Hannah Arendt Center Presents

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

Roger Berkowitz will talk with Thomas Chatterton Williams (HAC Senior Fellow) about his provocative new book, Summer of our Discontent: The Age of Uncertainty and the Demise of Discourse (Knopf, August 5, 2025) that paints a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years. Free. Advance registration closed, but onsite registration will remain open.

Williams' incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice (“anti-racist”) orthodoxy, which has profoundly influenced how we think about diversity and freedom of expression, often with complex or paradoxical consequences. Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives. Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s, he has written for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Le Monde, among other publications. He lives in Paris and New York.

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz is the author The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). Berkowitz is editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (2024); The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition (2020) and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications.He is the winner of the 2024 Compassion Award given by Con-Solatio and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.

THIS EVENT WILL BE RECORDED, WHICH WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE AT A LATER DATE.

---

For more information, call 845-758-6822.

Time: 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File