Hannah Arendt Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

The Revolution Against Legitimacy

To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power

August 26, 2025 • by Roger Berkowitz

“[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 an omelette.”—Hannah Arendt We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today ...

Interviews

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

A conversation with Ronnie Grinberg about her book Write Like a Man

October 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Ronnie Grinberg

In this biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent post war writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College....

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

Europe & Central Asia

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Living through war can transform how we engage with philosophy

September 30, 2024 • by Aaron James Wendland and Volodymyr Yermolenko

This lecture was delivered as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Film

Notes on Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest

Mass dehumanization on the other side of the garden wall

September 25, 2024 • by Anonymous

When viewed against the backdrop of what Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the UN has called “the most thoroughly documented genocide in history,” Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s recent film about the genocide of the Jews, takes on a deeper meaning: “The reason I made this film,” Glazer said shortly after ...

Notes on Jonathan Glazer’s <em>Zone of Interest </em>

Literature

Very Far From the Homeland

On contemporary readings from Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alice Oswald exile in the Iliad

September 4, 2024 • by Lyndsey Stonebridge

One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer's long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about ...

Podcast

Write Like a Man

Episode 54: Ronnie Grinberg on her new book, Write Like a Man

May 14, 2024 • by Claire Potter

In Episode 54 of Why Now?, host Claire Potter interviews Ronnie Grinberg about her new book, Write Like a Man....

Middle East & North Africa

Universalism in Dark Times

And why friendship and enlightenment flourish together

April 19, 2024 • by Omri Boehm

In his acceptance speech for the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Omri Boehm discusses the challenge of open discussion....

Europe & Central Asia

War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest

How the banality of everyday life keeps us fenced off from evil

March 25, 2024 • by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus

In a way, our memory culture both in Germany and in Israel is an exact reversal of the reality revealed by the film. Perhaps that's why the film seems to annoy many people in Germany, who complain that it shows the "perpetrator's perspective." But memory must also be a memory ...

War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s <em>Zone of Interest</em>

Middle East & North Africa

The War Between Israel and Hamas Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game

We need to acknowledge the universal experience of shared human suffering

October 25, 2023 • by Ilan Zvi Baron

Exploring the zero-sum game of rhetoric surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its dire consequences. Amid the polarizing narratives, a call for acknowledging shared human suffering and rethinking the discourse to avoid a path that exults in death. ...

The War Between Israel and Hamas Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game

Democracy

Anthropocentrism and Democracy in Planetary Times

It is time to rethink political regimes in non-anthropocentric terms

April 12, 2023 • by Rafi Youatt

The way forward for our planet and democracy are to acknowledge nature’s own, different political modalities, by recognizing what I’ve elsewhere called interspecies politics. ...

Democracy

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

February 1, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Juliet Hooker, William Milberg, James Miller and Deva Woodly

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...

Democracy

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

The democratic project is both unfinished and unstable

January 31, 2023 • by James Miller

Even though the post-war consensus over the meaning and value of specifically liberal democratic institutions seems more fragile than ever—polls show that trust in government experts and elected representatives has rarely been lower—democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites ...