Candor without Hypocrisy | Bonus Episode

Podcast host Roger Berkowitz continues a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, focusing on sections 7–9 on the public realm, the private realm and property, and the rise of “the social.” He argues that for Arendt freedom is political action and speech in a shared world, and that reality itself depends on being seen and heard from a plurality of perspectives; the common world both connects and separates us, like people gathered around a table. Berkowitz highlights Arendt’s claim that intensely subjective experiences such as pain and love resist public reality, and her insistence that politics requires a durable world that transcends individual lifespans—an “earthly immortality.” He then explains Arendt’s distinction between property (a stable place that enables privacy and citizenship) and wealth (mobile accumulation), criticizing modern liberal and Marxist reductions of property to wealth and describing how mass society, ideology, and consumerism endanger both public and private life.

Recorded live at Bard College as the inaugural event in the new Hannah Arendt Lecture Series and a bonus episode of the podcast, host Roger Berkowitz interviews Georgetown Law professor David Luban about his book Powers of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Moral and Legal Philosophy. Luban explains how Eichmann in Jerusalem redirected Arendt toward questions of individual responsibility in collective settings, bureaucratic “rule of nobody,” and the banality of evil as culpable ignorance akin to willful blindness. He presents Arendt as both guide and sparring partner, probing her suspicion of moralizing, her separation of morality from politics, and her reliance on Socratic thinking and Kantian judgment. The conversation also examines the “right to have rights,” human dignity, refugees and statelessness, and the problem of complicity and “lesser evil” within institutions, concluding with audience questions on conscience, public action, and advice about moral red lines. ABOUT: Produced by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, this podcast offers close readings of Arendt's books alongside engaging interviews and thought-provoking conversations. Released weekly, each episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of Arendt's philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. Available on all major podcast platforms, listeners join us on a captivating intellectual journey through the mind of Hannah Arendt. New episodes every Friday morning! Join Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, as he discusses the works of German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).

In discussing chapter two, sections 4–6, of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, host Roger Berkowitz argues that, for Arendt, freedom is not a right but an activity of speech and action among equals in a public sphere. He explains her claim that a translation shift to “social animal” obscured the Greek distinction between household necessity (oikos) and political freedom (polis), and that modernity and the nation-state blur public and private through the rise of “the social,” understood as nationwide housekeeping and “political economy.”

In this bonus episode of the podcast, Jana Tirey (nee Mader) and Roger Berkowitz chat about his forthcoming book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Oct. 6, Yale University Press). Berkowitz traces the book’s origins to an Arendt Center conference on Friendship and Politics held shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, and to Arendt’s 1959 Lessing Prize speech on whether Jews and Germans can be friends, which he uses to ask what friendship could mean amid contemporary conflicts. He outlines the book’s four main threads: defining friendship, Arendt’s friendships and writings, friendship as a model for civic politics, and friendship’s limits. They define friendship in terms of face-to-face talk, duration and trust, respect amid disagreement, and they discuss a gendered dimension in Arendt’s friendships, and the claim that friendship—more than truth—binds the polis, alongside Arendt’s test of whether one can “share a world” with someone.

Podcast host Roger Berkowitz introduces Arendt’s first chapters of The Human Condition as an inquiry into modern alienation shaped by science and Cartesian inwardness and a search for meaningful life amid irreversible losses. He outlines the vita activa—labor (biological life), work (durable worldliness), and action (speech and plurality, generating history/remembrance)—and Arendt’s shift from “human nature” to “human condition,” emphasizing conditions as nonessential. He traces the term vita activa from bios politikos through medieval devaluation versus contemplation, and explains Arendt’s contrast between Greek immortality (worldly remembrance) and philosophical/Christian eternity (worldlessness). Join us at Bard College on via livestream at The Arendt Forum, October 15-17, 2026, on Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?