On Hannah Arendt
Sometimes We Have to Choose Humanity Over Justice
in House of Beautiful Business (2026)
Roger Berkowitz’s keynote at The PolyOpportunity Retreat, Garrison Institute, Hudson Valley, NY, April 13, 2025.
Hannah Arendt taught us that civil disobedience is essential to American democracy
in PBS American Masters (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.
in Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, (DeGruyter, 2025).
The Make America Great Again movement in the United States gives voice to a rising nationalism and tribalism we see around the world, from Modi’s India, to Putin’s Russian, Orban’s Hungary, and Netanyahu’s Israel. Against such a tribalism is the dream of a world citizenship, the cosmopolitan ideal that sees all human beings as part of one large political world. Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism is dedicated to exploring the humanity of both tribal affiliation and cosmopolitan dreams.
Volume 13 of the HA. The Yearbook of Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities centers on the compelling theme of tribalism and cosmopolitanism. Inspired by the 2024 Hannah Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics, it brings together contributions by prominent thinkers such as Sebastian Junger, Fintan O’Toole, Seyla Benhabib, Niobe Way, Leon Botstein, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and more, featuring insightful conversations and talks held at the conference, alongside in-depth essays that build on and expand on the themes of tribalism and cosmopolitanism. An illuminating anthology of texts relating to both tribalism and cosmopolitanism from Anthony Appiah, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Cicero, Emile Durkheim, Epictetus, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ibn Khaldûn, Martha Nussbaum, and more enriches the volume. The goal is to offer a broad introduction to the inquiry into the human tension between our need to belong to tribes and our aspirations to cosmopolitan humanism. Present scholarship and canonical texts are put into conversation to provide an extended sourcebook of ideas for the interested reader.
The Revolution Against Legitimacy
in Amor Mundi (2025)
“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”
— Hannah Arendt
We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today think of revolutionaries as the proletariat, and a revolution is fought in the name of equality and justice. Unlike past revolutions fought in the name of equality, Trump’s revolution is against legitimacy itself — and against the very idea that legitimacy depends on equality.
Like all revolutions, the Trump revolution thrives on violence. But unlike many revolutions of the past, violence is not a means to an end — there is no fresh vision of society, no alternative and legitimate institutions. Its aim is destruction itself: the delegitimation of elections, courts, laws, knowledge, and the very procedures that make politics possible. And beyond destruction, its second aim is simply power — the replacement of one elite with another, stripped of legitimacy, bound only by force.
Chapter 8: Prejudice and Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Prejudice, Racism, and Politics
in Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024)
Roger Berkowitz is a contributor to Creolizing Hannah Arendt, which brings Arendt’s ideas into conversation with Caribbean political thought, Africana philosophy, and existential phenomenology.
in On Civil Disobedience (2024)
More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience. Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature. This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.
The Importance of Between Past and Future & The Conquest of Space
in On Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future, Eight Proposals for Exhibition," ed. Richard Saltoun (Richard Saltoun Gallery, 2023).
On Hannah Arendt is the complete catalogue of a 14-month program of exhibitions, sonic interventions, virtual talks, and events dedicated to the writings of German-born, American political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Organized by Richard Saltoun Gallery, London between January 2021 and March 2022, the series took as its inspiration a set of themes and questions put forward in the chapters of Arendt’s 1968 book Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Each of the eight chapters: “The Modern Age,” “The Concept of History,” “What is Authority?” “What is Freedom?” “The Crisis in Education,” “The Crisis in Culture,” “Truth & Politics,” and “The Conquest of Space,” was used as a framework to compose an exhibition.
While the world has changed dramatically since Arendt published the final version of Between Past and Future in 1968, her call for thoughtful reflection
on difficult subjects remains impressively relevant today. On Hannah Arendt rediscovers these important texts and one of the most exceptional and controversial philosophers of the postwar generation. This timely new publication includes the work of twenty-two internationally renowned artists alongside essays by Arendt specialists Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Politics,Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College and Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities; Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights, University of Birmingham; and a conversation between curator Gavin Delahunty and several the exhibiting artists on the intersection of Arendt’s thought and art practice. These three texts are complemented by special contributions from some of the world’sleading philosophers, scholars, historians, and poets, including Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Martin Jay, Ken Krimstein, Ann Lauterbach, Shai Lavi and Griselda Pollock.
