Featured Article
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
All Categories
The Atom(ization) Bomb - Hannah Arendt’s Warning, Critical Race Ideology and the Coming Totalitarian Nightmare
Seventy brief years have passed since the controversial political theorist, Hannah Arendt, published what many consider her seminal work, On the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Now, standing at the fiery dawn of the new Age of Victimhood, with collectivist ideology once again in the ascendency and the haunting spectre of identity politics looming large across the West, Arendt’s key insights are simultaneously as poignant and, one fears, prescient as ever.04-23-2021
Regulating Artificial Intelligence
The European Union has issued a “Proposal for a Regulation on a European Approach for Artificial Intelligence.” Download it here. Sam Schechner and Parmy Olson write that “European officials want to limit police use of facial recognition and ban the use of certain kinds of AI systems, in one of the broadest efforts yet to regulate high-stakes applications of artificial intelligence.”04-22-2021
Our Epistemological Crisis
Roger BerkowitzThe crisis of truth is upon us and for many this is a phenomenon associated with Donald Trump. But Hannah Arendt diagnosed the crisis of truth in modern politics over 60 years ago. And in her essay “Truth and Politics” Arendt argues that one foundation for that crisis is the loss of a non-political standpoint from which one can speak about the world and politics.
04-22-2021
An Attack on the Soul
Roger BerkowitzIn response to news that Howard University is disbanding its Classics Department, Cornell West reminds us that Frederick Douglas and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. were inspired and nurtured by the classics. West argues that the attack on the classics is an attack on the soul and symptom the moral and spiritual rot of American culture.
04-22-2021
To Think What We Are Doing
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is not about human nature. Arendt says little if anything about what it means to be human in the sense of our natural humanity. Her inquiry is premised on the fact that we humans are conditioned beings, that we are born into an already existing world. That world is made through human artifice; it also conditions us humans insofar as we must live and die in a humanly built world.
04-15-2021
First Amendment on Campus
Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya found himself suspended and dismissed from the University of Virginia Medical School after he raised questions during a panel on microagressions. The case is now in the courts and Judge Norman K. Moon of the Western District of Virginia has allowed Bhattacharya’s freedom of speech suit to go forward. The opinion is well worth reading.04-15-2021
“Faith Changes Its Object, It Does Not Die”
Roger BerkowitzIn Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy secures and fosters political and civil liberties, religion nurtures a “civic religion” that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism.
04-08-2021
Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom Part I
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?04-06-2021
The Courage to Be Lecture Series:
Steven Zeidman
Valentina Flores '22There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, a reality that makes the United States notorious for being the world's leader in incarceration. In recent years, however, this phenomenon—mass incarceration, has gained momentum as a matter of discussion in conversations about criminal justice.
04-02-2021