Roger Berkowitz, The Power of Friendship in a Broken World

Joining Tayo in The Study for this episode is Roger Berkowitz, author of the book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. Berkowitz argues that practicing friendship—dialogue, respect, and honest conversation among people who disagree--is just what we need to reinvigorate the health of democracy today. This conversation explores the experience of mass loneliness, the problems of truth and ideological certainty, and the ways our civic life has become frail and frayed. Turning to the work and life of Hannah Arendt offers a powerful model for how friendship helps create the kind of world we can share and enact politically.

Roger Berkowitz is Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College and founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He hosts the podcast Reading Hannah Arendt and writes the weekly Amor Mundi newsletter. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (2005) and the forthcoming A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026). He is the recipient of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought awarded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Links:
A World We Share on Amazon or at Yale

www.vernunft.org

hac.bard.edu

The Hannah Arendt Center Virtual Reading Group

Amor Mundi, the Newsletter of the Hannah Arendt Center. Subscribe

Roger Berkowitz’s Substack

Thanks to my guest and to you, listener and fellow student, for joining me in The Study. Before you go, we'd love to welcome you into the wider work of The Study. Head to thestudynd.org for free and low cost online classes, lectures, living history performances, study clubs and other ways to curate your own study practice on your terms. Join us when you can and bring a friend!