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Only Power Can Check Power
Hannah Arendt saw America’s strength in its dispersion of power, rooted in civic engagement and local governance. As executive authority expands, the true challenge is not just legal resistance but the reinvigoration of collective action. Can we reclaim the founding spirit of self-governance, or will we cede our power to those who seek to consolidate it? 02-02-2025
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What We're Reading: Standing On His Own
By Roger BerkowitzGeorge Packer won the 2010 Hitchens Prize given annually in honor of Christopher Hitchens. In his acceptance speech, Packer explores why it is highly unlikely that another writer like Hitchens might emerge in our time. “Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?...
01-29-2020
Oikophilia
By Roger BerkowitzRoger Scruton died earlier this month. In obituaries, he was frequently called a conservative philosopher. The Guardian wrote that he “was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual’ who “dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.”
01-29-2020
What We're Reading: A Monumental Effort
By Roger BerkowitzUlrich Baer writes that three new sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker offer a new and important way to engage the debates about what to do with historically meaningful but offensive monuments.
01-29-2020
Whistleblowers
By Roger BerkowitzThis piece was originally published October 27, 2019.
It is still too early to draw the lesson of the whistleblower who came forth this month to report that President Donald Trump has been running a covert and shadow foreign policy aimed at using United States foreign aid to further his personal and political aims.
01-26-2020
How Education Divides Us
By Roger BerkowitzOur societies are coming apart. This is true not only in the United States, but also in Europe and around the world. As technological bubbles enable alternate factual universes, we witness a growing divide amongst people that threatens to undo the common sense that unites us as citizens.
01-22-2020
What We're Reading: Incoherence
From Samantha HillHannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about the need to embrace incoherence against this political moment, which has fallen toward ideological imperatives. Citing Arendt, Williams argues:
01-22-2020
The Need for Analogy
Peter E. Gordon writes a defense of historical analogy in the New York Review of Books. Gordon situates his considered argument against the backdrop of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issuing a blanket statement, refusing historical comparison to the Holocaust in response to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez calling the detention camps on the U.S. boarder “concentration camps” last year. — Samantha Hill01-15-2020
“It Doesn’t Really Matter”
Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood argue that empirical studies show that when Americans of both parties are confronted with corrections to factual misstatements, they overwhelmingly change their opinion of the facts. — Roger Berkowitz01-15-2020
What We're Reading: Antisemitism & Free Speech
By Samantha HillKen Stern, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, writes about Donald Trump’s Executive Order that was signed this week. Stern was responsible for drafting the working definition of antisemitism used in Trump’s order when he worked for the American Jewish Committee, and is now worried that it is being used to silence free speech on college campuses.
12-18-2019