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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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Model of Courage: Adolph L. Reed Jr.
On Wednesday, February 17th, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College welcomed Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Adolph L. Reed Jr. as keynote speaker for its first “Courage to Be” Lecture of the Spring 2021 semester. Written by 2020/21 Student Fellow Sage Saccomanno03-04-2021
Race and Class At Smith
Jodi Shaw resigned from her staff position at Smith College where she earned about $40,000 annually. Michael Powell has a long post-mortem of the controversy in The New York Times. Shaw wrote an open letter to Smith’s President Kathleen McCartney.02-25-2021
How To Fight Illiberal Democratic Movements?
Roger BerkowitzThere is a widespread misconception that we are seeing a threat to democracy. More rightly, we are witnessing a democratic revolt against liberal-constitutional-limited government. The question, then, is how liberal-constitutional republics should react to threats from populist democratic movements. The general view at least in the United States is that constitutional democracies allow its critics—even its existential critics—the benefit of freedom of speech.
02-25-2021
Rethinking Liberalism and the Enlightenment
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt was a decidedly anti-metaphysical and anti-universalist thinker. For Arendt, “particular questions must receive particular answers.” There are, she writes, “no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules.” Amidst what Arendt calls the “break in the tradition,” it is a fact that “traditional verities seem no longer to apply” and the “loss of general standards and rules--cannot be undone.” There is no going backwards to some past golden era.
02-25-2021
On the Contradictions of Nikki Haley: Republican
Roger BerkowitzI am not a prognosticator. Take what I am going to say with a large dose of skepticism. It is very likely that in four years the United States will elect a minority woman as its President. The question may be, will that woman be Vice President Kamala Harris or former South Carolin Governor Nikki Haley?
02-18-2021
From Data to Data, Without the Theory
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt was skeptical of social science theories. Theorists, or problem solvers as she often referred to them, are people of “great self-confidence.” They are confident in the education and intelligence and they “pride[] themselves on ‘rational.’” Dedicated to rationality, they “were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory...'"
02-18-2021
An Asia-African World Block
There have been many devastating pandemics in the past. Each time people managed to pull through them and take stock of things, they found their world completely transformed. After this pandemic, are we going to be confronted with a similarly strange new world? Quite possibly. Those from the right like Henry Kissinger to leftists like Slavoj Žižek have been making prognostic statements and there have been all sorts of assessments of the situation...02-18-2021
Play
Roger BerkowitzSusanna Crossman reflects on the power of play. “Play is a powerful motor.” Play involves a “leap in the dark” and requires trust. Play, the thinker Eugen Fink writes, “unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’.” Play is thus deeply connected to the very human way of being alive, something we can hear in its etymologies, many of which go back to the Latin ludere. “Ludere in Latin refers to leaping fishes and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon lâcan means to move like a ship on the waves, or to tremble like a flame.
02-11-2021
Firings and Prosecutions This Week
Roger BerkowitzIn what seems a fairly usual occurrence, two journalists and two professors were fired or prosecuted this week for running afoul of mainstream opinions or, in Poland, legally prohibited opinions. John McWhorter argues that firing a New York Times reporter for using the N-word to refer to the N-word and not as a slur obfuscates the difference between a slur and a taboo. Ben Cohen reports on the prosecution of Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in Poland.
02-11-2021