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 The HA Yearbook and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. A World We Share: Why Friendship Matters More than Truth is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. 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
HA: The Yearbook, Volume 13
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) 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 Russia, 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.
Published by De Gruyter Brill, the Hannah Arendt Yearbook, Volume 13 centers on the compelling theme of Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, featuring edited transcripts from the annual Hannah Arendt Center conference that took place in October 2024 at Bard College. For those who crave deeper engagement with the ideas explored at our annual conference, the new edition provides unparalleled access to scholarly discourse, with insightful essays by prominent thinkers such as Sebastian Junger, Fintan O’Toole, Seyla Benhabib, Leon Botstein, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Uday Mehta, and more.
With the Hannah Arendt Center’s acquisition of the exemplary humanities journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, we are incorporating Lapham’s model of supplementing contemporary essays on a theme with excerpts from classic reflections. As a result, you will find here texts relating to both tribalism and cosmopolitanism from Anthony Appiah, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Amy Chua, Emile Durkheim, Epictetus, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ibn Khaldûn, Martha Nussbaum, and more. The goal is to offer a rich and broad introduction to the inquiry into the human tension between our need to belong to tribes and our aspirations to cosmopolitan humanism. In addition, the mixing of present scholarship with classic texts provides a sourcebook for those who would like to explore these questions with more depth.
Available for pre-order through De Gruyter Brill and retailers such as Amazon and Target.
Published in 2024, On Civil Disobedience is available now at your local bookstore or preferred retailer.
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.