A WORLD WE SHARE

It is widely recognized that our country is experiencing twin crises of politics and friendship. Opposing political tribes are so fully at odds that political disagreement has been transformed into fundamental hatreds grounded in the dehumanization. At the same time, nearly half of all Americans report having fewer than three friends and the U.S. Surgeon General blames the decline in friendships for an epidemic of loneliness that leads to multiple physical and mental illnesses.

While the crises in politics and friendship are widely recognized, less understood is how they are connected. Atomization and loneliness mean that large masses of people feel abandoned, adrift, and purposeless. It is precisely these lonely and homeless masses who become susceptible to mass movements that underlie right and left-wing populisms, authoritarianism, and potentially totalitarian mass movements.

Hannah Arendt was the 20th century's preeminent theorist of how friendship and politics are connected, and it is to her that we must turn if we are to understand how to work our ways out of this dilemma. Her account of loneliness as the radical origin of modern totalitarian politics is increasingly seen as foundational to understanding the modern crisis of politics. Friendship was central to Arendt's political philosophy. Without friendship, Arendt argued, there could be no politics worth the name. Indeed, she considered the "truths" of reason deeply dangerous to humanity, unless tempered by the claims of friendship.

Roger Berkowitz as an internationally recognized authority on Arendt and heads up the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. In A World We Share he draws on Hannah Arendt's life and philosophy to offer a seminal understanding of the vital relationship between friendship and the health of our politics. Engaging Arendt's thought and illustrating it through biographical episodes, Berkowitz explores friendship as an innately human and political phenomenon, showing how friendship is the key to forging a new politics built on plurality, civility, and disagreement.

This book asks: What are the limits of respect and friendship? Are there people with whom we can't be friends? Can a progressive liberal be friends with a Trump supporter like Marjorie Taylor Greene? Can an abortion rights supporter be friends with an abortion opponent? Can an Israeli be friends with a Hamas supporter? These examples form the hard question at the heart of Arendt's account of political friendship: Who are the people that, amidst our disagreements, I can still respect, talk to, thus giving us the opportunity to together build a shared world?

A World We Share unfolds through stories of Arendt and her friends, some of the most important philosophers, writers, activists, and political actors of the 20th century. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, as an exile in Paris and New York, and as an intellectual continually at war with the orthodoxies of postwar America and Europe, Hannah Arendt sustained herself through deep and complicated friendships with those she considered her tribe of outsiders, including minds as disparate as Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas, Mary McCarthy, her husband Heinrich Blücher, and her former teacher and lover Martin Heidegger, who had committed the ultimate betrayal of joining the Nazi party. A World We Share will explore how these remarkable and complicated friendships shaped and were shaped by Arendt's philosophy.

A World We Share offers not only a compact guide to one of the greatest modern thinkers, but a tool for us to understand the roots of our current political maelstrom, and how we might navigate through it.

A World We Share grows out of a lecture given at the Hannah Arendt Center's 2023 Annual Conference on "Friendship and Politics." At around 25-30,000 words (the book will also engage the MacArthur Fellow artist Anna Schuleit Haber to create a series of 6-10 original three-color drawings), it is short and readable, at once a compelling window into the friendships of one of the 20th century's greatest exile intellectuals and a powerful argument about the place of friendship in politics. It is intended as a keepsake that explores a universal theme that has contemporary urgency, not unlike what Timothy Snyder did with his book On Tyranny. It will speak to readers of Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne (Other Press, 2010), Massimo Pigliucci's How to be a Stoic (Basic Books, 2018) and Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians (Penguin Press, 2020) and The Visionaries (Penguin Press, 2023).

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. It has become one of the most influential academic centers in the world with a broad and engaged public presence. The Center reaches over 50,000 people on its social media channels and its weekly "Amor Mundi" newsletter goes out to 10,000 recipients. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2003) and the editor of numerous collections of essays, including: On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (Library of America, 2024). He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, Quillette, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College. He holds J.D. from Boalt Hall Law School at UC Berkeley and Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley. He has taught politics, law, and philosophy at Amherst College, L'Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, and the Collegium Phänomenologicum, in Citta di Castello, Italy.