a vivid sense of the future

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Peter

My conception of the relatively distant future is almost empty. How things will be in 20 years, or 50–I have no idea. I am not motivated or inspired by any such vision.

Walter Benjamin would not approve. He concludes his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with these words:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

According to Benjamin, history was not linear for the ancient Hebrews. Studying the past revealed a future that could suddenly appear in the present. For them, the future was not empty. Nor were they like “soothsayers” who make predictions by studying current trends–like today’s pundits who project a magical, technological future based on what they observe today. The future for the ancient Jews was something radically different from the present yet foretold by the past, if you read it right.

Benjamin is thinking of the Hebrew prophets. For example, the Lord gives Amos a message to convey to the rich and powerful:

^5:11Therefore because you trample on the poor
    and you exact taxes of grain from him,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
    but you shall not dwell in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
    but you shall not drink their wine.
¹²For I know how many are your transgressions
    and how great are your sins—
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
    and turn aside the needy in the gate.

A bit later, the Lord adds a hortatory or imperative sentence:

²⁴But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Such sentences from the Lord can have direct consequences, as in “God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” He then promises to shake the house of Israel, “as one shakes a sieve,” except that no pebble will make it through this shaking:

¹⁰All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword,
who say, ‘Disaster shall not overtake or meet us.’

This is not only a prediction (certain people will die) but also an instruction (stop denying your faults). Then comes a much more positive promise:

¹¹“In that day I will raise up
    the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
    and raise up its ruins
    and rebuild it as in the days of old …

This is a vivid vision of the future–the text goes on for many verses describing it– brought into the present to serve a purpose. Amos’ prophesy is both a prediction and an exhortation. It chastises the wicked and comforts the oppressed.

Here is a quote from another text which–like the Hebrew Bible–impressed Walter Benjamin. It is Das Kapital (from the afterward of the second German edition)

With me [in contrast to Hegel], the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. …

In its rational form [dialectics] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx is saying, on the one hand, that he simply studies “the existing state of things.” As a hard-headed scientist, he knows that the world is material and governed by laws. However, his analysis also reveals the “negation of that state,” an infinitely better future. This makes his text “critical and revolutionary.”

Benjamin begins his “Theses” with the famous story of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th-century automaton that appeared to be a machine capable of winning at chess. Actually, there was a man inside who pulled the strings. Benjamin says, “One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Marxism can be interpreted as historical materialism. As a rigid system, it is unfalsifiable–“it can win all the time.” It is also inert, because human agency isn’t needed to bring about the future. It works like a machine and assumes that history is mechanical. Benjamin suggests, however, that Marxism is really a religion–in a good way. Its power is prophesy. Like the Torah, it instructs people in remembrance, conjures a future into the present, and inspires us to act.

I take my own bearings neither from Amos nor from Marx, yet I appreciate Benjamin’s idea that historical time is not linear. By acting politically, we change the meaning of the past and bring an imagined future into the now (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit). When we lose the capacity to envision a radically better future, we abandon our agency to impersonal forces.

priorities of liberals and conservatives

Posted on February 4, 2026 by Peter

In 1993, 1994, 2010, and 2021, the General Social Survey asked representative samples of Americans to choose a “America’s highest priority, the most important thing it should do” from a list of four items: maintaining order in the nation, giving people more say in government decisions, fighting rising prices, or protecting freedom of speech.

I presume that these items were meant to test Ronald Inglehart’s “postmaterialism” thesis, the idea that once a society attains a high level of economic development, many voters become most concerned about non-economic issues. Inflation is a materialist concern, and the others are “post-materialist.”

Above, I show the responses to this question by political ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative). I omit 1993 because it looks very similar to 1994. The GSS asks people to place themselves on a 7-point ideological scale, but I collapse that into three categories to increase the numbers in each cell.

You might imagine that conservatives would be more likely to want to maintain order. Compared to liberals, that was true in 1994 and 2010, but not in 2021, when conservatives were the least likely to choose “order” as their priority. Furthermore, moderates were the most committed to order in 1994, not conservatives.

In 1994 and 2010, conservatives and moderates were more committed than liberals to popular voice in government. Perhaps this was “The West Wing” era, when many liberals were content to be technocrats. In 2021 (while a liberal was president) liberals and moderates had become more committed to voice than conservatives were.

