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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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Persuasion
Roger BerkowitzAt the very core of Arendt’s thinking about politics is her view that politics is about opinions and not truth. We all come to politics with opinions formed at times by prejudices and at other times by reason and judgment. Persuasion is the coin of politics but it is not always rational and often emotional and raw.
09-16-2023
The Boss In Their Own Country
Roger BerkowitzThe reasons for the rise of ethno-nationalism are many, and include economic insecurity, an epidemic of loneliness, and the algorithmic seduction of social media. Also leading to the rise of the right is widespread distrust and even disdain for elite, liberal technocrats who have presided over rising globalization that has brought very little advantage to most working class voters.
09-16-2023
Humanist Virtue and Constitutional Structure
Roger BerkowitzFor Arendt, the experience of freedom, of constituting and self-governing, was an essential factor in the emergence of a free political system. The great threat to freedom Arendt perceived in the United States was, first, that the U.S. Constitution did not institutionalize spaces for the practice of freedom for everyday citizens and, second, that the drive for bourgeois wealth and success tended to overwhelm the love of political action.
09-08-2023
Taking Liberties
Roger BerkowitzOne of the perils of running the Hannah Arendt Center is that I am expected to respond to controversies that I would rather avoid. I strive to be ecumenical, to allow all sorts of readings of Arendt, not to impose my own or disqualify others. One recent essay, however, has caused quite the stir. It is the pugilistic and highly conceptual essay by Samuel Moyn that warns us to be wary of reading Arendt’s work because, he argues, she was a “Cold War liberal.”
09-03-2023
Friendship. Politics, and Human Meaningfulness
Roger BerkowitzIn the wake of the Alpine Fellowship on Human Flourishing in Fjallnas, Sweden last week, I’ve been reading Lisa Miller’s book The Awakened Brain. Miller makes what my daughter says is an obvious argument, that mental illness and especially depression and anxiety can be prevented and also helped by having a rich spiritual and inner life. Hannah Arendt isn’t mentioned in Miller’s book, but the fundamental idea underlying Miller’s work is the Arendtian worry about the loss of meaningfulness, the absence of purpose, and the feeling of abandonment that has become widespread in the modern world.
08-20-2023
The Power of Past Prejudices
Roger BerkowitzWolfram Eilenberger finds in Hannah Arendt’s encounter with Rahel Varnhagen a paradox between the rational individual and the power of past prejudices.
08-13-2023
The Double Weaponization of Loneliness
The existential crisis facing humanity is likely neither the devastation of the earth from global warming nor the destruction of humanity by a rogue AI. Indeed, artificial intelligence, in its promise of exponential technological advance, may change the calculus of the most apocalyptic climate change models. But what AI does threaten to do is to make ever increasing numbers of human beings economically superfluous.08-13-2023
Kidnapped
Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason writes about the poet Shane McCrae, who at the age of three was kidnapped by his white grandparents and raised separately from his black father.08-06-2023
Hannah Arendt Prize 2023
Roger BerkowitzMy Bard Colleague Masha Gessen has won the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. Porter Anderson covers the announcement.
08-06-2023