The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond. Today's panelists are The Empire Report’s JP Miller, Former Times Union Associate Editor Mike Spain, Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and speakers from the Hannah Arendt Center Conference Uday Singh Mehta, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Shai Lavi.
Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. A Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world.
Uday Singh Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow (awarded by Central European University and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College).
Lyndsey Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include her latest: We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster. She lives in London and France.
Shai Lavi is a Professor of Law and heads the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is also the co-director of the Minerva Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of End of Life, and until 2017 was also the founding director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics – both at Tel Aviv University.
The Hannah Arendt Center’s upcoming Conference “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics” responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. The conference asks: How can we make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to pluralist politics? The 16th annual Arendt conference will bring notable speakers to Bard College in Annandale on October 17th and 18th to discuss the implications of tribalist politics just weeks before the national US election.
The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality.
Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the commonsense connections that are part of living with and amidst one's tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices.
At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus, tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.
Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of persons in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community.
This panel is in a new pre-fund drive format that aims to provide information and discussion on topics pertaining to the 2024 election.