Freedom of speech has not divided liberals from conservatives during this period. About one third of both groups have chosen it as the top priority in each year.

Inflation polarized opinion in 2021, with 55% of conservatives and only 19% of liberals choosing it as the top issue. Inglehart’s framework would suggest that moderates were the most “materialist” group in 1994, but conservatives had become the “materialists” by 2021. But I doubt that this is the right framework for interpreting the 2021 results. I think that conservatives’ spike in concern about inflation was a verdict on the incumbent Biden Administration, not a deep shift in values.

Summit on Civics in Higher Education

Posted on January 30, 2026 by Peter

April 10 | Tufts University, Medford, MA

The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA), with support from GBH, are proud to host a national summit on the state of civics in higher education.

The summit will convene practitioners, faculty, administrators, and students from across the United States to explore, discuss and compare models of civic practice in higher education.

Summit speakers and panelists will include Amy Binder, Mary Clark, Michael Clune, Dayna Cunningham, Andrew Delbanco, Fonna Forman, Bryan Garsten, Leslie Garvin, Caroline Attardo Genco, Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Peter Levine, Jessica Kimpell Johnson, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Josiah Ober, Mindy Romero, Jenna Silber Storey, Marisol Morales, and more.

The summit will bring together three categories of university-based centers and programs—including diverse representatives from each—that are influential and widespread:

Colleges or programs of Civic Thought or Civic Studies. These entities offer civic education courses within a liberal arts curriculum. At least 13 are new initiatives at public universities. They may also produce research and public programs related to civic life.
Centers and initiatives that engage higher education with communities in part to enhance their students’ civic skills and knowledge. These initiatives have roots in the Land Grant tradition (including the HBCU Land Grants) and the “Wisconsin Idea,” and many are ambitious and innovative today.
Democracy research centers and institutes based in universities that aim to improve democracy or civil society by generating research, tools, and events for the public.

Panel sessions will explore these three categories, while plenary discussion will compare them and provoke reflection on questions like these:

To what extent should college-level civic education be about reading and discussing texts?
To what extent should civic education be experiential, and which kinds of experiences are most valuable?
Should colleges and universities be embedded in and accountable to local communities, to states, to the nation, to transnational communities, and/or to the globe?
What does it mean to promote viewpoint diversity in each type of program? Are there other dimensions of disagreement that are also (or more) relevant than ideology?
Is the goal of civic education to build support for the constitutional order, to subject the system to critical scrutiny and improvement, or both?

We anticipate rich discussions and constructive disagreements that will enrich participants’ views of these issues while also strengthening the intellectual community.

Please register on the summit site and check it for the full agenda and list of speakers. This information will be updated as the summit develops.

the case for viewpoint diversity

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Peter

Here is a quick interview of me for Tufts’ Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education. I think the question was something like this: “Why is it important to include diverse points of view?” Even though I appear to be looking heavenward for answers, I stand by my claim that ethical reasoning is comparative; and we need direct exposure to diverse views to be able to make comparisons.

A subtle point: for reasons that Andrew Perrin and Christian Lundberg present in this Boston Globe editorial, I don’t love the metaphor of viewpoints. It implies that each person has a stance that explains all their specific views, and we either stand in the same place as another person (in which case our mentalities are identical) or in a different place (therefore destined to disagree). I prefer to think in terms of networks of beliefs that may overlap.* Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill’s basic argument for diversity of values applies.

I would also note that the argument for value-diversity conflicts with the goal of objectivity. If we can use objective methods to settle issues related to policy or social criticism, then it doesn’t matter what values we bring to the conversation. On the other hand, if values are simply manifestations of our viewpoints or identities (or preferences), then there is no point in reasoning about them. Ethical reasoning is neither subjective nor scientific but discursive and comparative.

*See Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas (Journal of Political Ideologies 29 (3), 464-491) and People Are Not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions ( Critical Review 36 (1-2), 119-145)

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: 2026 Institute for Civically Engaged Research

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Peter

The American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) is a four-day residential institute that provides political scientists with training to conduct ethical and rigorous civically engaged research.

