Featured Article
A Politics of Meaning
By Roger BerkowitzIn an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory. For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...
02-14-2020
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Prison Abolition
By Samantha HillThe New York Times Magazine featured an extensive profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s campaign for prison abolition. The article breaks down the provocative term “abolition” to look at the language and arguments that surround prison culture in the United States, where more than 2 million people are incarcerated.
04-28-2019
University in Exile
By Roger BerkowitzSamantha Hill reviews a new book by Judith Friedlander about the history of the New School for Social Research and the “University in Exile” that saved so many European intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt. (free registration required)
04-28-2019
Thinking Under Siege: Masha Gessen
A presentation and discussion from the Hannah Arendt Center's 10th Annual Fall Conference, Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times04-26-2019
Democratic Education and the Open Inquiry Imperative
By Elizabeth BeaumontFromn volume III of HA: The Jounral of the Hannah Arendt Center.
04-26-2019
The Conservative Coates
By Roger BerkowitzWil S. Hylton interviews Paul Coates. Coates was a Black Panther Party leader in Baltimore in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He founded a prison literacy program, owned of a bookstore devoted to community service, and established the publishing company Black Classic Press to disseminate the work of...
04-18-2019
Tough Talk: They Mistook a Backlash for a Movement: Black Men and the Doom of Western Civilization
This talk was presented as a part of The Hannah Arendt Center's Tough Talk Lecture Series, organized by Bard student Mark Williams, Jr.. Introductions by Roger Berkowitz, Director and Founder of the Hannah Arendt Center, and Mark Williams, Jr.. Discussion moderated by Bard alum, Dana Miranda '14.04-17-2019
Left Totalitarianism?
By Roger BerkowitzI continually hope that the right-wing narrative about left-wing intolerance (and even left-wing totalitarianism) is overblown. As a professor at Bard College—a liberal arts college that welcomes and relishes difficult conversations—I hope that the trend of censoring right-wing views is overblown and a passing fad.
04-17-2019
Hate
By Roger BerkowitzI am a few years older than Matt Taibbi, but it turns out we both share an encounter with Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent as a formative experience in our encounter with worlds of politics and journalism.
04-17-2019
Fear of Fascism
By Samantha HillJacob 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