Quote of the Weeks
Featured Article
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
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
“What do we do now?”
Why Arendt Refuses to Answer
Chiara T. Ricciardone is Provost and Faculty Member of the Activist Graduate School and an NEH Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center of Bard College (2018–19). 07-13-2019
The Refugee Question
This week, we republish a Quote from Nikita Nelin on Arendt and the plight of refugees.06-29-2019
Three “Ideals”
This week's Quote is written by Jana Schmidt, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2016-2017 and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard College in 2017.06-21-2019