Up to 20 scholars will be selected as ICER Fellows and invited to attend the 2026 Summer Institute. ICER Fellows will network with other like-minded political scientists, and together, learn best practices for conducting academically robust, mutually beneficial scholarship in collaboration with communities, organizations, and agencies outside of academia.

ICER is organized in partnership with the Center for Community Engagement (CCE) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). with generous support from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.

The 2026 Institute will be held in person at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA from July 13-16. To apply, please complete this form by April 15, 2026, 11:59 pm PT.

What is Civically Engaged Research?

Scholars in many disciplines are grappling with how to produce rigorous scholarship that addresses significant social challenges in collaboration with communities, organizations, and agencies. They strive to learn from those working outside of academia, to grow in understanding from the insights of all kinds of groups and institutions, and to give back to communities rather than extract value from them.

Civically engaged political science research is an approach to inquiry that involves political scientists collaborating in a mutually beneficial way with people and groups beyond the academy to co-produce, share, and apply knowledge related to power or politics that contributes to self-governance. Conducting robust community and civically engaged research entails a different set of practices than other kinds of political science research,

APSA’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research

ICER trains political scientists at all career stages in best practices for conducting CER The Institute Directors are Peter Levine (Tufts University), Samantha Majic (John Jay College & The CUNY Graduate Center), and Adriano Udani (University of Minnesota). Together with practitioner experts and scholarly guest speakers, ICER Directors and fellows will explore key topics related to civically engaged research by discussing relevant readings, by analyzing specific examples of civically engaged research from political science and cognate disciplines, and by considering the research plans and ideas of institute participants.

2026 Summer Institute

The Institute will take place on campus at UCLA from July 13-16. Approximately twenty fellows will meet each day for intensive discussions and workshops. Thanks to generous support from the Haynes Foundation, participants will have access to complimentary housing on the UCLA campus alongside scholarships available to defray costs of meals and travel. Applicants are expected to seek financial support from their home institution, but admission to the Institute will not be affected by financial need.

TOPICS TO BE COVERED

How to do civically engaged research: Practical guidance on initiating, designing, and sustaining collaborative research across fields and sectors.
Scholarly engagement: What political scientists uniquely contribute to CER, the limits of scholarly expertise, and the value of working across disciplines and practitioner and community knowledge
Ethics: Engaging partners fairly by sharing credit, funding, and other resources equitably, managing disagreement, and navigating IRB and other institutional constraints.
Career considerations: Aligning and producing engaged research for publication, tenure and promotion, and funding.
Communicating impact: Strategies for sharing findings and articulating the value of civically engaged research to partners, communities, policymakers, the media, and the broader public.
Engaging with different kinds of partners: Why and how to engage with governments and other institutions, communities, social movements, and other kinds of partners. We will welcome ICER participants from subfields including but not limited to governance, public administration, public policy, and social movements.

How to Apply

ICER is not intended for scholars who already have extensive CER experience; instead, it is designed for political scientists who wish to learn about or transition into Civically Engaged Research (CER).

While the program is best suited to early- and mid-career scholars, advanced graduate students nearing completion of their doctoral program are also welcome to apply. We are especially interested in gathering scholars interested in partnering with government officials, policy practitioners, and/or community organizers for CER projects.

To apply, please complete the form located here. Applications are due April 15, 2026, and applicants will be notified of decisions by early May 2026.

For more information abot ICER, please visit our website:

https://connect.apsanet.org/icer/.

If you have further questions about the institute, please contact centennial@apsanet.org.

Sadness is a Light Kindled in the Heart

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Peter

In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled “We Refugees” in a Jewish-oriented New York magazine, Menorah Journal. Here she observes that her fellow exiles act like optimists in public, for they want to banish their terrors and assimilate to an optimistic American society. The exceptions are the ones who can’t maintain the appearance and “turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.”

She says, “I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.”

Around the same time, she privately wrote a poem in her native tongue that I will translate–a little loosely–as follows:

Sadness is like a light that is lit in the heart,
Darkness, a glow that gives shape to our night.
We set the small lamp of sorrow alight
To find our way home through the night's darkest part.
It brightens the wood, city, street, and tree.
And one who has no home--blessed is he;
In his dreams, even so, he sees home right.

