The Hannah Arendt Center
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College is an expansive home for thinking about and in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.
Claps from The Hannah Arendt Center
“The moment you speak for an audience, everything changes.”
This made me think about how demonstrations, talk shows, placards, and op eds have established the norm of a one-way street of communication. Instead of offering inspiration for conversations between people, these are offering weapons to defeat each other.
As a Bard alum, whose professional career has been devoted to increasing understanding of hatred and antisemitism, so we can fight it more effectively, I applaud Roger Berkowitz and the Arendt Center for its recent conference. Academic settings are precisely the right environment in which students and scholars can best examine ideas we might find hateful or divisive, hearing directly from their proponents.
Dear Roger and The Hannah Arendt Center,
I feel compelled to write you as I’ve been reading about the so-called controversy about the inclusion of Marc Jongen in conference. I have to say that I was surprised to hear this news, and feel upset about this group letter for a number of reasons. As an alumnus of Bard, and an…
Most triumphant! I am actually working on a piece using this very essay, and it is most interesting to me how this essay opens up differently, that is to say, appears differently, to each of us. My piece makes this essay look more continuous with Arendt’s one piece of pure philosophy, Life of the Mind, perhaps as its prelude, whereas you make it seem…
Ted Lowi: Remembering “The End Of Liberalism”
Theodore J. Lowi died this week. I never met him. He is memorialized here in the Cornell Chronicle and here in the New York Times.* Lowi’s book The End of Liberalism thinks the fact and meaning of the transformation of the United States from a…
Turning Ourselves Into Outlaws
Hannah Arendt arrived in France as a refugee in 1933. After escaping from Gurs internment camp she once again narrowly escaped arrest in Marseille and made her way — with the help of Varian Fry and my Bard colleague Justus Rosenberg — to Lisbon with her Husband Heinrich…
I’ve been searching for, – reflecting on – the idea of ‘post-factual’ or ‘post-truth’ politics and society, and how ‘free-speech’ figures ethically and practically in the ?post-modern’ world. I think this essay has provided a really useful purchase on the current debate; it shines some light on the genuinely troubling problems of the relationships…