Roger Berkowitz

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the modern era and continues to draw widespread attention. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and scholars from all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, providing a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom with extraordinary intelligence and courage. An activist and thinker whose work resists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity that resonates with intellectuals and the reading public alike. Her writing continues to delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most haunting questions of our time. These twelve essays are based on talks originally given at three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and businesspeople--and include Lewis Lapham, Nicholson Baker, George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Patchen Markell, and Peg Birmingham. These essays are based on oral lectures that make Arendt's thinking as accessible as it is potent.

Truthtelling and Being Human

Facets of the Human Condition

Racism and Antisemitism: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Thomas Keenan

Jeffrey Katz

Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In her works, she grappled with the dark events of that century, probing the nature of power, authority, and evil, and seeking to confront totalitarian horrors on their own terms. This book focuses on how, against the professionalized discourses of theory, Arendt insists on the greater political importance of the ordinary activity of thinking. Indeed, she argues that the activity of thinking is the only reliable protection against the horrors that buffeted the last century. Its essays explore and enact that activity, which Arendt calls the habit of erecting obstacles to oversimplifications, compromises, and conventions. Most of the essays were written for a conference at Bard College celebrating the 100th anniversary of Arendt's birth. Arendt left her personal library and literary effects to Bard, and she is buried in the Bard College cemetery. Material from the Bard archive--such as a postcard to Arendt from Walter Benjamin or her annotation in her copy of Machiavelli's The Prince--and images from her life are interspersed with the essays in this volume. The volume will offer provocations and insights to Arendt scholars, students discovering Arendt's work, and general readers attracted to Arendt's vision of the importance of thinking in our own dark times.

Roger Berkowitz

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