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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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The Conscious Pariahs
Roger BerkowitzPhilip Roth and Hannah Arendt are buried but two meters from each other in the Bard College Cemetery. Two of the greatest Jewish intellectuals and writers of the 20th century, Arendt fled Nazi Germany. Roth, as Corey Robin writes, “fled his parents and kept going home.” In an essay on Roth and Arendt, Robin begins on their shared propensity to challenge the Jewish consensus, to bring a critical eye to bear on their own people.
05-14-2021
Does It Matter Where it Came From?
Roger BerkowitzThere is a new journal dedicated to difficult topics, The Journal of Controversial Ideas. But the most provocative and well-researched essay of the week was published independently on Medium. Nearly three million people have died from the Covid 19 novel Coronavirus, and yet we still know remarkably little about how the virus emerged. The origin-story of the novel Coronavirus became a political hot potato under the Trump administration.
05-06-2021
An Attack on the Soul
Roger BerkowitzIn response to news that Howard University is disbanding its Classics Department, Cornell West reminds us that Frederick Douglas and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. were inspired and nurtured by the classics. West argues that the attack on the classics is an attack on the soul and symptom the moral and spiritual rot of American culture.
04-22-2021
To Think What We Are Doing
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is not about human nature. Arendt says little if anything about what it means to be human in the sense of our natural humanity. Her inquiry is premised on the fact that we humans are conditioned beings, that we are born into an already existing world. That world is made through human artifice; it also conditions us humans insofar as we must live and die in a humanly built world.
04-15-2021
“Faith Changes Its Object, It Does Not Die”
Roger BerkowitzIn Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy secures and fosters political and civil liberties, religion nurtures a “civic religion” that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism.
04-08-2021
The Courage to Be Lecture Series:
Steven Zeidman
Valentina Flores '22There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, a reality that makes the United States notorious for being the world's leader in incarceration. In recent years, however, this phenomenon—mass incarceration, has gained momentum as a matter of discussion in conversations about criminal justice.
04-02-2021
Without Vision, the People Perish
Elisa Gonzalez writes about Marilynne Robinson’s novels with a particular attention to her account of race, the Church, and the vision of what America might be.04-01-2021
The New Left and Ideological Politics
Roger BerkowitzLouis Menand writes a long and important account of the “New Left” as it emerged in the cultural politics of the 1960s. Pace Menand, the core tenets of the “New Left” are a fight against “the system” and an understanding of politics as an existential struggle in self-actualization.
03-25-2021
Power is Everywhere and Nowhere
Roger BerkowitzNadav Eyal writes that our time will be remembered for what it lacks and for what it destroys. It is a period of negation and nihilism consumed by a rage against the machine and a distrust of the system. Writing in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt saw that the glorification of violence witnessed in both theory and practice was in large part driven by a global sense of powerlesseness...
03-18-2021