“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people so long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you—and make everyone—believe. It has secret police, and snitches, and surveillance. And it tries to fully organize society. It’s the most organized and successful attack on freedom that one can imagine. And so for Arendt, you can’t just be an individual and sit in jail and be free if you’re going to protect yourselves from the dangers of totalitarianism and the end of constitutional, free government, which is what she’s worried about. You need to act politically, and you need to act politically with a certain amount of power.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They discuss the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays that share the title “Civil Disobedience,” one by Arendt, the other by Thoreau, both recently collected in a volume that Berkowitz edited and introduced. Their conversation touches broadly on the works of the two writers, on their differences and disagreements, on the political tumults that inspired their essays, and on the lessons to be learned from them in the present day.

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WORKS CITED
(In order of mention.)

 

“Oceanic Feelings with Lapham’s Quarterly.” Donovan Hohn and Greil Marcus, live at Clio’s Books in Oakland, CA, August 12, 2025. (Tickets to this free event available here.)

 

Greil Marcus. "Americana," Lapham's Quarterly, Fall 2017: Music.

 

Greil Marcus. What Nails It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

 

Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau. On Civil Disobedience. Edited and introduced by Roger Berkowitz. New York: Library of America, 2024.

 

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Introduced by Margaret Canovan. Foreword by Danielle Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

 

Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, HA: The Yearbook of the Hannah Arendt Center, 2025.

 

Dana Villa. Arendt. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021.

 

Hannah Fenichel Pitkin. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

 

Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Library of America, 2025.

 

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Marcus Weigelt. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.

 

Hannah Arendt. “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal, 1943.

 

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. New York: Signet, 2003.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America and Two Essays on America. Translated by Gerald Bevan. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

 

J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Del Rey, 1986.

 

James Baldwin. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Notes of a Native Son. Foreword by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

John Locke. Two Treatises on Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

 

Henry David Thoreau. Walden. New York: Everyman, 1995.

 

Hannah Arendt. On Revolution. Introduced by Jonathan Schell. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Afterword by Reginald Dwayne Betts. New York: HarperOne, 2025.

 

Henry David Thoreau. “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The Avalon Project by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School.

 

Hannah Arendt. On Violence. New York: Mariner, 1970.

 

David Graeber. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.

 

Hannah Arendt. “What is Authority.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Hannah Arendt. Men In Dark Times. New York: Mariner, 1970.