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Temptations of Tyranny
Rod Dreher’s conflicted support for President Trump illustrates a broader crisis among intellectual conservatives who fear the "soft totalitarianism" of liberal institutions yet embrace the hard authoritarianism of executive overreach. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the essay contends that true freedom is preserved not through charismatic leaders but through the multiplication and decentralization of citizen power. Revitalizing democracy, it argues, requires stubborn, local acts of collective governance rather than the dangerous temptation to concentrate authority in a single figure.04-27-2025
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Model of Courage: Adolph L. Reed Jr.
On Wednesday, February 17th, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College welcomed Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Adolph L. Reed Jr. as keynote speaker for its first “Courage to Be” Lecture of the Spring 2021 semester. Written by 2020/21 Student Fellow Sage Saccomanno03-04-2021
How To Fight Illiberal Democratic Movements?
Roger BerkowitzThere is a widespread misconception that we are seeing a threat to democracy. More rightly, we are witnessing a democratic revolt against liberal-constitutional-limited government. The question, then, is how liberal-constitutional republics should react to threats from populist democratic movements. The general view at least in the United States is that constitutional democracies allow its critics—even its existential critics—the benefit of freedom of speech.
02-25-2021
From Data to Data, Without the Theory
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt was skeptical of social science theories. Theorists, or problem solvers as she often referred to them, are people of “great self-confidence.” They are confident in the education and intelligence and they “pride[] themselves on ‘rational.’” Dedicated to rationality, they “were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory...'"
02-18-2021
Firings and Prosecutions This Week
Roger BerkowitzIn what seems a fairly usual occurrence, two journalists and two professors were fired or prosecuted this week for running afoul of mainstream opinions or, in Poland, legally prohibited opinions. John McWhorter argues that firing a New York Times reporter for using the N-word to refer to the N-word and not as a slur obfuscates the difference between a slur and a taboo. Ben Cohen reports on the prosecution of Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in Poland.
02-11-2021
Old Letters From Loved Ones
Jacob RiversThe latest issue of Poetry Magazine, guested edited by poets Tara Betts and Joshua Bennett, focuses on work written by currently and formerly incarcerated poets, bringing a systematically suppressed chorus of voices to the forefront of the poetry community’s publishing landscape. Editor Tara Betts writes in her introduction to the issue, “The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human.
02-04-2021
We All Should Have Something to Hide
Roger BerkowitzOne repeated argument against apps that allow for encryption and privacy is that those who have nothing to hide should not worry about the loss of privacy. But who is it that has nothing to hide? The human heart and mind is a factory of fantasies that remind each of us of the darkness that lurks within us.
01-29-2021
The Political Uses of Shame
Manu Samnotra argues that shame—an intensely private emotion—can play an important role in political engagement. Building on Hannah Arendt’s writings, Samnotra argues that shame can motivate people to create political spaces and engage in political action.01-14-2021
The Politics of Small Things
Roger BerkowitzJeffrey Goldfarb writes that his 2006 book The Politics of Small Things was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that “politics is about people meeting each other as equals in their differences, speaking and acting together.” In his Democracy Seminar, Goldfarb invites activists to speak about the ways they act together.
12-23-2020
The Credentialed Few
Roger BerkowitzJennifer Senior writes that the reason Congress is out of touch is not that it has too many millionaires, but that it is filled with people with too many academic credentials. This is a fact central to the argument for sortition—the selection of representatives by lot rather than by election. The Arendt Center held a webinar asking the question of whether it would be good to bring randomly selected citizens into the legislative process in October.
12-23-2020