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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
Articles
The Call of the Wild
Roger BerkowitzIn the 1950s, the Dutch drained an area of wetland and a new province called Flevoland rose up from the sea. Part of that province witnessed the emergence of a wetland ecosystem and an ecologist Frans Vera sought to turn the nearly 15,000 acres into an experiment in bringing back a wild world. This area is called Oostvaardersplassen, or OVP, and it is the center of a battle over the idea of “rewilding,” a term that means to “limit the human empire” in the so-called Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch that begins with human activity’s first significant impacts on the planet.”
08-12-2020
A Spray of Good News
Roger BerkowitzThe ingenuity of scientists who have developed dozens of vaccines that may be ready in late 2020 or early 2021 is now matched by a group of scientists at UCSF who have developed a potential way to stop the spread of Covid-19 through aerosolized nanobodies inspired by llamas.
08-06-2020
The Hellscape That is Facebook
Roger BerkowitzScott Galloway and Kara Swisher interview Rick Wilson, the former Republican consultant behind the Lincoln Project. Amidst a wide-ranging discussion, Wilson explains why Facebook is the most important and most destructive political tool for political manipulation ever invented.
08-06-2020
Heinrich Bluecher
Ringo RoesenerHannah Arendt’s husband Heinrich Bluecher was an exceptional and much admired teacher of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Bard College. Bluecher came from a different generation. He never earned a doctorate, or published. He was what Arendt called a “Socratic character.”
08-03-2020
What We Are Reading
The Self-Interest of White Fragility
Roger BerkowitzRoss Douthat offers one of the best and most original explanations of the attraction of the new ideology of white fragility.
07-25-2020
Special Contribution: Our Space
Dariel VasquezDariel Vasquez is a first generation college graduate from Harlem, NY. Dariel graduated from Bard College (Class of 2017) with a joint degree in History and Sociology, and a concentration in Africana-Studies. He is the founder and director of Brothers@. Youth development and mentorship is Dariel’s passion, and he’s been working with young men of color since he was 16 years old.
07-17-2020
A Letter from Roger Berkowitz
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt cannot solve the problems of our world. But her bold, provocative, and fearless thinking is a model for how we can think about the problems we confront today. At the Hannah Arendt Center we don't worship Hannah Arendt. But we seek to nurture the kind of worldly, humanities-based thinking about ethics and politics that Arendt so fully embodied.
07-17-2020
The Canceler in Chief
Roger BerkowitzThere is an apparent myth going around that cancel culture is a phenomenon of the political left. One sees this in the reaction to the Open Letter in Harpers that I signed last week. There was in that letter no mention of “the left.” The letter explicitly mentioned the danger from illiberalism from both the political right and Donald Trump as well as from cultural intolerance for curiosity and experimental thinking.
07-16-2020
What We Are Reading:
The Universal Editor
Samantha HillBari Weiss resigned from The New York Times this week in an open letter, citing the effect social media has had on traditional publishing platforms.
07-16-2020