Solidarity! What are we fighting for? With Roger Berkowitz

Hannah Arendt wrote that the break of the Western tradition in the 20th century had left us with “an ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not “What are we fighting against,” but “What are we fighting for.” For Hannah Arendt, solidarity was never sentimental. Unlike pity, it does not unite people through compassion alone. Solidarity honors human dignity by binding people together in a shared political project. It creates a community of common interest across difference—rich and poor, educated and uneducated, successful and striving.

Join Bard College Annandale Professor of Political Studies Roger Berkowitz and the BCB Hannah Arendt Center reading group to discuss some of these pressing questions:

• What is solidarity today?
• Can solidarity exist without a shared religion or ideology?
• Is faith (civic, spiritual, or religious) needed for solidarity?
• How do we nurture care for others in a world of liberal individualism?
• How do we build solidarity amid deep and meaningful difference?
• Can the humanities, arts, and civic practices renew our sense of common life?
• Can solidarity counter the loneliness and purposelessness of modern politics?

From this basis you are welcome to attend the 2026 Arendt Forum online from October 15-17, 2026.

Roger Berkowitz is Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College and Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. His new book is A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026). He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (2005). Recent edited collections include: Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times (DeGruyter, 2026) and Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism (DeGruyter, 2025). He hosts the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt" and writes the weekly Amor Mundi newsletter. Berkowitz is the recipient of the 2024 "Compassion" given by Con-Solatio, and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought awarded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Lecture Hall

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