At first, I didn’t love “darkness is like a light” (Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein), because that just seems to be a contradiction. But I came to appreciate the idea that the darkness of a sad night brings a kind of illumination by revealing the past.

The original German is three rhymed couplets:

Die Traurigkeit ist wie ein Licht im Herzen angezündet, 
Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein, der unsere Nacht ergründet. 
Wir brauchen nur das kleine Licht der Trauer zu entzünden, 
Um durch die lange weite Nacht wie Schatten heimzufinden. 
Beleuchtet ist der Wald, die Stadt, die Strasse und der Baum. 
Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.

the weakness of Trump’s domestic strategy

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Peter

Yuval Levin offers an important perspective on the second Trump Administration so far.* I anticipate several reasons that Trump opponents will be skeptical, but I think that Levin’s argument should influence the strategies of the left and the center-left.

Levin’s key points:

“Trump signed fewer laws in this first year of his term [2025] than any other modern president, and most of these bills were narrow in scope and ambition. The only major legislation was a reconciliation bill that contained a variety of provisions but was, at its core, an extension of existing tax policy.”
Trump has signed fewer regulations of economic significance than Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Biden had by this point in their presidencies. Of course, regulations can have significance that is not economic, but this measure (from the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University) has the advantage of roughly distinguishing between important regulatory changes and documents that may be purely symbolic or even trivial. Based on this method, it appears that Trump has done less with regulations than his predecessors so far.
As shown in the graph above, federal spending has been very similar as it was under Biden. It’s true (as Levin shows) that Homeland Security has more money and Education has somewhat less. But the reduction in Education seems to reflect planned sunsetting of COVID relief payments. In some cases, there were dramatic announcements of spending cuts (which may have caused substantial immediate damage) followed by a quiet resumption of spending. This seems to the case, for example, at NIH.
Many federal employees were laid off, and many quit, for a total of about 317,000 “departures.” This matters to those people, to the capacity of federal agencies, and to the quality of public service right now. But since the positions are still authorized in law, it also means that the next president will be able to hire hundreds of thousands of civil servants.
Trump has announced dramatic deals with various private entities, such as law firms, universities, and pharmaceutical companies. These deals raise serious constitutional questions and may intimidate other entities. Alas, there has been a lot of cowardly preemptive compliance. At the same time, these deals often turn out to be less consequential than they sound at first; and to a significant extent, everyone else in these sectors is proceeding as usual. Battling selected opponents makes great symbolic politics but is not an effective way to change a society. Levin says, “this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.”

Important caveats are required, and Levin acknowledges most of them.

First, immigration appears to be a major exception. Money is flowing to ICE, agents are being hired, and individuals and communities are being irrevocably harmed by tactics that are new or at least substantially worse than under Biden.

Second, Trump’s abuse of the Department of Justice to harass enemies is not captured on the list above.

Third, Trump style of governance may permanently change our political culture. His abuse of prosecutorial power is an important example.

Fourth, we don’t know what will happen next. Trump has won the power to replace members of regulatory commissions. Maybe these replacements will begin to enact actual regulations that matter.

Finally, his strategy may not be to change policies but to set the conditions for what Ezra Klein calls “power consolidation.” For instance, the right question may not be whether Trump’s tariffs have changed the economy. Rather, by levying tariffs at will and then excusing selected industries, countries, and firms from some tariffs, Trump has amassed power. This matters if–and to the extent that–he then uses his consolidated power for tangible purposes, such as suppressing the political opposition.

Using his power to protect himself is possible but will not be easy for Trump to accomplish. For example, his effort to interfere with the 2026 election by cajoling state legislatures to gerrymander may have produced a net Democratic advantage of about 2 or 3 seats.

Backlash to Trump may create opportunities to rewrite the rules in ways that curtail future presidents. ICE was already problematic under previous administrations. Migrants often present opportunities for governments to to abuse power. Hannah Arendt says that when World War I left a wave of stateless refugees, governments empowered their police in ways that led to dictatorship: “This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries.”** This passage is eerily reminiscent of ICE in Minneapolis right now. However, the US public’s turn against ICE has been dramatic, and the current structure is now entirely dependent on Trump or a MAGA successor. It is quite plausible that ICE will be abolished in 2029 or at least much more constrained in then than it was in 2020.

