our joys and our sorrows, and where our hearts are open, untouched by the demands of the world. The conversation explores the relevance of Arendt’s thoughts on friendship as a key political force and its importance in creating a 'unity of a plurality.' Berkowitz and Mehta discuss Arendt’s belief that true politics is driven by conversation and mutual respect rather than agreement on truth, and reflect on the crisis of friendship and polarization in contemporary society. They also discuss Berkowitz's upcoming book on friendship, which examines Arendt's extensive correspondences and develops a theory of how friendships can sustain political communities. And they look ahead to the Center's upcoming annual conference on JOY and its vital role in facing dark times.
The Humanity of Friendship and the Orgy of Truthtelling
in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, Volume XII (2024)
Friendship and Politics: Roger Berkowitz / Student Poetry Reading: Zarina Dawlat
from Friendship and Politics: The 15th Annual HAC Fall Conference (2023)
in Amor Mundi (2023)
At the end of my talk introducing the Friendship and Politics conference last week, I posed a simple question: Can an Israeli and a Gazan be friends? Is it even conceivable at this point that Israelis can come to talk to and respect a Gazan who votes for and defends Hamas, a movement that for decades has sought the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and who supports the October 7th flood of bacchanalian torture and murder that Hamas terrorists unleashed on Israeli civilians? is it at all possible that a Gazan can respect an Israeli who defends the settlements that displace Palestinians, who insists that Israel is a Jewish state, who demands security on the backs of an oppressive security state, and who has unleashed a fury of destruction that will lead inevitably to the murder of thousands and thousands of civilians?
Arendt elevates friendship over justice and truth, arguing that friendship humanizes the world more so than does the pursuit of justice. She expresses her preference for friendship over truth in a citation from Cicero who writes: "I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than to hold true views with his opponents." Given the choice between a so-called truth, a claim for justice and following one's friend, the choice is clear. But, What does this mean, to prefer to go astray with one’s friends rather than to hold true views with one’s enemies?
Friendship. Politics, and Human Meaningfulness
in Amor Mundi (2023)
In the wake of the Alpine Fellowship on Human Flourishing in Fjallnas, Sweden last week, Iʼve been reading Lisa Millerʼs book The Awakened Brain. Miller makes what my daughter says is an obvious argument, that mental illness and especially depression and anxiety can be prevented and also helped by having a rich spiritual and inner life. This may seem obvious to some, but it goes against the practice of modern psychotherapy that imagines the only and best way to treat mental illness is to focus on past traumas. Miller marshals scientific and experimental evidence to show, instead, that when people feel connected to others, when their lives have purpose and meaning, and when they believe in a world of meaning beyond themselves, they are less likely to suffer mental illness.