Lessons from Hannah Arendt on Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’
in Quillette (2022)
Fascism, communism, and transhumanism all lure us into rejecting the real human condition in favor of ideological constructs.
The Ground on Which We Stand: Hannah Arendt on Powerless, Necessary Truth
in Los Angeles Review of Books (2022)
“The truth will set you free.” The Bible says so, and even non-believers today insist on it. They are prone to saying: If the media just told people the truth about global warming, about Russia, about Trump, then the people would understand; if we only knew the truth, we would do the right thing.
But what if truth is powerless? What if truth has little or even no impact? That is the question Hannah Arendt raises in her essay “Truth and Politics,” asking: “Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent?”
Rage and Reason: Why Hypocrisy is the Political Vice of Our Times
in Amor Mundi (2022)
The Hannah Arendt Center held its annual conference this week on October 13th and 14th. The conference opened with a talk by Arendt Center Founder and Academic Director Roger Berkowitz. We publish below a transcript of the talk.
Actions That Deserve to be Remembered: Transcendence and Immortality in a Secular World
in Faith in the World: Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt (2021)
The crisis in politics today is that we live at a moment when, as W.B. Yeats said, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." The very idea of a meaningful political community is questionable. We live amidst what Carol Becker calls the "agitated now," a time where the narrative that binds the past to the present is broken. Not only in the din of war or in the chaos of catastrophe, but also in everyday life, there is an ever-present feeling "that our lives are discontinuous, that we have lost the sense of home that once anchored us to the physical world, that we have disrupted the continuity of generations (families are dispersed across the nation and the world, trying to stay connected), and that we cannot envision a path to the future." Geographically dispersed, spiritually isolated, and above all lonely and purposeless, we are today adrift and abandoned.
in Cahiers de L'Herne, Hannah Arendt (2021)
Longtemps tenue à l’écart du monde académique, l’œuvre de Hannah Arendt – désormais largement publiée et traduite – suscite aujourd’hui l’intérêt d’un nombre considérable de travaux, colloques et publications dans le monde entier. En revenant sur les principaux évènements de sa vie, ce Cahier dresse le portrait de cette « théoricienne de la politique » sans pour autant négliger les vives polémiques qui ont marqué sa carrière. Le volume rassemble des contributions qui évoquent notamment son travail majeur sur le totalitarisme, les catégories de sa pensée politique et la centralité de l’action, son insistance sur la responsabilité et le jugement ainsi que son analyse du monde moderne. Il revient sur son expérience historique et personnelle, les moments forts de sa vie et la réflexion qu’ils ont suscités en elle, en particulier sa judéité. Des extraits de correspondance (avec Judah Magnes, David Riesman, Hermann Broch, Hilde Frankel, Kurt et Helen Wolff) dévoilent par ailleurs des facettes moins connues de sa personnalité et de nombreux inédits, extraits de cours ou de conférences issus des archives de la bibliothèque du Congrès à Washington, viennent compléter l’ensemble.
Public Education: The Challenge of Educational Authority in a World Without Authority
in Hannah Arendt on Educational Thinking and Practice in Dark Times, ed. by Helen Gunter and Wayne Vick (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
This paper discusses the challenges and transformative potential of public education as articulated through the reflections of Richard Rodriguez in his memoir, "The Hunger of Memory." It explores the dichotomy between private familial identities and public citizenship, emphasizing the critical role of language in facilitating this transition. The insights highlight the need for a robust public schooling system that truly serves to cultivate a sense of public identity among students, beyond mere instruction.
in The Philosopher, vol 108 no. 2 (2020) 55-58.
