Articles

Tania Bruguera was Arrested

Tania Bruguera, the Cuban-American artist, founder of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Instar) in Havana, and former NEH/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Fellow here at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has been arrested and placed under house arrest.

Wholeness

In an interview with Ben Klutsey, Danielle Allen explains her idea of “wholeness” as an ideal of American society over and against the unity of e pluribus unum.

It's Time for Our Winter Membership Drive

"Politics," Arendt tells us, "is based on the fact of human plurality." What this means is that politics deals with factual coexistence and the association of different people, people who disagree about fundamental questions of social, economic, moral, and political life. Amidst these differences, politics is the activity in which a plurality of persons works—by persuasion, compromise, speech, and action—to discover or create "essential commonalities...

Whiteness as Original Sin

Roger Berkowitz
Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility has become a bestseller and a symbol, not to mention a cudgel. It promises to teach whtie people how to admit their racism and inveighs against any and all defense mechanisms—“silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback”— by which white people might disclaim their racist tendencies. Coleman Hughes pushes back, writing without white guilt as a black man.

The Threat to our Political Imagination

Roger Berkowitz
The “great evasion” is before us, writes Samuel Moyn. With the victory of Joe Biden and the defeat of Donald Trump, there is a deep desire to return to normalcy. Moyn writes that part of the great evasion is a continued worry that the threat posed by Donald Trump as to democracy. On the contrary, he argues, Trump was a weak President and “American democracy was never under systemic threat from so fickle and hamstrung a wannabe authoritarian.”

Me Parler

Roger Berkowitz

Parler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter, has somewhere around 10 million users. This is a far cry from the 330 active Twitter accounts or the 2.7 billion Facebook accounts. And yet Parler has become a “swamp-like ecosystem” in which the likes of Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and leading QAnon acolytes have free reign. In this fact-free reality, the CIA supercomputers changed votes from Trump to Biden, Republicans were given Sharpie pens to vote with...

Making the World Beautifully Chaotic

Roger Berkowitz
Recently the Hannah Arendt Center Race and Revolution lecture series featured a conversation between my former student Juliana Huxtable and Kimberly Foster. Now Philip Maughan pens a profile of Huxtable that offers one way to think about critical thinking: To resist simplicity and to make the world beautifully chaotic.  

An Autocratic Nationalism with Total Domination 

Roger Berkowitz
In the United States, there is an industry of people turning to Hannah Arendt to raise the spectre of totalitarianism. Sam Moyn has rightly questioned this approach. But there are places where it is worth worrying about the rise of totalitarianism. China—where reeducation camps for Uighur are leading to detention and torture—is also engaging in an unprecedented use of technology and state-sponsored repression to censor its population.

The Destruction of Truth

Roger Berkowitz
Michiko Kakutani offers another approach to the meaning of the modern lie, what she calls the “destruction of truth.” Turning back to Hannah Arendt,