A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz; Yale University Press, 176 pp., $28
In October 2016, a colleague phoned Roger Berkowitz, a professor of politics and human rights at Bard College and the founding director of the Hannah Arendt Center, to warn him. A public letter was circulating, accusing Berkowitz of giving a platform to fascism: He had invited a German philosophy professor, by then a member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), to a conference at Bard. Fifty-six political theorists signed the letter, including the colleague who called. She told him that there was no space in the present moment for views so out of keeping with what the liberal left took to be self-evident. She hoped, however, that they could still be friends. “You have my number,” he told her. “If you disagreed with me, you could have called me before you signed a public letter against me.”
The exchange opens Berkowitz’s new book, A World We Share, which details the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s sometimes stormy friendships. In it, Berkowitz expresses a vitally important position on friendship, drawing a sharp distinction between his view and that of his colleague. “For her, friendship meant loyalty to a common cause,” he writes, but “for me, it meant loyalty to a shared world.” This slim, elegant book about Arendt’s life among her friends is likewise an attempt to state clearly what her example has to teach us and why it matters more now than it has in a long time.
The usual story is that friendship rests on shared values. We like the people who see the world as we do, and when they stop seeing it that way, something has gone wrong with the friendship. The sorting of American life into tribes has quietly made this model official: Friendship is the private face of agreement, and agreement always comes first. Berkowitz thinks this is exactly backwards, and he has Arendt to prove it.
In 1946, she sent Gershom Scholem her essay “Zionism Reconsidered.” He was furious, accused her of betraying her people, and demanded that she recant. She defended herself but ended her reply not with an argument but with a question: Could they still be friends? She warned him against becoming “a fanatic for truth,” said he had unleashed “an orgy of truth-telling,” and wrote the sentence Berkowitz’s book keeps returning to: “A human being is far more valuable than his opinions.” In 1963, after Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, Scholem charged her with lacking love for the Jewish people. She agreed. “I love in fact only my friends and am fully incapable of any other love.” A people, she said, is an abstraction. One cannot love it. Friendship is loyalty to particular persons, not to positions, and that is why Arendt thought it a sturdier foundation for a shared world than truth, certainty, or being right.
What keeps the book from being one more plea for civility is a phrase Arendt wrote to Kurt Blumenfeld that same year. She had also sent him “Zionism Reconsidered,” knowing he would hate it, and waited five months for a reply that didn’t arrive. “Friendship,” she finally wrote him, “is rare enough, and it is not to be except on the knife’s edge.” Berkowitz takes the phrase for a chapter title, and it is the real center of his argument.
He identifies three marks of friendship in Arendt: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. Notice that each is a form of exposure. Conversation means speaking aloud to someone who can answer back. Duration means staying long enough to be disappointed. Respect, in Arendt’s sense, means allowing a friend to keep an opinion you find disagreeable instead of demanding that the friend surrender it. Friendship is not the comfortable alternative to politics. It is the risky one. Nobody made Arendt send that essay. “Caution might have told Arendt to let her friend remain silent,” Berkowitz writes. “She could not do so.”
I read this book in Washington, over a weekend spent with policymakers and politicians with whom I had very little in common. And something struck me both about the book and the conversations of that weekend. What we have built, in the texture of daily life, is a culture of caution. The public letter instead of the phone call. The 3,000-word email with studies attached, which Berkowitz himself received from a former student of 15 years over the war in Gaza. The dinner where everyone has agreed in advance not to bring up politics. The quiet unfollow. None of these is an act of hostility. They are risk management, and they work.
Today, you never get the Scholem letter. But you also never get what Arendt had with Karl Jaspers after he issued an ultimatum to her about Heidegger, she refused it, and he backed down: “The confidence in the friendship is so great that you know nothing can hurt.” That confidence can only be bought with the thing it protects against. Arendt said that “a two-week-old friendship does not exist.” Neither, one suspects, does a 20-year friendship in which nothing was ever put at stake. Berkowitz’s colleague wanted the friend without the friendship, and she is not unusual. We have come to treat exposure, risk, and vulnerability as design flaws. The result is a great many relationships that have never been tested into existence.
An election is the moment at which a polity is asked to stand on the knife’s edge together, and the dominant instinct this fall was to make sure you are standing only beside people who already agree. The same logic now governs the world beyond our borders. Alliances long described as resting on “shared values” are discovering how little that phrase holds once the values diverge, and the alternative is a politics of pure interest, which is to say no friendship at all. Arendt saw this coming. In her 1959 Lessing speech, she warned against two temptations at once: tribal nationalism and the “cloud-cuckoo-land” of a cosmopolitan humanism that floats above actual differences. A German and a Jew under the Third Reich could be friends, she said, but not by asking, “Are we not both human beings?” That would have been “mere evasion of reality.” They could be friends only by saying to each other: “A German and a Jew, and friends.” Friendship across difference begins by naming the difference, instead of pretending to dissolve it. That is harder than shared values, and it is the only version that survives contact with a real disagreement.
If Berkowitz’s book has a blind spot, it is here. He underrates how much security the knife’s edge requires. Arendt could afford to lose the philosopher and Zionist Hans Jonas as a friend for two years over her Eichmann book (it took his wife to end it: “After all, it is only a book”) because she had her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, at home. “For God’s sake,” she wrote to Blücher, “you are my four walls.” Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose friendship Berkowitz cites, had lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court: Neither would lose anything by liking the other, and they were going to share a bench for decades, whether they liked each other or not. The edge is a place you can stand only if there is a bit of underlying safety. In a country where many people feel they have very few bonds to spare, the caution Berkowitz laments may be less cowardice than scarcity and an awareness of existential insecurity, and I know from some firsthand experience that the chapter on Arendt’s marriage is doing more argumentative work than he lets on. You need something like a homeland before venturing out to take the risk of genuine friendship.
Arendt also knew when to step off the edge of friendship, and so does Berkowitz. Benno von Wiese, a friend from her student days who became an enthusiastic Nazi Party member “without any external compulsion,” got a cold reception after the war. Of Eichmann she wrote that “no member of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth with you.” Reconciliation, in her phrase, “has a merciless boundary.” Berkowitz calls this a double courage: “to live with what we can, to reconcile without forgiving, and to cast out what we must.” The second courage is what keeps the first from collapsing into sentiment. His chapter on limits is among the shortest in the book, and the one I wished were longer; he raises the question of whether a thoughtful person can be friends with the architects of the current deportation regime without hazarding an answer. But he is right that the question is one of judgment, not of purity.
Arendt liked the image of a table. People sitting around it are related and separated at once; remove the table and their shared world disappears. Berkowitz ends A World We Share with his own table, grilled fruit, and a statement that encapsulates his vision: “We may no longer share the same truths. But we can, if we are friends, still share a meal, a story, and a world.” It is a hopeful sentence. The book’s harder and better insight is that the meal is a risk, that friendship in any sense worth the name is a type of bet on another person’s character rather than a reward for their agreement, and that we have grown very reluctant to make the wager it requires.