Amidst the death of God, the loss of tradition, and the end of political ideals, we are left, Hannah Arendt argues in Between Past and Future, with "the ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, 'What are we fighting against' but 'What are we fighting for?'" We all know what we oppose and fight against: totalitarianism, fascism, racism, sexism, loneliness, and meaninglessness. But we are silent in the face of the challenge: What are we fighting for?
The Failing Technocratic Prejudice and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy
in The Emergence of Illiberalism edited by Michael Weinman and Boris Vormann. (Routledge, 2020).
Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Reflections on Little Rock
in “Hannah Arendt und das 20. Jahrhundert," Catalogue for a Museum Show at German Historical Museum Berlin, ed. by Monika Böll. (2020) as "Zur Kritik an Hannah Arendts »Reflections on Little Rock”
Hannah Arendt wrote "Reflections on Little Rock" in the Fall of 1957, occasioned by a picture in The New York Times. There were actually two pictures in the Times on September 4, 1957. It is widely assumed that Arendt refers to the photo of Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year old black girl being taunted by a white mob of adults after she was refused entrance to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But it is as likely that she describes the other photo, which shows Dorothy Counts, another 15-year old black girl also being harassed by a mob of white students as she and a family friend walk toward Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arendt speaks of only one photograph: "I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from a school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters." Arendt seemingly combined the two photographs in her mind's eye, describing the scene in North Carolina while attributing it to Little Rock.
A speech given at the awarding of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking, given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany.
in The Rural We (2019)
Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The Center holds Arendt's personal library and is a destination for those studying her writing. Through a number of popular conferences and events, Berkowitz uses Arendt’s words to engage challenging ideas and foster constructive discussions between people of extremely diverse backgrounds and points of view. Arendt is perhaps best known in the zeitgeist for her writing on the trial of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann, where she coined the term “the banality of evil,” but the impact of her writing on the world of politics was pervasive in her own time. For her writings on equality, race, education, feminism and more, she is derided and cheered by members of the left and right simultaneously. It is the way in which her work defies partisanship that Berkowitz feels makes it so valuable in turbulent times.
in Russian Sociological Review (2018)
The Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has been developing an argument about the impossibility of politics in an age of rising authoritarianism. Gessen turns to Hannah Arendt to articulate the phenomenon of freedom in belonging to a movement fighting for freedom. This freedom is what Arendt calls the “treasure” of the public space where people act together. However, the passionate bonds that emerge amidst communal freedom are often intolerant. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, the American town governments may have been the locus of American freedom, but they were also coarse and opposed to civilized restraints. There is always a desire on the part of elites, Tocqueville argues, to restrict the freedoms of the town- ships in the name of civilization. What bothers Gessen about our political moment is that large political movements have come to act like tiny resistance cells. The Women’s March, for example, imposes an ideological purity on its members and leaders, so that anyone who trades in antisemitism in their private life must be excluded. Donald Trump’s supporters and many liberal groups enforce ideological conformity, so that those who might be environ- mentalists or those who reject identity politics are excluded and denounced. All we have left, Gessen argues, is a politics of denunciation. In such a situation, no politics is possible. In this talk, I turn to Arendt to ask what it would mean to imagine a politics amidst the impossibility of politics?
Protest and Democracy: Hannah Arendt and the Foundation of Freedom
in Stasis (v. 6, 2018).
The great political achievement of the modern era, stable representative democracies that legitimate power, are everywhere under attack. No thinker can better help understand our present democratic disillusionment than Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that as bureaucracies and governments grow, individual action is evermore attenuated in its ability to make a difference in the world.
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.
The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science
in Arendt Studies, v. 2 (2018)
To consider the meaning of The Human Condition today means to understand how Arendt explores the fate of humanity in the aftermath of the scientific age. She argues that the modern age of science began "in the seventeenth century [and] came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century." In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, we now live in what Arendt calls the modern world, a world defined above all by earth and world alienation.
