Friendship on the Knife’s Edge

Today, Jason and Aaron talk with Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World.

Roger makes a provocative argument: our political crisis is, at its heart, a crisis of friendship. Drawing on Arendt, he asks what it means to share a world with people whose beliefs we find deeply wrong, and whether friendship can sustain that world when agreement about truth cannot.

We talk about what distinguishes civic friendship from ordinary civility, whether friendship asks too much of citizens, and where its limits lie when political disagreements involve harm to other people. And we end with the practical question of how to build the relationships and institutions that make living together possible.

Produced by Landry Ayres