Amor Mundi

Articles

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

Article

Fear of Fascism

By Samantha Hill
Jacob 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

Article

The Microbiome

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs report on one of the greatest threats to our way of life, the rise of bacteria and fungi that are impervious to medications. The culprit, as with so much in our modern health and environmental crises, is the overuse of antibiotics and antifungal medications in farming.

04-14-2019

Article

Courage to Be Student Essay: Livy Marie Donahue on Deogratias Niyizonkiza

By Livy Marie Donahue
Deogratias Niyizonkiza visited Bard College on March 4th, as the second speaker of the 2019
Courage to Be lecture series.

04-11-2019

Article

No Crisis, But a Danger

By Roger Berkowitz
The folks at PEN ask, is there a crisis of free speech on college campuses. And once again, they answer “no.”

04-07-2019

Article

Student Fellow Opportunities

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities is hiring fellows to work on the Campus Plurality Forum projects Tough Talks and Dorm Room Conversations for the 2019-2020 Academic Year.

04-02-2019