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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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America: What Are We Fighting For?
By Roger BerkowitzThe Hannah Arendt Center Conference “The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideas Worth Fighting For?” posed a simple yet controversial question: Is America an exceptional country? In other words, Is there an American Idea? And if yes, what is the idea on which America is founded? Those of us who care about the collective American project— the idea of building a common constitutional democracy—have an imperative to ask: What is...
12-10-2019
On Walter Benjamin’s Legacy: A Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno
THE 1967 CORRESPONDENCE between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno followed Walter Benjamin’s death by nearly 30 years. The acrimony that grew between Arendt and Adorno during the intervening decades is present in these letters. Who had the right, ethically and intellectually, to edit and publish Benjamin’s work? — Susan H. Gillespie and Samantha Rose Hill write in the L.A. Review of Books.12-10-2019
What We're Reading: Arendt on the Political
By Samantha HillIn an Interview with the Cambridge blog fifteen eightyfour, David Arndt discusses his new book Arendt on the Political. The book addresses the questions of politics and the political sphere while thinking about the underlying problems of democratic politics.
12-10-2019
Walter Benjamin's Last Work
WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. — Samantha Hill writes this week for the L.A. Review of Books12-09-2019
Roger Berkowitz on the Hannah Arendt Center
Roger Berkowitz, academic director and founder of the Hannah Arendt Center discusses the Center's origins and continuing mission in Rural Intelligence.12-06-2019
Below the Surface.Underlying beliefs that most of us share
By David BrinTake the lesson of the Greatest Generation. Our Roosevelt-era parents and grandparents overcame a mélange of would-be plutocrats, populist tyrants and communist commissars to craft a social contract that unleashed a confident, burgeoning middle class, spectacular universities and science, vast infrastructure and entrepreneurship — plus a too-slow but ponderously-growing momentum toward justice.
12-05-2019
Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience: Leaks in the Era of Trump and the Deep State
By Allison StangerWriting in the March–April 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, the political philosopher Michael Walzer, whom some of you may know as the author of Just and Unjust Wars, identified several types of leaks and whistleblowing and explored their ethical implications. Walzer defined whistleblowing as conveying what a person “believes to be immoral or illegal conduct to bureaucratic superiors or to the public,” and he implied that there was no way to make...
12-04-2019
Fake News
By Roger BerkowitzFake news is everywhere these days. The “fake news” claim was first made by President Donald Trump a few weeks after his election. As the New York Times observes in a major editorial statement alongside graphical images, over 40 world leaders have now employed the President’s “fake news” meme to discredit press reports of their corruption or abuse of power.
12-04-2019
Giving Tuesday
By Samantha HillHannah Arendt Center fellow Amy Schiller writes about what happens when only rich people give to charity for the Washington Post. On “Giving Tuesday”, which follows “Cyber Monday” each year after Thanksgiving, Schiller highlights how up to thirty percent of all charitable gifts in the United States are made in December. And while charity has always been a part of the American mythos, who gives has changed over time, and giving on average has declined.
12-04-2019