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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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Change Happens
Neil Roberts called his recently-turned 18 year-old goddaughter after the polls closed in Georgia on Tuesday to congratulate her for voting. One day later, chaos broke out in our nation’s capital. Roberts asks, what he should say now to his goddaughter. 01-09-2021
Trump’s Conspiritualist Army
Jules Evans has written an important and well-researched essay on Jake Agnelli, the self-initiated QAnon Shaman who was so prominent in the mobbing of the Capitol building on Wednesday, January 6th. You’ll recognize Agnelli, who wore a Racoon hat with horns, no shirt, carried an American flag and sported prodigious tattoos on his shirtless torso.01-09-2021
Politics and the Humanities
In a podcast conversation with Ben Klutsey of Discourse Magazine, Roger Berkowitz speaks about pluralism, citizen assemblies, and liberalism. He also explains why the humanities are so important for politics.01-09-2021
The Habits of Democracy
Roger BerkowitzOn May 31, 1887, William James gave a speech dedicating a monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts regiment that he led. The Massachusetts 54th was the first black regiment in the United States. Gould, an abolitionist, led the regiment into battle and he, along with many of the soldiers, was killed during an assault in 1863 on Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
01-07-2021
What We're Reading: Nihilism
Nolen Gertz writes that if we are going to talk meaningfully about our nihilistic age, we should understand what nihilism really means. And he begins, appropriately enough, with Hannah Arendt.01-07-2021
Amor Mundi: The Miracle that Saves the World
Roger BerkowtizPope Francis published his annual Christmas Speech and, in his opening paragraph on the miracle of human freedom, invokes Hannah Arendt’s conviction that all men and women are beginners. Born free, we have the faculty and power to act and speak in ways that are unexpected and surprising. And such spontaneous doings can alter the course of history.
12-23-2020
The Politics of Small Things
Roger BerkowitzJeffrey Goldfarb writes that his 2006 book The Politics of Small Things was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that “politics is about people meeting each other as equals in their differences, speaking and acting together.” In his Democracy Seminar, Goldfarb invites activists to speak about the ways they act together.
12-23-2020
The Credentialed Few
Roger BerkowitzJennifer Senior writes that the reason Congress is out of touch is not that it has too many millionaires, but that it is filled with people with too many academic credentials. This is a fact central to the argument for sortition—the selection of representatives by lot rather than by election. The Arendt Center held a webinar asking the question of whether it would be good to bring randomly selected citizens into the legislative process in October.
12-23-2020
Moving Past Race Reductionism
Roger BerkowitzI recently wrote about a study by Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam who argue that—contrary to popular expectations—the years in which black Americans performed best on metrics of economic and social prosperity were before the Civil Rights Movement; Garrett and Putnam show that since the 1970s, black achievement has stagnated. How does this fact require that we reassess both the Civil Rights Movement and the new Movement for Black Lives?
12-17-2020