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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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Tekhines
Sarah Chandler is discovering the ancient Jewish art of measuring graves, or tekhines, and she writes about her visit to Hannah Arendt’s grave at Bard College. "I’ve invited my friends to accompany me to the cemetery that sits in the center of the campus of Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. It is just over 100 miles north of my Brooklyn apartment, but I suspect it will take us at least three hours to get there on a Monday afternoon."03-31-2024
The Joy of Arendt Center Conferences
Arendt Center member Neil Gussman writes about his experience attending Hannah Arendt Center Conferences, most recently our conference Between Power and Authority.03-31-2024
What we are reading: The Shoah After Gaza
Pankaj Mishra, who spoke at the 2022 Arendt Center Conference Rage and Reason, reflects on how to think about the Shoah in the wake of the war in Gaza and Israel.03-24-2024
What we're listening to: Victims, Villians, and Settler Colonialism
Mike Cosper explores why the West requires Israel to play by different rules when it comes to defense and modern warfare.03-24-2024
"Mafioso Politics"
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt insists that we look reality in the face and seek to understand even what is most strange, difficult, and horrific. In a new essay, Timothy Snyder analyzes the context of how Trump is seeking to normalize criminality and violence. Snyder’s essay reminds us of Arendt’s worry in her final essay, that “Public opinion is dangerously inclined to condone not crime in the streets but all political transgressions short of murder.”
03-24-2024
The End of The Golden Age
Franklin Foer has an essay arguing that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” What Foer calls the Golden Age was not only good for Jews; the emergence of Jewish-Americans helped define a new American liberalism, one the shed the assimilationist metaphor of the melting pot for the hyphenated-identity of the mosaic. But that Golden Age is ending. Antisemitism, once relegated to the fringes of American society, is back with a vengeance.03-17-2024
Liberalism and Liberal-Democracy
N.S. Lyons interviews Polish philosopher and politician Ryszard Legutko about Polish politics and liberal democracy. Asked about the difference between liberalism and progressivism, Legutko answers, "As I see it, liberalism is not about freedom but about power and social engineering . . . liberals always assume a dominant position, claiming to know how to distribute freedom in the optimal proportions, therefore, deserving to be the irrevocable referees."03-17-2024
Chilling Pro-Palestinian Speech
Eyal Press, has written about my Bard College colleague and collaborator, Ken Stern, who has become a critic of the chilling effect of using the the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.) definition of antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses. Stern was one of the original creators of the definition, which was intended to help quantify incidences of antisemitism. But he has always opposed the use of the definition to shut down or regulate speech.03-17-2024
Check out our new Hannah Arendt Personal Library Website
Over the last few months, we have been improving our online navigation for the Hannah Arendt Personal Library (HAPL). The Stevenson library’s new Archives & Special Collections site was launched last week and with it, a new page for the HAPL!03-17-2024