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Only Power Can Check Power
Hannah Arendt saw America’s strength in its dispersion of power, rooted in civic engagement and local governance. As executive authority expands, the true challenge is not just legal resistance but the reinvigoration of collective action. Can we reclaim the founding spirit of self-governance, or will we cede our power to those who seek to consolidate it? 02-02-2025
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On Campus Protests
Hannah Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a fundamental right and a distinctly American form of politics. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, who understood civil disobedience as an act of individual conscientious action, Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority.04-28-2024
Power and the University
George Packer reminds us of the liberal vision of the university and worries that such an ideal is being lost. Packer writes: "A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance . . . When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness."04-28-2024
René Girard and Internet Influencers
René Girard was one of the great social theorists of the 20th century. His book Violence and the Sacred is a classic account of the problem of violence in society, the way that so many of our religious and legal rituals are designed to quell the human urge for violence and reassert peace. The rituals of sacrifice and even today the ritual of legal punishment allows a community to exercise its desire for violence legally and with priestly sanction on one person or even one sacrificial animal–a scapegoat. The scapegoat can’t be innocent, we must believe our violence against the scapegoat must be justified, even sacred.04-28-2024
Symbolic Beliefs
I was recently in Mechelen, a small and lively city in Belgium, to speak to a group of mayors from the European Union about diversity and polarization. My address to the European mayors in Mechelen made three points. First, Polarization is not necessarily something to be feared and derided. Second, while polarization can be dangerous, it only becomes dangerous when our politics fails. And, finally, politics is based on talking with one another in ways that nurture a common sense.04-21-2024
Arendtian Sardines
Gabriele Parrino, who was a visiting a scholar at the HAC this spring, wrote about an "unprecedented event" which occurred in the Bologna in November 2019. "Against the discriminatory policies of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini," he writes, "four different people began to sing in Piazza Maggiore. This chant became a call that grew into a crowd of six thousand people and the [idea] of the 6000Sardines spread throughout the country.'"04-17-2024
On Gaslighting
The term “gaslighting” is one of those words that comes out of nowhere and now seems to pop-up regularly. It was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2022. In its pop-psychology usage, gaslighting refers to “Confident, high-achieving women” who are “caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.”04-14-2024
The Fight Over Schedule F
Before former President Trump left office, he issued an executive order to reclassify nearly 70% of federal civil service bureaucrats into a new job category dubbed “Schedule F.” Schedule F employees would lose many of the civil service protections. President Biden rescinded the executive order, but a major promise of the former President’s campaign is that he would reclassify and fire large numbers of the civil service and replace them with loyalists.04-14-2024
Who and What We Are
Samantha Fazekas writes that Hannah Arendt’s distinction between who we are and what we are can help us learn to better take criticism of our performance at work. In the Human Condition, Arendt writes: “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world … This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is . . . is implicit in everything somebody says and does.”04-14-2024
The Supreme Court in a Divided Nation
Jill Lepore writes about how Chief Justice William Howard Taft presided over a divided Court at a time of great ideological ferment. Taft brought a pragmatic and political sensibility to the Court. He both made the Court more efficient and expanded its power and authority. And as a conservative amidst the Progressive Era, Taft set the Court on his path of obstructing progressive legislation.04-07-2024