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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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What We Are Reading: Nonviolence
By Samantha HillMasha Gessen interviews Judith Butler for The New Yorker. Butler’s new book, “The Force of Nonviolence” tackles the way we can imagine “an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world.” In the interview, Butler addresses questions of nonviolence, equality, and the liberal notion of individualism.
02-18-2020
A Politics of Meaning
By Roger BerkowitzIn an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory. For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...
02-14-2020
The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science
An essay in Arendt Studies by Roger Berkowitz (2018) written for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) was recently republished in The Abstract Elephant, a publicly available journal.02-14-2020
What We're Reading: Justus Rosenberg
By Samantha HillBard College Professor Justus Rosenberg has written a book about his Time in the Pyenees: Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Mann, and More, working with the Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.
02-12-2020
What We're Reading: George Steiner
By Samantha HillWhen Hannah Arendt went to study with Martin Heidegger, he was known as the “magician from Marbach,” because he made Plato and Aristotle come to life. As Arendt later reflected, people went to study with Heidegger to learn how to think. In an insightful and graceful essay, George Steiner takes on Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger, in a review essay of their correspondence: “The Magician in Love.”
02-12-2020
Propaganda and Cynicism
By Roger BerkowitzMcKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.
02-12-2020
The Need to Be Right
By Roger BerkowitzJon Baskin in The Point identifies a disturbing tone in liberal culture. He recalls Lionel Trilling’s 1947 admission of his “deep distaste for liberal culture.” While Trilling identified with liberalism, he wrote that too often...
02-05-2020
Winning Chess, Winning Politics
By Roger BerkowitzGarry Kasparov argues that those who oppose President Trump from all sides need to come together to defeat him. He warns that, “As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them.” Witnessing the rise of radicalism on all sides, he writes, “Rage...
02-05-2020
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