A World We Share: Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human.

Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, reminds us that Arendt wasn’t a postmodern relativist who believed everyone’s opinions were equally credible. Facts mattered to her enormously — but a thousand facts about immigration will not verify migration policy, and two people with Harvard doctorates, especially if they are friends, can still disagree about how many people to let into America.

Nor is Berkowitz presenting Hannah Arendt as an anodyne centrist. For Arendt, he argues, people are plural and always will be so. We can, and should, have strong opinions that sometimes cause us to raise our voices in anger. But an argument, she believed, should end in disagreement rather than discord. So, when she and Scholem fell out all over again seventeen years later, this time over her argument about the banality of Nazi evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she hoped it wouldn’t affect their friendship. It’s our ability to disagree and reconcile (which isn’t the same as forgiveness) that makes us human, Arendt says. That’s what we should — indeed, must — share if we are to rebuild our broken world.

FURTHER READING

•   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026)

•   The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, which Berkowitz founded and directs

•   Yesterday’s episode featuring Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick, author of AI and Political Freedom, articulating an engineer’s view of politics — listen or watch

•   Sherry Turkle on Artificial Intimacy — last week’s episode Berkowitz praises: listen or watch

•   Keri Leigh Merritt on the American dissident Lillian Smith, who, like Hannah Arendt, was An Inconvenient Woman: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Better facts will not fix politics. This is the claim that puts Arendt at odds with almost everyone currently worrying about democracy. We tend to assume that misinformation is the disease and that better education, better journalism and better facts are the cure. Arendt did not believe it. Facts mattered to her enormously, but she insisted they have very little power to tell us what to do: twenty facts about immigration still will not settle immigration, and two people who have both been as well educated as it is possible to be can still disagree about Trump. Berkowitz traces the opposite assumption back to Plato, who watched Athens execute Socrates, concluded the many could not be trusted, and invented the philosopher king to rule in their place.

2. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. Arendt’s distinction here is precise and worldly rather than moral. Forgiveness, as she understood it, is Christian: it implies that you might have done the same, so you should not throw stones. Reconciliation claims nothing of the kind. It says that what you did