Reconciling Oneself With Reality, Whatever It May Be
in Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagbuch (2017)
“Reconciling Oneself With Reality, Whatever it May Be,” explores themes of responsibility and reconciliation in Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch. Arendt’s long first entry establishes reconciliation as a theme that returns over the next twenty years and also is reflected (and altered) in Arendt’s later works. If one reads only Arendt’s published writings reconciliation seems to be a meaningful, but not central, in Arendt’s effort to rethink the practice of politics in the modern age. All this changes, though, when one opens Arendt’s Denktagebuch, within which reconciliation is a constant, fluid trope to which she returns again and again in the face of an enormous variety of intellectual problems. In order to emphasize the extraordinary flexibility and incisive influence of the idea of reconciliation for Arendt’s thought, this essay eschews a unitary account of anything like “Arendt’s theory of reconciliation.” Instead, the essay identifies nine interrelated but distinct (and sometimes in tension) understandings of reconciliation to be found in the Denktagebuch. In doing so, the essay also presents a way of thinking about the content of the Denktagebuch that emphasizes Arendt’s own resistance to systematicity in favor of conceptual flexibility and responsiveness to the world around her.
Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism
in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)
THE ASTONISHING STATEMENT Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in mass movements.
Mass movements, writes Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, are one of the core elements of totalitarianism. Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.
Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch
(Fordham University Press, 2017)
Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s Denktagebuch offers a path through Hannah Arendt’s recently published Denktagebuch, or “Book of Thoughts.” In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt’s published writing and broader political thinking.
Unique in its form, the Denktagebuch offers brilliant insights into Arendt’s practice of thinking and writing. Artifacts of Thinking provides an introduction to the Denktagebuch as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt’s understanding of “the life of the mind” but her true lived experience of it.
in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2015)
Justice is the virtue of acting rightly and prop- erly with regard to others (political justice) and with regard to oneself (moral justice). Justice is also understood as the good, the appropriate, or what is right in a given situation. Rhadamanthus, the Greek judge of the dead, meted out justice according to the maxim: “Suffer what you have done.” The Roman jurist Ulpian writes: “Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each man his due.” The Golden Rule holds: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What these examples of folk wisdom share is the sense that justice is about proportionality and also singularity. The claim that justice is “to give to each his/ her own” expresses the aspiration for justice as equity. Because no two persons or circum- stances are the same, laws that treat everyone equally are, as Plato argued in the Statesman, stubborn and stupid. It is better, Plato con- cludes, to be governed by a wise philosopher- king than by rigid laws. Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, agrees that there will always arise new cases for which the application of the law will be unjust. But his solution is not to discard law in favor of a philosopher-king, but to allow wise judges to straighten the defects in law. It is just, Aristotle writes in the Nichomachean Ethics (NE), to rectify the defect in law by deciding as the lawgiver would himself decide if he were present. This rectification of law, or equity, is one fundamental aspiration of justice: to do what is fitting in each particular instance.
Instituting freedom: Steve Buckler and Hannah Arendt on an Engaged Political Theory
in European Journal of Political Theory (2014)
Steve Buckler’s Hannah Arendt and Political Theory is most revealing in the final chapter, ‘‘The Role of the Theorist.’’ I did not know Buckler, but this final chapter of his last book must stand as his apologia, his attempt—mediated through Arendt—to offer an account of a lifelong pursuit of an engaged politics. The theorist, Buckler writes, thinks and speaks from ‘‘the standpoint of the reflective citizen rather than [the standpoint] Arendt takes to be the traditionally accented voice of the philosopher’’ (154). He writes political theory as a citizen first, which means that he shows a general concern for ‘‘the enactment of the political and the conditions of its sustainability—the common world that provides us with grounds of common sense and terms within which we can interact coherently’’ (154). Unlike so much political theorizing today that takes critical thinking to demand criticism of everything, Buckler insists that theorists ‘‘must now share a common concern with the actor—albeit from a different experiential perspective—a concern with the world and with its unguaranteed active maintenance’’ (161). The thinker today must think ‘‘for the sake of the world,’’—he must love the world—and thus must attend to the world and even tend to the worldly in ways that moderate the unlimited criticism of those theorists who do not recognize the precariousness of the modern world. While Buckler’s theorist does not abandon a critical vocabulary, he does see that criticism cannot become the abstract core of the theoretical enterprise. Tied closely to everyday politics and always thought through examples, Buckler’s approach to theory illuminates Arendt’s insistence that the theorists remain in the world.
