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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 Truth Dies When Journalism Dies
Sebastian Junger, who will be giving the keynote address at the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2024 Conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, has recently written: “Journalism is important because reality is important, and reality is something that many generals and politicians have a complicated relationship with.” When journalism dies, Junger argues, “The truth dies with it.”02-03-2024
Totalitarianism in the Bathtub
Lyndsey Stonebridge's surprising, wonderful, and novel new biographical tale of Arendt’s life and thinking, We Are Free To Change The World is not your typical biography. It offers a quirky, original, serious, and humane inquiry into Arendt’s work and her continuing relevance in our world.01-20-2024
American Jewish Peace Archive: An Interview with Robert K. Lifton
HAC is proud to sponsor The American Jewish Peace Archive, a comprehensive repository of over 200 interviews with U.S. and Israeli Jews who have advocated for self-determination for Jews and Palestinians. Organized by activist and oral historian Aliza Becker, the Archive seeks to explore the plurality of Jewish thought on Israel. Today, we share an excerpt from a conversation with Robert K.Lifton, who served as President of the American Jewish Congress from 1988-1994.01-13-2024
Rebuilding Trust
Jedediah Britton Purdy writes that democracy depends on trust, but the fracturing world of experts and the loss of authority suffered by nearly all institutions means that trust is dispersed, politicized, and weaponized. : How can we rebuild common institutions of trust? His answer: “We need to practice nondefensively meeting serious disagreement—and proceeding to the rest of the human being.”01-13-2024
Orwell on the Falsity of Hedonism
More so than economics, a politics of meaning and identity is driving our current politicization and polarization. I recently came across George Orwell’s 1940 review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where Orwell notes that the core aspect of Hitler's attraction is “the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop . . . not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.”01-06-2024
Humanities for the People: Settler Colonialism and Moral Derangement
I’ve published an expanded version of my essay on settler colonialism and campus culture on the Arendt Center’s Humanities for the People Medium Page. "What is so unsettling about the critique of settler colonialism is not simply its anti-political retreat into moral righteousness. More dangerous still is the elevation of all so-called indigenous people to be in some way more pure, more deserving, and more innocent than so-called setters."01-06-2024
On Moral Error
There are, of course, important goals pursued by the DEI frameworks on campuses. But too often today the DEI bureaucracy is not actually doing what it ought to do, making our campuses more pluralist, more tolerant, and more thoughtful. Danielle Allen has offered an essay that acknowledges the serious problems with our current DEI framework and seeks to begin a conversation around productive and positive solutions.12-23-2023
The Negation of Politics
Roger BerkowitzOn Friday, December 15th, Masha Gessen was finally awarded the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Bremen. The award ceremony, however, did not take place in the beautiful City Hall in Bremen, where it is traditionally given. Just days before the ceremony, rumors emerged that the Heinrich Böll Foundation, had decided to rescind the award. The cause was an article Gessen published in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.”
12-17-2023
Non-Ideological Thinking
Roger BerkowitzRabbi David Wolpe resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard. He reminded us all that most students at Harvard are there to get an education and are not in the grip of morally reductive ideologies. At the same time, Wolpe recognizes that there is an ideology at Harvard “that grips far too many. The ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.”
12-10-2023