Articles
Featured Article
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
Reading Arendt Now
By Samantha HillPeople often ask me, “Why Arendt?” The honest answer is that I fell in love with her writing my freshman year of college, reading The Human Condition on a brown leather sofa in the library, between the stacks.
05-05-2019
Arendt on Marx
By Samantha HillGeoffrey Wildanger reviews the first volume of Hannah Arendt’s Critical Edition The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente eines Buchs, focusing on Arendt’s unfinished Marx manuscript.
05-02-2019
University in Exile
By Roger BerkowitzSamantha Hill reviews a new book by Judith Friedlander about the history of the New School for Social Research and the “University in Exile” that saved so many European intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt. (free registration required)
04-28-2019
Who is a Whistleblower?
By Roger BerkowitzDaniel Ellsberg was the quintessential whistleblower. He was an expert insider who had evidence of government misconduct. After attempts to expose the misconduct to his superiors, he offered it to journalists. Ellsberg’s whistleblowing led to the publication of “The Pentagon Papers,” which became the raw material for one of Hannah Arendt’s prescient essays “Lying in Politics.”
04-28-2019
The New Loyalty Oaths
By Roger BerkowitzWhen I was a graduate student teaching at UC Berkeley I was asked to sign a statement that I would report people with suspicious immigration backgrounds. When I applied for professorships at certain traditionally religious schools, I was asked to swear that I would not promote abortion in my classes.
04-28-2019
Prison Abolition
By Samantha HillThe New York Times Magazine featured an extensive profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s campaign for prison abolition. The article breaks down the provocative term “abolition” to look at the language and arguments that surround prison culture in the United States, where more than 2 million people are incarcerated.
04-28-2019
The Conservative Coates
By Roger BerkowitzWil S. Hylton interviews Paul Coates. Coates was a Black Panther Party leader in Baltimore in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He founded a prison literacy program, owned of a bookstore devoted to community service, and established the publishing company Black Classic Press to disseminate the work of...
04-18-2019
Left Totalitarianism?
By Roger BerkowitzI continually hope that the right-wing narrative about left-wing intolerance (and even left-wing totalitarianism) is overblown. As a professor at Bard College—a liberal arts college that welcomes and relishes difficult conversations—I hope that the trend of censoring right-wing views is overblown and a passing fad.
04-17-2019
Fear of Fascism
By Samantha HillJacob Mikanowski profiles Timothy Snyder for The Chronicle Review. Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and professor at Yale University. His new work, The Road to Unfreedom, chronicles the rise of authoritarianism today.
04-14-2019