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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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Perspective is the Most Important Word in Life
Jerry Seinfeld talks to Bari Weiss about how comedy is so important because it demands honesty and, above all, the effort to see the world from the perspective of others. Hannah Arendt defines thinking as an enlarged way of thinking, of being able to imagine the world as others see it. Thinking is a conversation one has with oneself, a two-in-one, in which the thinker tests their own opinions against all the possible counter thoughts imaginable by others. Seinfeld’s approach to comedy is, surprisingly, deeply Arendtian.06-16-2024
An Oasis of Peace
Masha Gessen writes about Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, “an intentional community of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli families.” Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom “means Oasis of Peace, in Arabic and Hebrew—was founded by Bruno Hussar, an Egyptian-born Jew who fled the Nazi invasion of France.” Gessen writes about how the village has changed since the October 7th attacks by Hamas and the Israeli military response.06-16-2024
Courage to Be Fellow Reflection: Adriana Želmira Ondrejka
My name is Adriana Želmira Ondrejka and I am a rising junior at Bard. I also have always had a passion for history, and during last summer I got an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian helping out with their special events sector. I really wanted to continue to work on the skills I learned there, so when I saw the posting for the Courage to Be fellowship at the Arendt Center I immediately jumped on it. I decided to ask Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson to speak as part of the Courage To Be Porgram because I thought having a local politician would be very impactful for the students. Here at Bard, we have a high visibility on voting and politics, with our school body having some of the highest numbers of registered voters in the country and our very active Center for Civic Engagement. Thus, I thought people would really appreciate being able to hear from and talk to a professional who was deeply involved in that world06-14-2024
Socialized Risk
To Arendt, the great danger to political freedom was bigness of all sorts, big government, big business, and big bureaucracy, all of which marginalized the importance of individual action and made self-government meaningless. As Ruchir Scharma writes in his essay “What Went Wrong with Capitalism?”, we are witnessing a quasi-capitalist system of socialized risk in the United States that is ballooning the size of both government and business at the expense of individual freedom and innovation.06-08-2024
Laughing at Criminals
Donald Trump is a small-time crook whom the ruling classes have permitted to become a medium-time crook. As Bertolt Brecht once noted, “If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he became a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature." The question before us is whether we will allow Trump to become a great crook with tragic consequences for the American Republic.06-01-2024
Social Media, Anxiety, and the Common World
In a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Michael Toscano argues that social media is “designed to provide artificial imitations of what human animals require and fool them into believing they are receiving the real thing." For Toscano, Haidt’s analysis raises fundamental questions about the possibility of a common world, an idea most fully articulated by Hannah Arendt. 05-25-2024
A Look Into Our Spring Social
We were thrilled to have our Arendt Center members, student fellows and the broader Bard community join us at Bard College for our Spring Member Social and End of Year Gathering! Membership is an opportunity to join a rich community of thinkers, writers, activists, scholars. It comes with two free entrances to our Annual Conference in the fall, access to our Virtual Reading Group, and much more!05-18-2024
On Protests, On Violence and on Hannah Arendt
Two Arendtian scholars at Indiana University in Bloomington have turned to Hannah Arendt to make sense of an incredibly tense situation on the University of Indiana Campus. In recent weeks, police have twice cleared encampments in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In the midst of such a standoff, Jeff Isaac, a Professor of Political science, published an Open Letter to the students in Dissent Magazine, the journal that once published Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.”05-16-2024
Carefully Curating Our Shibboleths
A ceasefire, Zadie Smith writes for The New Yorker, is an ethical demand, not a politics. It is a cri de coeur, and it is natural and right that young people let their hearts cry out. But what would it mean to forego shibboleths and just speak from the heart? Is it possible to scream and yet not trade in overly simplified slogans?05-11-2024