A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of US$916,537 held at the state-owned Bank of Ceylon and its return to Taiwan’s Far Eastern International Bank, the bank from which
At the beginning of President Trump’s second term, I committed myself to looking past the noise. The past week challenges that discipline. In foreign policy, President Trump has openly embraced coercion —
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Roger Berkowitz’s keynote at The PolyOpportunity Retreat, Garrison Institute, Hudson Valley, NY, April 13, 2025. This was first published in Beauty Shot It’s a real pleasure to be here. Bard College is
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As 2025 slumbers toward its end, there are tentative signs of life in our constitutional republic. Few — certainly not I — would have predicted that the first stirrings of congressional resistance
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On Friday we concluded our reading of On Revolution in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group. Arendt’s last finished book, On Revolution is about freedom — the idea that animates her writing from beginning to end.
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Shortly before he died just over a year ago, Jerry Kohn called me up to discuss how we should mark the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s passing. As Arendt’s good friend, her
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The most politically urgent argument in Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is her diagnosis of a quiet, foundational mistake at the heart of the United States Constitution: the belief that representation — even when supported by an
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Teaching my course on “Truth and Politics”, I’m struck by how prescient Hannah Arendt was: factual reality is stubborn, but the meaning of facts is endlessly contested. We live inside that contest.
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Some teachers retire. Some stay on too long. And then there is Austin Sarat. This weekend I traveled to Amherst College for a celebration of Austin’s fifty years in the Amherst classroom.
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The shutdown of the American government is not about healthcare. Democrats have seized on healthcare as a popular hook, betting that people will see them as fighting for affordable healthcare while Republicans
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In her final public interview with Roger Errera in 1973, Hannah Arendt issued one of her most quoted warnings. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said, “the consequence is not that
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At a moment when political lines are crossed every week, every day, even every hour, this week still felt different. In the blink of an eye, the looming threat of living under
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I traveled this weekend to see the opening of a new play about Hannah Arendt at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library. The play is set in Berlin
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Labor Day is meant to honor laboring, but for me it marks a new beginning. This year, I return from a sabbatical having finished a new book, A World We Share: The Power of
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Last week I described a new class of revolutionaries taking power in the United States. The aim of revolution, I argued, is not so much the creation of a new order but the perpetual
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“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making
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