Here are some strategic implications of Levin’s argument.

Don’t be tempted to emulate Trump. I’ve talked with progressives who basically say, “I hate Trump’s values and goals, but he has shown us how to make change.” Levin suggests that Trump is not making sustainable or coherent change. Indeed, he is making much less tangible policy than Biden did. If you want to shift the country, there is no alternative to passing actual laws.

Work against preemptive compliance. Trump’s retail deal-making doesn’t affect the society as a whole except insofar as organizations pre-comply out of fear that he will turn to them next. All of us who have stakes in organizations must buttress their independence and press them not to acquiesce in advance.

Plan for governing when Trump is gone. For example, how should the next administration fill more than 300,000 vacancies with young talent? Now is the time to plan for that. The statutory and regulatory framework that existed under Biden may still be largely in place, offering many opportunities for hiring and spending (even if total federal outlays are trimmed).

Focus resistance on the areas where Trump is actually effective. The top of that list is immigration, and I think most of the resistance realizes this.

Bear in mind that most citizens may not see much change. Progressives are rightly alarmed about Trump and often frustrated that the electorate does not see him as we do. Trump’s popularity has declined, but the rate of decline has been less than one percentage point per month. Voters may be turning gradually away from him because they perceive high inflation, which is not a wise basis for assessing Trump or any president. One reason that low-attention voters are not more critical of Trump is that their actual lives have not changed dramatically due to the Administration. At a meeting that I attended in the industrial Midwest last fall, grassroots activists (almost all Black and urban) viewed their community’s problems as perennial and unrelated to Trump. This has implications for how the opposition should criticize Trump–not by claiming that the president has wrecked everything but by accusing him of failing to act effectively.

*Levin, “Status Quo or Revolution?” The National Review, Sept. 25; interview with Ezra Klein, “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?,” Jan 16; and “The Levers Trump Isn’t Using,” The Atlantic, Jan 20.

** Arendt, Hannah. The Origins Of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book Book 244) (p. 287). (Function). Kindle Edition. But the public backlash to ICE under Trump has been extraordinary. As part of the reaction, the federal government may be pushed back out of immigration enforcement.

how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Peter

Mystics have often advised that by turning our minds inward, we may find freedom. For instance, Marcus Aurelius restates a Greco-Roman commonplace when he writes, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. …. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul” (2:8 and 4:3).

Roughly similar ideas can be found in classical Indian and Christian sources:

“In dependence on the ear and sounds … In dependence on the mind and mental phenomena, mind-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, feeling comes to be; with feeling as condition, craving. But with the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving comes cessation of clinging … cessation of existence … cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering. This, bhikkhus, is the passing away of the world.” (Buddha, in the Pali Canon, SN 12.44)

— “But, Sir, where is the silence and where the place in which the word is spoken?”
— “As I said just now, it is in the purest part of the soul, in the noblest, in her ground, aye in the very essence of the soul. There is the central silence, into which no creature may enter, nor any image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware of any image either of herself or any creature. Whatever the soul effects she effects with her powers.” (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)

The same general idea appealed to the young Hannah Arendt. Her turn away from it explains much about her mature thought.

At age 65, Arendt recalled her early encounters with Martin Heidegger. “The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again. … There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” She remembered that in Heidegger’s seminars, she and her fellow students experienced “thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive for cognition.” They found that thinking can “become a passion” that orders the rest of one’s life.

One of the ways that Heidegger and his students would “think” was by analyzing a mental phenomenon in great detail. Heidegger resists saying that he “observes” his own mental states, such as his anxiety or boredom. That would be psychological research. Instead, “Our fundamental task now consists in awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing.” He and his students would let their moods and other mental states reveal themselves, and they saw this as a path to truth and freedom.

Certainly, Heidegger’s method was not identical to the meditative exercises of Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, or Meister Eckhardt, but it resembled them in a very general way. And it drew Arendt to Heidegger.

In the winter of 1925-6, Arendt ended her romantic relationships with him and wrote a poem about her feelings: “Klage” (or “Lament”), which I have translated here. It is a teenager’s breakup lyric. It is also a very carefully constructed poem, rhymed and rhythmic, which means that it cannot be a literal report of its author’s mental state. Although she begins, “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly,” some of her hours must have been spent rhyming “Nieder” with “Lieder” and “wie Spiel” with “Qualenspiel”–and, I presume, enjoying the results.