Hannah Arendt: Power, Action and the Foundation of Freedom
in Liberal Moments (2016)
The paper explores Hannah Arendt's concept of power, emphasizing that it arises from collective human action rather than mere individual strength. It contends that power is essential for legitimate government and self-governance, advocating for its augmentation while preventing corruption. The text also critiques monopolistic organizations that stifle individual creativity and spontaneity, warning against the dangers of organized control overshadowing the natural, dynamic forces of society.
Drones and the Question of "The Human"
in Carnegie Journal of Ethics & International Affairs, volume 28, issue 02, pp. 159-169. (2014)
The increasing reliance on drones is threatening our humanity—but not because of the inhumane ways we use Predator drones in warfare. It is a mistake “to use the term “drone” to refer only to these much publicized military devices. Drones, more precisely understood, are intelligent machines that—possessed of the capacity to perform repetitive tasks with efficiency, reliability, and mechanical rationality—increasingly displace the need for human thinking and doing. The trend Jünger and Turkle worry about is unmistakable: we are at risk of losing the rich and mature relationships that mark us as human. The rise of social robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other one-dimensional machines that act like humans—without the perceived human weaknesses of distraction, emotion, exhaustion, quirkiness, risk, and unreliability—answers a profound human desire to replace human judgment with the more reliable, more efficient, and more ra- tional judgment of machines. For all the superficial paeans to human instinct and intuition, human beings, in practice, repeatedly prefer drone-like reliability to the uncertain spontaneity of human intuition. In other words, we confront a future in which “human” is a derogatory adjective signifying inefficiency, incompetence, and backwardness.
Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film
in The Paris Review (2013)
In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.”
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.
in Just War in Religion and Politics, ed. by Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, and R.E. Tully (University Press of America, 2013).
In speaking of "just war," we speak not of justice but of justification. As a matter of justification, just war theory can and often does work to exclude and preclude the question of justice in war. What is needed, rather, is a determination to recall that justice, and not merely justification, has a place in war. Instead of the justifications offered by just war theorizing, we must demand that those who fight and we who think about war not blind ourselves to the illumination of justice amidst the fog of war's justifications.
Hannah Arendts erste Briefe an Karl Jaspers und Martin Heidegger: Freundschaft, Versöhnung und Wiederaufbau einer gemeinsamen Welt
in Nach dem Krieg! - Nach dem Exil? Erste Briefe/First Letters 1945-1950, II, ed. Detlef Garz and David Kettler (Text und Kritik, 2012).
Bearing Logs on Our Shoulders: Reconciliation, Judgment, and the Building of a Common World
in Theory & Event (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 to reconcile myself to the world?"—is, for Arendt, the pressing political question of our age.
Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
in The Handbook of Human Rights (Routledge, 2011)
Hannah Arendt approaches human rights as someone who lived through their failure in the first half of the 20th century. A German Jew, Arendt understood antisemitism, experienced the denationalization of the Jews in Germany, and witnessed how the world and even the diaspora Jewish community largely ignored the plight of European Jewry. Arendt also saw how other minority peoples in Europe - Germans in Russia, Slovaks in Czechloslavakia, muslims in Yugoslavia, Gypsies, and many others - were systematically denaturalized, persecuted, and killed - all, as she emphasized, within the strictures of national and international law. For Arendt, the failure of human rights is a fundamental fact of modern times.
