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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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How Education Divides Us
By Roger BerkowitzOur societies are coming apart. This is true not only in the United States, but also in Europe and around the world. As technological bubbles enable alternate factual universes, we witness a growing divide amongst people that threatens to undo the common sense that unites us as citizens.
01-22-2020
What We're Reading: Incoherence
From Samantha HillHannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about the need to embrace incoherence against this political moment, which has fallen toward ideological imperatives. Citing Arendt, Williams argues:
01-22-2020
The Need for Analogy
Peter E. Gordon writes a defense of historical analogy in the New York Review of Books. Gordon situates his considered argument against the backdrop of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issuing a blanket statement, refusing historical comparison to the Holocaust in response to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez calling the detention camps on the U.S. boarder “concentration camps” last year. — Samantha Hill01-15-2020
“It Doesn’t Really Matter”
Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood argue that empirical studies show that when Americans of both parties are confronted with corrections to factual misstatements, they overwhelmingly change their opinion of the facts. — Roger Berkowitz01-15-2020
“We are more” and “We can do it”
By Marion DetjenI am aware of the fact that the last German who stood here in a Hannah Arendt conference to speak to you about Germany was Marc Jongen, the so-called party philosopher of the AfD, the German extreme right-wing party. While I am not going to apologize for my bad English, one could easily get the impression that Jongen and I represent the two opposing and conflicting camps which these days challenge and strain the cohesion of German society...
01-15-2020
HAC Podcast Episode 3: Twilight of the Gods, with Antonia Grunenberg
A talk delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center, November 25, 2019, on Walter Benjamin‘s project of founding a political metaphysics in secular times – and Hannah Arendt‘s answer01-03-2020
Hannah Arendt and World War I: On statelessness and the rise of totalitarian regimes
By Jana Marlene MaderBehind this narrative of the “dangerous migrant” is a disinformation machine that cultivates the powerful climate of anti-immigration. Unlike the scenario 100 years ago, when nationalism was closely linked to the trial of strength between great powers, we can see a trend that is an irony in itself: the globalisation of nationalism. The target audience in this scenario is the “dissatisfied” citizen..
01-03-2020
Everything is Fragile: Reading Arendt in the Anthropocene
John D. Macready, professor of philosophy at Collin College, offers this week's Quote of the Week.This essay was originally published in Amor Mundi on July 18, 2019.
01-02-2020
Democracy in Name Only
From our 2017 annual conference, Madeleine Rosen asks “Has representative democracy failed?”01-02-2020