A new episode of Philosophy for All is out. I spoke with Professor Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press).

Berkowitz’s central claim is that, for Arendt, politics rests on friendship rather than on truth. Here is an overview of what we cover.

Truth and politics. Arendt held that truth has no place in politics. She did not think people who learn the same facts will reach the same opinions; that is what she meant by plurality. Facts still matter, and we have no right to our own. But they settle less than we assume. Questions such as immigration or taxation have no single correct answer, only competing political judgements. Berkowitz warns that treating our own views as the truth, and politics as the job of imposing it, breeds the resentment between educated elites and everyone else that Arendt foresaw.

What politics is for. For Arendt, the aim of politics is not just security but meaning. Humans are storytelling creatures, and a political community is where we speak, act and are remembered. That is why she thought the basic human right is the right to belong to such a community.

Friendship. Drawing on Arendt’s letters, Berkowitz identifies three elements of friendship. It begins in conversation. Through conversation, friends build a small common world. And that world is held together by respect, not agreement. Politics, on this view, works the same way at a larger scale.

Arendt’s friends. We look at her political friendships with Zionist thinkers such as Kurt Blumenfeld and Gershom Scholem, which survived sharp disagreement; her intellectual friendships with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; and her friendships with women such as Mary McCarthy and Hilde Fränkel.

Tribes and prejudice. Berkowitz presents Arendt as both a tribalist and a cosmopolitan: she embraced belonging to a people while rejecting tribal nationalism and the nation state. Since we all have prejudices, politics is the work of becoming aware of them, often by talking to the people whose views we find hardest to hear.

The limits of friendship. Arendt did not think we should be friends with everyone. Berkowitz explains her distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation, and why she could reconcile with Heidegger, who acknowledged his wrong, but not with Eichmann. He closes with the controversy over a speaker he invited to the Hannah Arendt Center, and what it taught him about friendship.

Check out the full interview:

AI disclaimer: This post was drafted from the interview transcript with the help of AI (Claude by Anthropic).