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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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Unprincipled Power
Roger BerkowitzAlexei Navalny was poisoned and almost murdered by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Languishing in a Russian prison, Navalny has a front row seat to witness the depravities of the Putin regime. The real danger of contemporary authoritarians, Navalny argues, is corruption.
08-26-2021
Masters Degrees and the Bureaucratic Boom in Bullshit Jobs
Roger BerkowitzWilliam Deresiewicz asks after the boom in Masters programs--“From 1991 to 2019, the number of master’s degrees awarded rose by 143 percent. That’s 70 percent faster than bachelor’s degrees and 84 percent faster than doctorates.” These programs are cash cows for universities and are frequently financed by huge amounts of debt by students seeking to invest in their futures.
08-20-2021
The College Pyramid
Roger BerkowitzRebecca Gordon asks about the ethics of teaching in Universities where students increasingly graduate with immense debt and few meaningful prospects. She notes that “The average number of doctorates earned over the last decade is almost 53,000 annually. In other words, we're talking about nearly 530,000 PhDs produced by American higher education in those 10 years alone.
08-20-2021
College Hierarchies
Mitchell L. Stevens argues that despite the “enduring faith that a college education creates opportunity for rising up social ranks,” empirical evidence suggests that at least some college degrees may actually reinforce social and economic stratification.08-20-2021
VIDEO: Crisis in Education
As part of the Richard Saltoun’s Gallery’s reading group around its Exhibit “On Hannah Arendt,” Roger Berkowitz hosted a conversation with Griselda Pollock on Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Education”08-20-2021
The New Class War
Roger BerkowitzDavid Brooks revisits what he got right and wrong about the rise of the creative class. Above all, he admits that he was wrong when he wrote in 2000, “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste. Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That view that the creative elite was benign and open to all was, he writes, “one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.”
08-06-2021
Against Bad Ideas
Glenn Loury writes the inaugural essay in the newly launched Journal of Free Black Thought:08-06-2021
A Full-Text Search Tool for the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress
On June 16th the Hannah Arendt Center hosted a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of the new Library of Congress Hannah Arendt Papers digital archive. You can watch it here. Rob McQueen, one of our members, has now created a supplemental search tool that enables full-text searches of the archive. McQueen explains his new search tool below.07-29-2021
In AI We Trust
The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network of OSUN partnered with the Central European University (CEU) and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to award Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, the first annual Yehuda Elkana Fellowship.07-29-2021