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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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HAC Student Fellow Isis Pinheiro Awarded Watson Fellowship
Selected from a nationwide finalist pool of over 150, Pinheiro was one of 42 college seniors to receive a Watson Fellowship for the 2021–22 academic year. She will spend the year traveling to England, Japan, China, Italy, and Guyana, where she will examine “the intersection of fashion and Black American culture through streetwear [and] explore how streetwear, and Black culture more broadly, have been globalized.”03-18-2021
Masha Gessen on Language, Loneliness, and the American Story
The central object of (Arendt’s) study is what happens to society when there’s too much distance, or not enough distance. . . . It is so important in her thinking that people think with one another. In order to think with one another, they have to feel their separateness from one another. You have to be an individual capable of forming an opinion, and expressing it, and exchanging it, and seeing the reflection of your ideas in the eyes of others.03-13-2021
Perpetual War Cultivates Militarism
Brad Evans interviews Vincent Brown about violence, white privilege, and police brutality. Brown begins with an account of the violent foundation of American life.03-13-2021
Real Risk Analysis
Roger BerkowitzHong Kong democracy was always a project rather than a reality. But the movement for democracy in Hong Kong had been gaining steam for a decade. With the unanimous vote by the Chinese National People’s Congress this week, the hope for democracy in Hong Kong has gone up in smoke. The increasingly totalitarian Chinese Communist Party is solidifying rule at home and mobilizing its people for a long-term confrontation with the West, especially with the United States.
03-13-2021
The Academic Freedom Alliance
Roger BerkowitzI have joined The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) as a founding member. The AFA “is a non-profit organization whose members are dedicated to protecting the rights of faculty members at colleges and universities to speak, instruct, and publish without fear of sanction or punishment. We uphold the principles that are required if scholars are to fulfill their vocation as truth-seekers..."
03-13-2021
The Amor Mundi Podcast Episode 11: Masha Gessen
In the latest Amor Mundi Podcast, Roger Berkowitz and Masha Gessen talk about how even amidst the rise of subjectivism and the internalization of the world—what Hannah Arendt calls world alienation—there has remained a commitment to a common or shared world. Yet, it is precisely that common world that today seems endangered, and Gessen asks how language is used in anti-political ways to undermine the world we share.03-08-2021
Is There a Crisis of Academic Freedom?
Eric Kauffmann, who spoke at the Arendt Center’s last conference, has published a study on “Partisanship and Ideology” in the academy. In an op-ed summarizing his study, Kauffmann argues that while academics frequently brush aside worries about partisanship and disciplining of faculty for their opinions, “Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses.”03-04-2021
Accepted Falsities
Roger BerkowitzThere are simply too many accepted truths that are not true. Two recent essays make the case that the Press needs to do better at avoiding making false claims, claims that then come to be accepted as verities. Holman Jenkins Jr. writes that Musicologist Ted Gioia “may be on to something when he says that after 9/11, the long reign of cool had ended, the reign of hot had begun.”
03-04-2021
Peter Kennard on Arendt and Art
As part of Hannah Arendt Center’s collaboration with the Richard Saltoun Gallery and its year-long exhibition “On Hannah Arendt,” Roger Berkowitz interviews Peter Kennard, one of the artists featured in the show. The interview touches on Kennard’s art, Arendt’s essay “The Concept of History,” and the importance of political art.03-04-2021