The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic

Around the world, far-right leaders’ responses to the pandemic feature key elements of fascist ideology

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring out the fascist ideology in countries under far-right rule. In the world's three largest democracies, national leaders are using the COVID-19 crisis to wage war on immigrants and minorities, while testing the limits of common sense. NEW YORK/NEW HAVEN -- In stark contrast ...
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The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic

Fifty Years of Social Research

Arien Mack reflects on her half-century stewardship of The New School’s flagship quarterly journal

James Miller [JM]: Let’s start at the beginning. What year did you come to The New School for Social Research? Arien Mack [AM]: 1966. I had just gotten my Ph.D. JM: At that time, how much did you know about the legacy, the traditions of The New School? Did you know anything at all ...
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Fifty Years of Social Research

The Contemporary Art of Lying

The moment Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, journalists began counting his lies. According to The Washington Post they numbered no less than 4229 by the end of Summer 2018. Paradoxically, however, Trump is a president with high ‘truth-capital’. He is not a liar, according to his voters, but ...
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The Contemporary Art of Lying

Trump’s Emergency Is Part Of A Theatrical Tradition — And Congress Plays A Starring Role

In America, emergencies are normal. Whether they are real or not doesn’t seem to matter.

We in the United States are living under a state of emergency. But that’s nothing new. President Trump recently declared an emergency on the U.S./Mexico border, explaining that this was the quickest way to access funds for border wall construction that Congress had refused to appropriate. Some weeks later, Congress passed a ...
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Trump’s Emergency Is Part Of A Theatrical Tradition — And Congress Plays A Starring Role

The One Who Writes Books

Eric Hoffer and the Perks of Being Self-taught

We don’t know much about Hoffer’s first decades of life, up to his forties. The only available markers came through his voice only and they were full of inconsistencies. Many biographers have had difficulties with identifying the real pre-Longshoreman Philosopher Eric Hoffer (see Tom Bethell’s Eric Hoffer, Genius—And Enigma). He had ...
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On Media Mess and Its Alternatives

Islands of Totalitarianism and Democracy continued

When people meet in their differences, as equals, develop a capacity to meet and talk in the presence of each other, and develop a capacity to act together in concert, they constitute political power, an island of democracy. For Hannah Arendt, in fact, this is political power in contrast to ...
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On Media Mess and Its Alternatives

A (Liberal) World We Have Lost?

What we can learn from Arendt’s insights into an earlier crisis of liberalism

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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A (Liberal) World We Have Lost?

Hannah Arendt’s Crises, and Ours

The “worldlessness” of our time manifests itself in right-wing populism

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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Hannah Arendt’s Crises, and Ours

What is the Crisis a Crisis of?

To characterize our republic’s predicament as one of democracy is an authoritarian fantasy

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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What is the Crisis a Crisis of?

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Trump

Hannah Arendt on why civil disobedience is not just justifiable but politically imperative

This symposium contains essays by Mary Dietz, William E. Scheuerman, Christian Volk, Seyla Benhabib, and Jeffrey C. Isaac that engage with the obvious and meaningful resonances between Crises of the Republic and the present. They were originally presented in August at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Boston, in a ...
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Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

What Hannah Arendt does, and does not, anticipate under a deeply vicious presidency

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

7 notes on the ideal of a free, intelligent and consequential public life

1. From a critical point of view, “the center” is the ground of the wishy washy: too attached to the ways things are to commit to the radical change of the left, not sufficiently informed by the wisdom of customs and traditional values to fully embrace the good of the ...
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The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?