Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

Origins of Totalitarianism: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense

This episode of Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz deals with Chapter 1 of Origins of Totalitarianism: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense. Our podcast follows the book that we are reading in our current Virtual Reading Group (VRG), which meets weekly on Fridays at 1 PM EST. We are currently reading Arendt's classic analysis of the 20th century, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In Origins, Arendt tracks the rise of Fascism and Communism and explores what differentiates these regimes from past authoritarian systems. 

 

THE HOST

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is editor of The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

Origins of Totalitarianism: The Prefaces

This episode of Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz deals with The Prefaces to Origins of Totalitarianism. Our podcast follows the book that we are reading in our current Virtual Reading Group (VRG), which meets weekly on Fridays at 1 PM EST. We are currently reading Arendt's classic analysis of the 20th century, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In Origins, Arendt tracks the rise of Fascism and Communism and explores what differentiates these regimes from past authoritarian systems. 

 

THE HOST

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is editor of The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany.

Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom Part 3

The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?

 

This event took place October 16th, 2020 and featured David van Reybrouck, Hélène Landemore, and Roger Berkowitz.  Click here to learn more.

Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom Part 2

The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?

 

This event took place October 16th, 2020 and featured David van Reybrouck, Hélène Landemore, and Roger Berkowitz.  Click here to learn more.

Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom Part I

The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?

 

This event took place October 16th, 2020 and featured David van Reybrouck, Hélène Landemore, and Roger Berkowitz.  Click here to learn more.

The Amor Mundi Podcast Episode 11: Masha Gessen

In the latest Amor Mundi Podcast, Roger Berkowitz and Masha Gessen talk about how even amidst the rise of subjectivism and the internalization of the world—what Hannah Arendt calls world alienation—there has remained a commitment to a common or shared world. Yet, it is precisely that common world that today seems endangered, and Gessen asks how language is used in anti-political ways to undermine the world we share. If the common world is shattered, the question is whether a new story can be told and constituted to rebuild a common world. Berkowitz and Gessen ask: What would it mean in the wake of both the Trump Presidency and the Black Lives Matter Movement to retell the American story? But is the story of America the unfulfilled story of the Langston Hughes, that America has not yet lived up to its promise? Is it the story of competent management and technocracy? Or is it the story of decentralized and local government, a humbler and more anarchic amalgamation of plural and different people who come together around an embrace of freedom? Touching on the importance of hypocrisy, the rise of the masses, and the perils of bi-partisanship, Gessen and Berkowitz embrace politics as a conversation, the attempt to figure out how we live together. 

Amor Mundi Podcast Special Series, Thinking the Plague: Revitalizing Democracy Through Citizen Assemblies.

This is episode 10, “Revitalizing Democracy Through Citizen Assemblies.” It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz and Jonas Kunz, co-founder of the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy Through Sortition, giving a talk and leading a discussion over Zoom. The talk was organized by Lawrence Davis-Hollander and the Scoville Memorial Library and took place on Saturday, April 18, 2020.

Podcast editing and music by Andy Evan Cohen. Additional narration by Janet Bentley.
Illustration by Grant Barnhart.

The Amor Mundi Podcast Special Series, Thinking the Plague: The Rule of Nobody

This is episode 9, “The Rule of Nobody,”  It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz in a Zoom conversation with Philip K. Howard, lawyer and activist. Howard has written five books including “The Death of Common Sense” and “The Rule of Nobody,” a reference to Hannah Arendt’s description of bureaucratic rule.  He also started Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization which advocates simplifying government.

Amor Mundi Podcast Special Series, Thinking the Plague: How to Think About Change

Amor Mundi Podcast Special Series, Thinking the Plague: The Thrill of Democracy

This is episode 7,”The Thrill of Democracy.”  It features the Arendt Center's Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz in conversation with Olivia Guaraldo, a political thinker, Professor of Political Thought, and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Verona in Italy.   

 

Podcast editing and music by Andy Evan Cohen. Additional narration by Janet Bentley.
Illustration by Grant Barnhart.