Quote of the Weeks
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Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
In the Fall of 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a series of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. She was scheduled to teach Kant again in the spring of 1976, though her death in December 1975 prevented her from doing so. Indeed, the fact of her untimely death is central to the story of Arendt’s Kant lectures – both their origin and the scholarly attention given to them. Being lecture notes, they were, of course, not published – nor were they ever intended for publication. Relegated to a cardboard box and stored in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., they became the interest of a then-graduate student, Ronald Beiner, who sought to read them for the purposes of his dissertation research.10-31-2024
Quote of the Weeks
On the Authority of Children
By Chiara RicciardoneYou’ve seen clips of Greta Thunberg at the U.N. and the Climate Strikers on the streets; you remember how the March for Our Lives movement erupted after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. When Arendt asked in 1959 whether children were being tasked with changing the world, the Little Rock Nine were enacting the change decreed by Brown vs. the Board of Education. Now, high schoolers are the ones bringing lawsuits and demanding action to bring change.
10-07-2019
In the Archive with Hannah Arendt
By Samantha HillWhen Hannah Arendt arrived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach Germany in June 1975 to organize Karl Jasper’s papers, she stood up in the cafeteria and began reciting Friedrich Schiller by heart. She was fond of “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”, but this is pure speculation. As Arendt said to Günter Gaus in her last interview, she carried German poems around in her hinterkopf. I’d wager she knew more than one.
09-25-2019
Swift as Thought
By Thomas Bartscherer
[W]hen one thinks of things that Homer used to say, the phrase “swift as thought” may not come immediately to mind. It is well known that Homeric epics are replete with formulas, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles” that are often repeated. To my knowledge, however, there are only three instances in the Greek texts traditionally ascribed to Homer that approximate the English “swift as a thought”...
[W]hen one thinks of things that Homer used to say, the phrase “swift as thought” may not come immediately to mind. It is well known that Homeric epics are replete with formulas, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles” that are often repeated. To my knowledge, however, there are only three instances in the Greek texts traditionally ascribed to Homer that approximate the English “swift as a thought”...
09-17-2019
Migration as Avant-Garde
A Book Review
Max FeldmanThey came out in the tens of thousands. In London and Paris, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and others, people marched in the streets. They carried signs and banners, urging governments to do something, anything. “Refugees Welcome,” they said, illustrated with a silhouette of a family fleeing for their lives: a father first, then a mother dragging a child, whose foot trails in the air in the rush. “Bring Your Families,” they said.
09-10-2019
Why Tell a Story?
By Nikita NelinReading Arendt has caused me to consider the generative quality of my own work. All too often I find myself swinging from the narratives of hope to the voice of alarm and despair. From week to week my voice will vacillate between historically informed caution and a pragmatic optimism, which feels to be bordering on faith. Only loosely depending on the news of the day I am either warning people against the reactionary spirit that rises out of labeling our current...
08-30-2019
A Higher Understanding of Freedom
This essay was first published April 25, 2016.By Richard A. Barrett
Politicians, despite their divergent views and their distaste for each other, share at least this common ground: they believe in the vigorous pursuit and defense of freedom. In campaign speeches and party platforms freedom is one of the most frequently used terms. Freedom is set forth as a goal, as something that goes hand and hand with democracy.
08-27-2019
Tough Talks
By Charlotte AlbertThis week, we republish a QotW essay from one of our current students here at Bard College.
In our current political climate, media has exacerbated and publicized social tensions. Mostly these are tensions that have always existed but have not always been issues of large-scale public contention. The proliferation of mass media has led to increased political divisiveness...
08-19-2019
Power, Violence, & Political Action
By Yasemin SariPower is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.— Hannah Arendt
08-12-2019
Time for Arendt
“In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it.”08-02-2019