The Angry Jew: Hannah Arendt on Revenge and Reconciliation
in Philosophical Topics (2011)
Sholom Schwartzbard killed Simon Petlura in an act of revenge. He admitted his crimeand a French jury acquitted him in 1927. For Hannah Arendt, Schwartzbard’s actions show that revenge can, in certain circumstances, be in the service of justice. This paper explores Hannah Arendt’s distinction between reconciliation and revenge and argues that Hannah Arendt embraces revenge as one way in which politics and justice can happen in the world, but only under certain conditions.
The Power of Non-Reconciliation – Arendt’s Judgment of Adolf Eichmann
on hannaharendt.net (2011)
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem has caused controversy for all the wrong reasons. Arendt's criticisms of the Judenräte for cooperating with the Nazis and protecting their friends and families while selecting Jews to be sent to the camps is well commented upon, if rarely thoughtfully considered. Her insight into the banality of evil is now common sense, which makes it an easy target for those who seek to discredit her criticisms of the trial in Jerusalem. But Arendt's rejection of the Israeli Court's legalistic response to Eichmann's great wrongs—and her framing of the question of war crimes outside the law and, instead, through the political question of reconciliation—has been poorly understood. As a result, her book has failed to provoke as it ought. The truly radical judgment in Eichmann in Jerusalem is Arendt's insistence that the question for the Israeli Court was one of reconciliation versus non-reconciliation rather than punishment, and thus her argument that the Israeli judges should have dared to judge politically rather than legally.
The judgment that Eichmann must die, Arendt argues, should have been a singular, political, and non-legal judgment that no common world was possible. What was called for in the Eichmann trial was, she argued, was an extraordinary judgment--one not grounded in law—that such things as Eichmann did ought not to have happened. Eichmann must die in order to state unequivocally that we reject a world in which he and the deeds he helped enact could happen. Eichmann must die, in other words, because something happened in Germany to which we, as human beings, cannot be reconciled.
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)
“The true predicaments of our time.” Hannah Arendt wrote, “will assume their authentic form only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” The totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union were only symptoms of these true predicaments, of what Arendt early on calls the mass society characterized by “organized loneliness.” Later, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she would come to see that the bond between totalitarianism and loneliness is the phenomena of thoughtlessness.
Thinking in Dark Times - Six Questions for Roger Berkowitz
in Harpers Magazine (2009)
Fordham University Press has just put out Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, a collection of papers from a conference convened at Bard College to mark Arendt’s hundredth birthday. I put six questions to Roger Berkowitz, a professor at Bard and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, about issues addressed in the book.
The Judge as Tragic Hero: An Arendtian Critique of Judging
on HannahArendt.net, Articles/Research Notes v.4 (2008). Revised version, originally published in The Graduate Review (cont. as Critical Sense) v. 1, #1 (1994).
In his book Justice Accused, Robert Cover explores how and why ante-bellum Federal judges who were opposed to slavery consistently upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.2 These judges claimed that despite their strong personal convictions that slavery was immoral and wrong, they were constrained by the U.S. Constitution to declare the Act constitutional.
Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Some Thoughts on Laurie Ackermann's Dignity Jurisprudence
in Acta Juridica (2008). Reprinted in Dignity, Freedom and the Post-Apartheid Legal Order, ed. by Alfred Barnard (Jutta, 2009).
Justice Laurie Ackermann’s decision in Ferreira is a study in tonal dissonance. Ackermann’s 232 paragraph legal opinion begins slowly. It plots out the judicial history of the case; it wades through questions of jurisdiction and standing; and it frames the question of the case all without offering a narrative version of the facts.
Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
in Philosophy in Review (December, 2007). Review of Peg Birmingham's Hannah Arendt and Human Rights.
This article explores Hannah Arendt’s critique and reformulation of human rights in three parts. Part One offers a summary of Arendt’s critique of human rights as she develops it in the central chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Part Two explores the intellectual foundations of Arendt’s reconstruction of human rights as the “the right to have rights” in her concept of natality, the core condition of human being. Finally, Part Three, engages Arendt’s effort in Eichmann in Jerusalem to think clearly about how international law might meaningfully understand the crime of “crimes against humanity.”