Articles

What We Are Reading:
The Rule of Law Under Siege

By Roger Berkowitz
We live in irregular times and the President and members of the Executive branch of government are pushing the bounds of Constitutional norms. But there are lines that should not be crossed if we are to preserve the virtues and benefits of limited government. One of those norms is quite simply the rule of law and authority of the Federal judiciary.

What We Are Reading:
Impotent Bigness

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt McManus writes about a dimension of Hannah Arendt’s work that he believes is given short shrift: Arendt’s critique of bigness and of “political leaders who embody the traits of “impotent bigness,” as she framed it.” Bigness in politics for Arendt is a danger to freedom. It goes together with the rise of bureaucracy and centralized government. 

What We Are Reading:
Los Angeles

By Samantha Hill

Alex Ross writes about “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile.” Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, found refuge in Los Angeles during the war years, and turned the city into “the capital of German literature in exile.”  

Lisbon

By Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt Center NEH fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams write about his travels in Lisbon, Portugal, reflecting on Hannah Arendt’s own time there for three months in 1941, as she fled Nazi-occupied France. Williams observes that “According to legend, it was Odysseus himself who, during his meandering trip around the Mediterranean and past the Pillars of Hercules—guided by a thunderbolt from Zeus—founded Olisipo...

What We Are Reading:
Longyearbyen

By Roger Berkowitz
We are all learning about the year 1918 when the last influenza pandemic swept across the world leaving millions dead in its wake. Most of all we have learned the difference in the impact of the flu in Philadelphia, where rallies and crowds were allowed, and in St. Louis, where public health officials banned such gatherings. But there are other lessons to learn from the last great viral pandemic.

Political Hobbyism

By Roger Berkowitz
Eitan Hersh argues that college-educated voters only think they are engaged in politics, while what “they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.” When college-educated voters donate online, follow the polls, and become fans of a candidate, they are less doing politics than participating in a spectator sport as spectators. And these hobbyists, Hersh writes, are hurting American politics. 

The Prejudices of Intellectualism

By Roger Berkowitz
In an essay on Hannah Arendt in a series on the Great Thinkers, Finn Bowring rightly focuses on Arendt’s worry about the power of intellectual elites. At home in abstraction and theories, intellectuals have an uncanny ability to lose themselves in flights of fancy and reject or deny the facts of this world. The philosophical temptation is to live amongst logically coherent fictions and deny those real facts that frustrate their beautiful forms.

What We Are Reading: Normal

By Samantha Hill
Writing for The Point, Becca Rothfeld critiques the work of Irish novelist Sally Rooney. Rothfeld’s analysis reflects upon the distinction between Rooney’s public persona as a writer, and what her novels reveal about this political moment. 

Member Essay: Trials and Tribe-ulations: The Dangerous Degeneracy of Trump’s Amerika

by Phil Burpee
    My people on my father’s side first came on record on this continent in the person of one Thomas Burkby who was put in the stocks in Boston in 1632 for ‘taking of strong waters whilst on watch duty’. Thomas seemingly sobered up enough to go on to have five sons from whom was spawned the misspelled diaspora that was to become Burpees.