About the Hannah Arendt Center

Mission

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. The Arendt Center's mission is to think what we are doing. Towards that end, the Center sponsors and supports the highest quality scholarship on Hannah Arendt and her work; in addition, the Arendt Center is an intellectual incubator for engaged humanities thinking at Bard College and beyond, thinking that elevates and deepens the public argument that is the bedrock of our democracy.

As the intellectual cornerstone of Bard College's Center for Civic Engagement, The Arendt Center insists that liberal arts thinking is at the core of an enlightened politics. While policy questions are important, serious political engagement requires that citizens confront the intellectual foundations of the crises and challenges facing our world. The Arendt Center nurtures the foundational thinking that prepares students for active citizenship that can humanize an often inhuman world.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the modern era. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and students from all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, providing a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom with extraordinary intelligence and courage. Writing for a scholarly and a lay audience from deep within the humanities tradition, Arendt bequeathed us the idea of the "banality of evil," insisted that facts be held protected from the corrosive force of opinion, and called us to the highest ideal of political citizenship. She is that rare writer who compels her readers to think and re-think their most fundamental ethical and political convictions.

The Director of the Center is Roger Berkowitz and otherwise unattributed Blog posts are usually by him.

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