Friendship Vs Polarization

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. By the way, to that sad sports news in Michael's cast. We're going to be talking about the Liberty. There's still a lot to root for with the New York Liberty. They're still alive. Maybe we'll mention the Yankees briefly, but we're going to talk about the Libs.

In the last few minutes of the show coming up, so those of you following the New York Liberty, get ready to call in and listen coming up. But with us now, Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights at Bard College and Founder and Academic Director of Bard's Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, which is currently celebrating its 20th year in existence. Roger Berkowitz has a new book called The World We Share, Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. He also hosts a weekly podcast called Reading Hannah Arendt, which includes excerpts from and discussions of Arendt's writings, and he'll be doing a book event interviewed by Roosevelt Montás on Monday, October 19th at 7 o'clock at Book Culture on West 112th Street in Manhattan.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities website describes her as a humanist thinker who thought boldly and provocatively about our shared political and ethical world. It notes she has been embraced by both liberals and conservatives, and that she also enraged and engaged interlocutors from all political persuasions. She is perhaps best known for coining the phrase the banality of evil. If you didn't know that came from her, that's who it came from, the banality of evil with respect to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She was a German Jew who fled after being arrested in 1933 She soon became a New Yorker until her death at age 69 in 1975 As a New York Times article by Jennifer Salae noted last year, Hannah Arendt's work was frequently cited as a warning about where the George W. Bush administration's forever wars might lead. As someone who had been detained by the Gestapo, stripped of her German citizenship and interned in France, she was consistently attuned to the question of the right to have rights, and how such legal standing rested precariously on the whims of the state. But the article says it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that enshrined her as a prophet. Bewildered Americans looked at her work about European cataclysm for guidance, sales of Arendt's, the origins of totalitarianism soared.

But a central idea in that Times article was that the recent canonization of Arendt has overlooked how controversial she was for various reasons in her time. This new book by Roger Berkowitz, sometimes controversial himself in running the Arendt Center at Bard, challenges readers with one of Arendt's beliefs, that friendship makes meaningful politics possible. Friendship makes meaningful politics possible, maybe even more than a commitment to truth. Again, the book's title is A World We Share, Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. Roger, Professor Berkowitz, hello. Welcome to WNYC.

Roger Berkowitz (3:35)

Thank you very much, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer (3:37)

Would you start with a little introduction? Just why did you found the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2006, and congratulations on your 20th anniversary at that.

Roger Berkowitz (3:49)

Thank you.

I came to Bard College in 2005, and she's buried at Bard along with her second husband, Heinrich Blucher, who taught at Bard for 16 years and was a beloved professor there. She also left her library to Bard, which is in the current library. It was her 100th birthday in 2006, and I thought, I'm not a Hannah Arendt scholar because I wasn't then, but I always had really found her work to be incredibly insightful and provocative. So I thought, let's do a conference.

I invited 20 people, most of them not Arendt scholars because I'm not someone who was caught up in Arendt scholarship, but I actually think that too often people who are scholars of any particular person end up talking in a very, you know, with a lot of jargon in a very inside baseball kind of way. And so I invited just some of the smartest people I knew to come to Bard and talk about why she mattered today. And it really was an extraordinary event. It was two days, really exciting. And her literary executor, Jerome Cohn, who unfortunately passed away about a year and a half ago, was there. And afterwards, he came up to me and said, you know, this is the conference she would have loved. I've been to hundreds of conferences at Arendt. This is it. Would you take over the Hannah Arendt Center? And I said, I'm not a Hannah Arendt scholar. And he said, I don't care. You know, this is where I want it to be. And that was the beginning.