Meanwhile, the poem is deeply Heideggerian, focusing on how time becomes evident when we are distressed and ending with a claim of authenticity: “Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away,” yet “Never will it make me give away / The bliss of lovely truth.”

Having read the mature work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, you would assume that she would not want to retreat into introspection, especially meditation on the highly abstract and general topics that interested Heidegger. You would assume that she would decry an inward turn as irresponsibly apolitical. She would advocate engagement with fellow citizens as the basis of a good (and free) life.

One way that she brought herself to this conclusion was by way of her encounter with Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1831). Soon after Arendt left Heidegger, she began to write a book about this Prussian-Jewish salon hostess of the Romantic period.

In Arendt’s account, Varnhagen (born Levin) turned to private introspection to find freedom. Varnhagen presumed that “self-thinking brings liberation from objects and their reality, creates a sphere of pure ideas and a world which is accessible to any rational being without benefit of knowledge or experience” (p. 54). Arendt explains: “If thinking rebounds back upon itself and finds its solitary object within the soul—if, that is, it becomes introspection—it distinctly produces … a semblance of unlimited power by the very act of isolation from the world; by ceasing to be interested in the world it also sets up a bastion in front of the one ‘interesting’ object: the inner self” (p. 55).

This practice of reflecting on one’s inner life (and writing some 6,000 letters about it) was particularly appealing to someone in Varnhagen’s circumstances. She experienced prejudice as a Jew yet lacked commitment to Judaism or to other aspects of her heritage, or even much knowledge of them. She never received a formal education, so she couldn’t investigate history, society, or nature in an advanced way. Since she was poor, female, and–in her own view–physically unattractive, she had limited social prospects. She was drawn to investigating herself as if she were purely an instance of the human condition:

She saw herself as blocked not by individual and therefore removable obstacles, but by everything, by the world. Out of her hopeless struggle with indefiniteness arose her “inclination to generalize.” Reason grasped conceptually what could not be specifically defined, thereby saving her …. By abstraction reason diverted attention from the concrete; it transformed the yearning to be happy into a “passion for truth”; it taught “pleasures” which had no connection with the personal self (p. 59)

But there were reasons that she was so frustrated, and they were not inevitable features of human existence. These reasons included sexism and antisemitism. They explained some of what Varnhagen found when she looked within: her own bitter memories.

While you introspect, Arendt says, everything can feel calm and free. “The one unpleasant feature is that memory itself perpetuates the present, which otherwise would only touch the soul fleetingly. As a consequence of memory, therefore, one subsequently discovers that outer events, have a degree of reality that is highly disturbing” (p. 55).

Arendt uses “world” in a Heideggerian sense, which I think she will retain throughout her life. The “world” is the web of relationships into which we are born as human beings:

Relationships and conventions, in their general aspects, are as irrevocable as nature. A person probably can defy a single fact by denying it, but not that totality of facts which we call the world. In the world one can live if one has a station, a place on which one stands, a position to which one belongs. … In the end the world always has the last word because one can introspect only into one’s own self, but not out of it again (p. 58)

Arendt argues that Varnhagen gradually realized that she had a specific place in a specific world. Supposedly, her dying words were: “What a history! —A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. … The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed” (p. 49). She had understood, in short, that had never been free in her inner life or in her conversations and correspondence with friends and lovers. But she had been a particular person in a specific place and time, and this had given her life meaning.

For Arendt, then, a good life must involve addressing the kinds of social injustices that made Varnhagen suffer–not simply to remedy or mitigate these injustices, but because an active and ethical engagement with the “world” is a better form of freedom than the one that is promised by introspection.

Sources: I quote Marcus Aurelius from Gregory Hays’ translation, and Heidegger from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude 1,1,16a., translated by McNeill and Walker. I quote Arendt’s own English version of her Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess from The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000).

