Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was a conversation with the various thinkers I love most dearly.

The day after the 2016 US presidential election I wrote a small piece for the Hannah Arendt Center newsletter Amor Mundi. Caught in the throes of grief, shocked, and uncertain of the future, I said that now we had to learn to love the world. Arendt’s provocation in that moment gave me a sense of calm and purpose, something to hold on to.

From calling President Obama’s nationality into question to the announcement of his candidacy which targeted Hispanic immigrants, Donald Trump has put citizenship at the center of his political agenda. His announcement this week to end Birthright Citizenship should not come as a surprise…

Hannah Arendt was not a fan of Karl Marx, but she took his writing very seriously. There are no less than three volumes of Das Kapital in her personal library at Bard College. She famously opens her chapter on “Labor” in The Human Condition declaring: “In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized.” In her lectures on Marx, which were recently published for the first time in Jerome Kohn’s edited volume Thinking Without a Banister, Arendt begins by noting: “It has never been easy to think and write about Karl Marx.”…

The unthinkable has happened. So we must ask, among other things, why was it unthinkable? How could we not see what was happening? In asking these difficult questions my thoughts keep wandering to Hannah Arendt…

America is not a totalitarian society, but there are elements of totalitarianism in America.

When Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1949, she was attempting to understand the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the world. Instead of offering an historical account of the emergence of fascism, Arendt undertook a historical, material analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and Nazi practices. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s claim in OnThe Concept of History that “the exception is always the rule,” Arendt turned against historicist modes of thinking. Instead of offering a timeline, she sought to highlight the “crystalized elements” of totalitarianism that forged together to make fascism possible…

2016 feels like a disastrous year. Each morning and evening brings fresh news of violence: Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, police shooting black men, police being shot at, BREXIT, Trump, Congress staging a sit-in, attempted military coups. With each media push we cringe: What’s happened now? And once we’ve answered that question, we move into a meta-narrative where the conversation has shifted to: “President Obama hangs his head, again.” “We know what everyone is going to say.” “We feel numb.” It seems in this age of technology that the stream of violence and turmoil is never ending. It is what we have come to expect from the daily news. So, how do we understand this violence? …

There is an exchange about doubt, fear, and thinking toward the beginning of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt’s correspondence. Mary is working on her novel, A Charmed Life, and asks Hannah for her thoughts on the phenomenon of doubt within the tradition of western political thought…