Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz speaks with Samantha Fazekas about her book Hannah Arendt’s Unwritten Chapter on Judging (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Fazekas argues that judging became central for Arendt as she confronted unprecedented political events like World War II, the Holocaust, and the Eichmann trial, which “explode” inherited moral and political categories. They discuss Arendt’s use of Kant’s aesthetic reflectiv...

Host Roger Berkowitz closes our discussion of Hannah Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgment with her final public speech, “Home to Roost” (1975), presented as Arendt’s last assessment of the crisis of the U.S. republic. He highlights her claims that republics are fragile, that McCarthyism began a constitutional crisis by attacking due process and the civil service, and that Vietnam, foreign-policy failures, do...

Focusing on two essays from Responsibility and Judgment—Arendt’s 1964 review of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy and her 1966 introduction to Bernd Naumann’s Auschwitz on Trial—podcast host Roger Berkowitz traces Arendt’s insistence that judgment be grounded in understanding individuals and contexts. Arendt critiques Pope Pius XII’s “rigid adherence to normality” and failure to m...

There's a shift in Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgment from essays on moral and political responsibility to shorter essays of judgment about particular events, beginning with her controversial 1957 “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz situates the essay in the aftermath of Brown v. Board, and notes Arendt’s factual errors about the Little Rock photos and discou...

In this episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz discusses two essays from our summer read, Responsibility and Judgment: “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and “Collective Responsibility.” He explains Arendt’s post-metaphysical claim that shared morality and metaphysical truth have collapsed, separating solitary, negative moral thinking (“I will not”) from public political judgment. Pr...

In this bonus episode of the podcast, recorded on July 5 from Marlborough, Massachusetts, host Roger Berkowitz reflects on Fourth of July patriotism, baseball, and a Lapham’s Quarterly podcast series, Revolutionary America, edited by Donovan Hohn. Berkowitz highlights Lewis Lapham's archival conversations with Jill Lepore on historians’ duty to face complexity and humility, and with Gordon Wood, who cites Lincoln’...

In this episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz discusses the final sections of Hannah Arendt’s essay “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” focusing on Arendt’s post-Eichmann turn to thinking, morality, and the collapse of shared moral certainties. He presents Arendt’s claim that morality is Socratic and grounded in solitude—the “two-in-one” dialogue that makes personhood, memory...

In this episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz introduces Arendt’s essay “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” compiled by Jerome Kohn from 1965–66 courses after Eichmann in Jerusalem. He explains Hannah Arendt’s late turn to morality as a response to Nazism’s revelation that morality could function as mere custom, enabling ordinary people to become criminals by following law and public opi...

In this episode, host Roger Berkowitz walks us through the Prologue and first essay of our summer read, Responsibility and Judgment, a posthumous collection edited by Jerome Kohn. Introducing Arendt’s "Sonning Prize" lecture on persona, citizenship, and the exchangeable “mask” of public life, Berkowitz closely reads the opening essay, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” framed by the controve...

In this bonus episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz reflects on two recent gatherings and their relevance to Hannah Arendt’s concerns about truth, technology, and world-building. He recounts a Santa Fe Institute workshop on AI and institutions, like universities and law, arguing that AI should remain a tool rather than a force that replaces human agency. He warns that AI already distorts reality through fabricated &ldq...

In this bonus episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz previews the Arendt Center’s collaboration with the International Human Rights Art Movement, including a June 5–7 New York City theater festival and the anthology Hannah Arendt: An American Hero. Drawn from 328 submissions from 64 countries and supported by NEH funding tied to the proposed “Garden of Heroes,” Berkowitz interviews contributors Dr. Shu...

In this bonus episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz shares about his recent talks in Athens at the House of Beautiful Business conference, and about the Bard College commencement, honoring Marilynne Robinson—before turning to the Hannah Arendt Center’s 20th anniversary Arendt Forum (Oct. 15–17) on Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For? Drawing on Arendt’s account of a shattered Western tradition a...

In this bonus episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz welcomes Peter Rosenblum,  a professor of international law and human rights at Bard College, to discuss their constitutional law course, which is taught as a liberal-arts, critical-thinking class rather than pre-law. Beginning with Aristotle, Montesquieu, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, and Arendt, it asks what a constitution is and how it constitutes a people. ...

In this bonus episode, host Roger Berkowitz interviews Chris Gibson, former U.S. Army colonel, Purple Heart recipient, ex–three-term congressman, former Williams College professor and Siena College president, and author of The Spirit of Philadelphia: A Call to Recover the Founding Principles. Gibson explains the “spirit of Philadelphia” as the coalescing energy of collaboration and compromise that emerged at the C...

Recorded live at Bard College, this bonus episode features Roger Berkowitz in conversation with Walter Russell Mead, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and Global View columnist for The Wall Street Journal. They discuss whether the post-1945 American-led liberal world order has fractured and what is replacing it as gl...

In this bonus episode, Roger Berkowitz welcomes George Packer—National Book Award–winning author of The Unwinding, staff writer for The Atlantic and contributor to The New Yorker—to discuss his 2025 novel The Emergency and his upcoming appearance at The Arendt Forum (October 15–17, 2026), the Hannah Arendt Center's 20th anniversary fall gathering on Solidarity. Packer explains that the pandemic and January 6...

In this episode of the Reading Hannah Arendt podcast, Roger Berkowitz discusses Hannah Arendt’s final speech/essay “Home to Roost” (May 20, 1975), published in Responsibility and Judgment and widely received at the time. He explains Arendt’s rejection of celebrating “America” in favor of the Republic, emphasizing the United States as a plural republic rather than an ...

In this episode of the podcast, Roger Berkowitz concludes our reading of Crises of the Republic by introducing Arendt’s 1970 interview “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution.” Framing it through recent wars and Arendt’s claim that declining power invites violence, he emphasizes Arendt’s diagnosis of a “revolutionary situation” in which power has lost legitimacy and lies “in the streets,...

In this episode of the podcast, Roger Berkowitz summarizes part three of Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence,” reviewing the essay’s structure: action (not only violence) can interrupt historical processes; power and violence are opposites, and violence rises when power is in jeopardy. In section three, Arendt rejects social-scientific views that treat violence as beastly or irrational, arguing it can be rational a...