Hannah Arendt seminar

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Peter

Below is the syllabus of the seminar on Hannah Arendt that I will teach this semester. (I’d still accept suggestions!) I’ve removed all the practical information except for my policy on AI, just in case that’s useful for other teachers.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) personally experienced some of the great events of the 20th century, interacted with many famous contemporaries, and offered challenging arguments about totalitarianism and democracy, migration and human rights, Jewishness and Israel, modernity and science, feminism, activism, and the role of intellectuals. We will critically discuss her texts, her life, and her context and relate her ideas to other thinkers and issues of the present.

Objectives: To build an understanding of Arendt’s own thought in its context; To analyze and evaluate conflicting arguments about the major philosophical, historical, and strategic issues that confronted her; To learn to make stronger normative and interpretive arguments in writing and discussion.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy: This is a humanities seminar, and the entire rationale is that we can learn by intensively reading complex texts, discussing them with peers, and producing our own writing in response. Extensive research shows that “deep reading” has educational and spiritual benefits, while substituting AI summaries for reading causes substantial brain decay. I am not sure whether instructors can currently detect the use of AI or penalize it. It is your responsibility to learn in college, and you will not learn if you substitute AI tools for reading and writing. That said, I do not object to querying large language models (LLMs) for additional information and insights about the assigned texts and topics; using AI tools to translate texts that would otherwise be inaccessible to you; or even writing papers in your native language and using an AI tool to translate your work into English. Further discussion of whether and how to use AI is welcome.

Thursday, Jan 15: Introduction

During class, we will watch portions of a 1963 German television interview of Hannah Arendt to get a feel for her personality. And we will read and discuss Arendt’s “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”), an early poem.

Tuesday, Jan 20: Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review, October 21, 1971. (Note that Arendt writes this when she is 65.)
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1930), trans. W. McNeil & N. Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), §16-17, §18c, §19-36

(Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Heidegger and Arendt: Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and the politics of remembrance,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.2 (2002): 171-182.

Thursday, Jan 22: Being Jewish, being a woman

Watch the PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.
Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, excerpts, and a letter from Arendt to Jaspers dated 9/7/1952, both in The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000), pp. 49-72
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale 1982), pp. 56-59 (a portion of chapter 2)

Tuesday, Jan 27: Statelessness, migration, and human rights

Arendt, “We Refugees.” (1943)
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”). You can skim or skip the historical detail from the bottom of p. 269 the last line on p. 276.

Not assigned, but useful if you want to focus on this topic: Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? Download Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 297–310

Thursday, Jan 29: Nazism and Stalinism I

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapters 11 and 12

Tuesday, Feb 3: Nazism and Stalinism II

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 13

Thursday, Feb 5: How she uses history

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Arendt, “The Modern Concept of Histor., The Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 570–90. You may read only pp. 585-590 (from “It has frequently been asserted that modern science was born when attention shifted from the search after the ‘What’ to the investigation of ‘How …” to the end).
David Luban, “Hannah Arendt and the Primacy of Narrative,” in Luban, Legal Modernism (University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp, 179-206
Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin, The Review of Politics, Jan., 1953, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1953), pp. 76-84

[Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Arendt on historical narrative: Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative.” Social Research (1990): 167-196]

Tuesday, Feb 10: German war guilt

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (1947), pp. 1-44.
Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945)

Thursday, Feb 12: From Europe to America

Arendt to Jaspers, letter dated 1/29/1946
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021), pp. 97-117
Watch the 1963 interview and/or read it in Baehr, pp. 3-22. Note pp. 20-21 on coming to the USA.

Tuesday, Feb 17: Modernity 1: Public and Private

Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 7-11, 17-21, 22-78

[Additional recommended article for anyone who wants to write about the public/private distinction in Arendt: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice on relating private and public,” in Amy Allen (ed) Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2017) 89-114.]

Thursday, Feb 19 : no class (substituting Monday schedule)

Tuesday, Feb 24: Modernity 2: Action

The Human Condition, 175-247

Thursday, Feb 26: Modernity 2: Political Freedom

Arendt, The Human Condition, 305-325
Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power,” translated by Thomas McCarthy, Social Research (1977): 3-24.

Tuesday, March 3: Israel

Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time” Commentary. (1948)
Young-Bruehl, pp. 137-9, 173-81 (portions of chapter 4 and chapter 5)

Thursday, March 5: The Adolf Eichmann case I

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3-67 (chapters I-V), 90–95

Tuesday, March 10: Adolf Eichmann II

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 112-150 (VII and VIII).

