About Roger
Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz authored The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). Berkowitz is editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (forthcoming, 2024); The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition ( 2020) and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2024 Compassion Award given by Con-Solatio and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.
Roger’s Books
Available September, 2024
The Gift of Science
New & Noteworthy
HANNAH ARENDT PRIZE IN POLITICAL THOUGHT
I am thrilled to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen. This annual award …
Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt’s Politics
Published in Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey).
In this essay, I argue that reconciliation is a central and guiding idea that deepens our understanding of Arendt’s politics, plurality …
The Singularity and the Human Condition
Published in Philosophy Today, Volume 62, Issue 2 (Spring 2018)
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions….
Public Education: The Challenge of Educational Authority in a World Without Authority
Published in Hannah Arendt on Educational Thinking and Practice in Dark Times (ed. by Wayne Vick and Helen M. Gunter).
I argue that education must be both revolutionary and conservative. Children must learn common values and shared stories to see the world as their own. But education must also be revolutionary and prepare young people to change the world.