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On Campus Protests
Hannah Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a fundamental right and a distinctly American form of politics. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, who understood civil disobedience as an act of individual conscientious action, Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority.All Categories
Institutional Conservatism
David Kilon interviews Corey Robin about the real dangers posed by Trumpism and the new conservatism of the Republican Party. Hint, it is not authoritarianism.Elusive Racial Progress
Roger BerkowitzIn a common narrative, racial progress in the United States was slow or non-existent until the Civil Rights Movement, at which time there was a sustained improvement in racial equality. Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam argue that this view is not born out by facts. On the contrary, the years in which black Americans performed best on metrics of economic and social prosperity were before the Civil Rights Movement; since the 1970s, black achievement has stagnated.
The Standpoint Epistemology Trap
Roger BerkowitzOlúfémi O. Táiwò reflects on his unease at being asked to speak for underprivileged black people in elite and professional settings. As a Black American of Nigerian descent, Táiwò is an elite; to have him and others like him “represent” and “speak for” poor or excluded people of color contributes, he argues, is more to the maintenance of elitism than to real revolutionary change.
Tania Bruguera was Arrested
Tania Bruguera, the Cuban-American artist, founder of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Instar) in Havana, and former NEH/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Fellow here at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has been arrested and placed under house arrest.Wholeness
In an interview with Ben Klutsey, Danielle Allen explains her idea of “wholeness” as an ideal of American society over and against the unity of e pluribus unum.It's Time for Our Winter Membership Drive
"Politics," Arendt tells us, "is based on the fact of human plurality." What this means is that politics deals with factual coexistence and the association of different people, people who disagree about fundamental questions of social, economic, moral, and political life. Amidst these differences, politics is the activity in which a plurality of persons works—by persuasion, compromise, speech, and action—to discover or create "essential commonalities...Whiteness as Original Sin
Roger BerkowitzRobin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility has become a bestseller and a symbol, not to mention a cudgel. It promises to teach whtie people how to admit their racism and inveighs against any and all defense mechanisms—“silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback”— by which white people might disclaim their racist tendencies. Coleman Hughes pushes back, writing without white guilt as a black man.
The Threat to our Political Imagination
Roger BerkowitzThe “great evasion” is before us, writes Samuel Moyn. With the victory of Joe Biden and the defeat of Donald Trump, there is a deep desire to return to normalcy. Moyn writes that part of the great evasion is a continued worry that the threat posed by Donald Trump as to democracy. On the contrary, he argues, Trump was a weak President and “American democracy was never under systemic threat from so fickle and hamstrung a wannabe authoritarian.”
Plurality and Freedom
Roger Berkowitz“Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.” Arendt sets plurality as the foundation of her understanding of man as a political being. According to plurality, we are all equal, which means we can understand each other and those ancestors who came before us and those will come after us. And yet, as distinct, we need to seek to make ourselves understood.