Thursday, March 12: Adolf Eichmann III

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 274-279 (chapter XV and epilogue)
Letters to Mary McCarthy, 9/20/1963 and Gershom Scholem 7/24/1963

[Additional recommended texts for anyone writing about Eichmann:

Sandra K. Hinchman, “Common Sense & Political Barbarism in the Theory of Hannah Arendt.” Polity 17.2 (1984): 317-339.
Peg Birmingham, “Holes of oblivion: The banality of radical evil.” Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 80-103.]

(March 14-22 = Spring Break)

Tuesday, March 24: The importance of truth (in the wake of the Eichmann controversy)

Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, pp. 227-264

Thursday, March 26: Republicanism and revolution I

Arendt, On Revolution, 1963 (excerpts)
Counterpoint: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 1-50 (or less)

Tuesday, March 31: Republicanism and revolution II

Arendt, On Revolution (excerpts)
Counterpoint: Christopher H. Achen, and Larry M. Bartels, “Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government” (2017)

Thursday, April 2: Feminism and the public/private distinction

Amy Allen, “Solidarity after identity politics: Hannah Arendt and the power of feminist theory.” Philosophy & Social Criticism1 (1999): 97-118.
[Consider:] Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations?: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics. Routledge, 2002, excerpts (hard copy in Tisch Library, not online)

Tuesday, April 7: The Civil Rights Movement

Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), in Baehr, pp. 231-246
Young-Bruehl, pp. 308-18 (a portion of chapter 8)
The response from Ralph Ellison, discussion in Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers

Thursday, April 9: Violence in the 1960s

Arendt, On Violence (1970) excerpts
Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Robert B. Silvers, Mitchell Goodman and Susan Sontag (debate), “The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?(1967)
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 173-5 (on Denmark), and 230-33 (on German resistance)
Chad Kautzer, “Political Violence and Race: A Critique of Hannah Arendt.Links to an external site.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture3 (2019)

Tuesday, April 14: Education

[Peter Levine is away]

Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Between Past and Future, pp. 173-96
The final exam. for Hannah Arendt’s 1961 course]

Tuesday, April 21: Science

Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space.” The American Scholar (1963): 527-540.
Arendt, “Prologue,” The Human Condition (pp. 1-6)

Thursday, April 23: Final discussion

an international discussion of polarization

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Peter

Last October, THE CIVICS Innovation Hub and the European School of Politics convened an international group in Istanbul for a conversation about “trust and polarisation.” Kameliya Tomova has written a nice summary. I’ll paste the portion that mentions me below and recommend the rest as well. (Note that I was talking here about the world, not necessarily or specifically about US politics.)

Peter Levine, political theorist and civic scholar, cautioned against treating all forms of division as equivalent. “Is the problem that two sides are too far apart,” he asked, “or that one side is organised around hate and the other around love and dignity?” The answer to that question, he suggested, has profound consequences for whether and how we even attempt dialogue. Levine argued that not all polarisation reflects symmetrical extremes — sometimes one side advances exclusion while the other defends basic rights. In such cases, the work of bridging may look very different, or may not be appropriate at all.

Building on this concern, human rights and peace activist Harsh Mander warned that insisting on symmetry between “sides” can normalise authoritarian or dehumanising positions. Drawing on his experience in India, he asked: “If I say Muslims deserve to live with dignity, and that’s seen as an ‘extreme’ view, then what is the centre? Mild dehumanisation?” The language of depolarisation and how broadly it’s currently being used, he argued, risks collapsing injustice into mere disagreement if moral asymmetries are not explicitly acknowledged.

Others spoke of perception gaps — the distance between what we think others believe and what they actually do. When people have limited direct contact and rely instead on distorted signals from online spaces, they tend to assume others hold more extreme and internally consistent positions than is often the case. Peter Levine noted that quantitative research frequently reinforces this assumption by treating political identities as coherent blocks — for example, presuming that someone who holds a conservative position on one issue will do so across others. In practice, he argued, people’s views are far more fragmented and situational. These misperceptions reduce willingness to cooperate, until direct interaction or clearer information disrupts the assumed coherence of the “other side”.

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Author Archives: Peter