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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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Power Politics
Roger BerkowitzIn an essay “Power Politics Triumphs” from 1945, Hannah Arendt argues that the “obsoleteness of this book” is a “consequences of the author’s pathetic faith in the validity of economic arguments.” Over and again, in modern politics, it has been shown that “nobody cares” about economic arguments and that politics is not driven by economics.
07-25-2020
Solitude and Hope
Roger BerkowitzJennifer Stitt finds herself turning to Hannah Arendt amidst the pandemic, protests, and democratic danger. In such “dark times,” Stitt writes, Arendt’s meditations on the relations between isolation, loneliness, and solitude are meaningful. Above all, Stitt is attracted to Arendt’s idea of solitude, “the thinking activity” that “made moral judgments...
07-25-2020
Special Contribution: Our Space
Dariel VasquezDariel Vasquez is a first generation college graduate from Harlem, NY. Dariel graduated from Bard College (Class of 2017) with a joint degree in History and Sociology, and a concentration in Africana-Studies. He is the founder and director of Brothers@. Youth development and mentorship is Dariel’s passion, and he’s been working with young men of color since he was 16 years old.
07-17-2020
A Letter from Roger Berkowitz
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt cannot solve the problems of our world. But her bold, provocative, and fearless thinking is a model for how we can think about the problems we confront today. At the Hannah Arendt Center we don't worship Hannah Arendt. But we seek to nurture the kind of worldly, humanities-based thinking about ethics and politics that Arendt so fully embodied.
07-17-2020
“I’m With the Young On This”
Roger BerkowitzIn a passionate, honest, and brilliant interview with Bill Moyers, Bill T. Jones is asked if he is more politically inclined now than previously in his life. Jones invokes Hannah Arendt to affirm the necessary confluence of politics, intellectual honesty, and spiritualism.
07-16-2020
The Canceler in Chief
Roger BerkowitzThere is an apparent myth going around that cancel culture is a phenomenon of the political left. One sees this in the reaction to the Open Letter in Harpers that I signed last week. There was in that letter no mention of “the left.” The letter explicitly mentioned the danger from illiberalism from both the political right and Donald Trump as well as from cultural intolerance for curiosity and experimental thinking.
07-16-2020
What We Are Reading:
The Universal Editor
Samantha HillBari Weiss resigned from The New York Times this week in an open letter, citing the effect social media has had on traditional publishing platforms.
07-16-2020
Saving America Once Again: Comparing the Anti-Trump Resistance to the Tea Party
By Theda SkocpolWhat I’m going to do today is to talk about two remarkable upsurges of self-organized citizen activity that have spread across the United States in just the last decade. I’m going to be talking about the Tea Party from 2009 to 2011—although there are still some Tea Parties meeting—and the anti-Trump grassroots resistance that has self-organized across many communities in the country since the November 2016 election.
07-11-2020
Justice and Vigorous Debate
Roger BerkowitzThe weakness of a group letter—and I have never signed one before and hope not to have to sign one again—is that it never fully captures one’s own views. It is by necessity a compromise. And I feel strongly that in a group letter, no person should be attacked. That is one reason why the letter took a positive and quite abstract approach.
07-09-2020