Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Peter

I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.

what it would take for the public to trust science

Posted on July 22, 2026 by Peter

On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

love of the world

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Peter

I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Juergen Habermas (1929-2026)

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Peter

Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday. His death has been the occasion for several substantial and interesting obituaries. So far, I prefer Gal Beckerman’s in the New York Times.

I took a seminar on Habermas in 1988, when I was a college junior. Georgia Warnke was the professor, and I have kept her useful packet of readings to this day. Habermas crystallized my early thinking about politics and philosophy and has remained a pillar for me ever since. I discuss him in most of my books, with the most general and extensive presentation in chapter 5 of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (2022) The title of that book basically captures Habermas in a phrase. I have also recorded a 29-minute introductory lecture on him.

It is misleading to treat Habermas as a proponent of rational, civil discourse. (See “Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas,” 2018). I suspect that more Americans have read Iris Marion Young’s critique of Habermas (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, 2011) than have read Habermas itself. The late and lamented Iris Young caricatured him in that article. If Habermas wanted everyone to talk calmly all the time, then why did he conclude his two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, with a celebration of disruptive social movements?

Habermas lived so long and became famous so early that his public role is itself an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, Ronald Dworkin remarked that even Habermas’ fame is famous, and it is worth asking why someone who wrote such thorny theory occupied the position of (arguably) the most influential German thinker for half a century.

I took a whole semester course on Habermas–in English, on the other side of the Atlantic–when he still had 38 years ahead of him. That is an indication of his stature. But it does not mean that he shaped the course of history, or even of scholarship.

In Postwar, Tony Judt discusses “the demise of the continental intellectual.” On May 31, 2003, Habermas plus Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading thinkers published coordinated essays against the Iraq War in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came” (pp. 785-7).

I am not quoting Judt today to cast aspersions on Habermas, whose work was deep and broad. I suspect that changes in media and communications have reduced the influence of serious intellectuals. Besides, Habermas may never have wanted to be the new Jean-Paul Sartre. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Michel Foucault (born just three years before Habermas) deliberately shunned the role of the “universal intellectual”; and perhaps we are better off without such people. By all accounts, Habermas welcomed criticism and learned from a wide range of responses. He modeled what he advocated: listening and learning from others. I think his work will long outlive him.

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”.

Hannah Arendt: “The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did”

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Peter

Here is a clip that resonates today. It is from Hannah Arendt’s 1964 interview on German television. The journalist Günter Gaus takes her through her life, from her childhood in Königsburg to the controversy about her 1963 Eichmann book.

At this point in the conversation, Arendt has been describing her work in France in 1933-1941. As an activist, social worker, and educator, she had helped to move Jewish refugee teenagers from France to kibbutzim in Palestine.

She concludes, “So that was roughly the activity [Tätigkeit]”. In her later theoretical writing, Arendt combines that word with other terms to differentiate three major human “activities”: labor, thinking, and action. Her work in France was the third kind of activity, “Die Tätigkeit des Handelns”: talking and working with others to change the world. That is how she defines politics, and “freedom is exclusively located in the political realm” (The Human Condition, p. 31),

She asks Gauss whether he would like to hear how she turned to this “activity.”

He nods, and she says, “You see, I came from purely academic activity [what she would call “thinking”], and in that respect, the year ‘33 made a very lasting impression on me, first positive and second negative. Or I would say, first negative and second positive.”

It is surprising that there was anything positive about 1933, but I suspect Arendt was thinking of how it had propelled her from thinking into action.

She continues, “Today, one often thinks that the shock of the German Jews in ’33 came from the fact that Hitler seized power. Now, as far as I and people of my generation are concerned, I can say that this is a curious misunderstanding. It was of course very bad. It was political. It wasn’t personal. That the Nazis are our enemies, my God, we didn’t need Hitler’s seizure of power to know that. It had been completely evident to anyone who wasn’t an idiot for at least four years that a large part of the German people were behind it. Yes, we knew that too. We couldn’t have been surprised by it.”

Gauss says, “The shock in 1933 was that something general and political turned into something personal.”

Arendt replies, “No. Well, first, that too. First, the general and political did become a personal fate, if one emigrated. Secondly, you know what conforming is. [She uses Nazi jargon, Gleichschaltung, which could perhaps be translated as preemptive capitulation.]. And it meant that friends were conforming. Yes, it was never a personal problem. The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Well, uh, what happened back then in the wave of Gleichschaltung–which was pretty voluntary, anyway, not under the pressure of terror–above all, in this sudden abandonment, it was as if an empty space had formed around me.”

For Arendt, this empty space would not only be cruel and disillusioning but would also reveal that she could not act freely when surrounded by the people she had counted as friends. “Action is entirely dependent on the presence of others” and requires interaction with them [The Human Condition, p. 23].

She adds:

Well, I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people, and I could see that among the intellectuals, [conforming] was the rule, so to speak; and among the others, not. And I’ve never forgotten that story.

I always thought back then (I was exaggerating a bit of course): ‘I am leaving Germany. Never again! Never again will I touch this intellectual business. I don’t want to have anything to do with this community.

“I was, of course, not of the opinion that German Jews or German-Jewish intellectuals would have acted any differently if they had been in a different situation. I didn’t think so. I was of the opinion that it had to do with this profession. I’m speaking of that time–I know more about it now than I did back then.

I learned about this interview from the new PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing History, which I generally recommend. See also: Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; Arendt, freedom, Trump (from 2017); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution; what is the basis of a political judgment? etc.

the meanings of ‘civility’

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Peter

If you Google the word “civility,” the Internet tells you that it means “formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech.” This bothers me a bit because the word has had other meanings. Besides, demanding “formal politeness and courtesy” in politics can be a way of suppressing criticism and agitation. William H. Chafe describes how calls for civility were used against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

My favorite meaning of the word “civility” (or its analogue in Italian: civiltá) comes from the Italian renaissance. For proponents of renaissance republics, civility meant speech and behavior that was egalitarian. Civility existed among people who treated each other as equals and therefore spoke plainly, practically, and with an absence of formal politeness.

For example, in the Discourses (book LV), Machiavelli writes, “Republics where political life has been maintained uncorrupted do not tolerate any of their citizens to be gentlemen, or to live in the manner of gentlemen: rather, they maintain equality among themselves. … ” He adds that in lands where many rich men live idly on inherited wealth, “there has never been any republic, nor any political life; because such generations of men are completely enemies of all civiltá.”

The last word is sometimes translated as “civil government.” Thompson’s Victorian translation simply says, “Such persons are very mischievous in every republic or country.” But literally, the idle rich are enemies of civility for Machiavelli, because civility is a conversation among equals aimed at making collective decisions.

Using the common Latin noun civis (“citizen”) as a root, it was possible to construct an abstract noun, meaning something like “citizenness”–civilitas. That word would be understandable in Latin, but it was rare, surviving only in a couple of texts. For one ancient author (Quintilian) civilitas meant the art of government; for another (Suetonius), it meant courteousness. They were thinking of different attributes of a Roman citizen. I doubt that anyone would have noted this range of meanings before the modern era of Latin lexicons.

Nevertheless, the Latin word civilitas was available to be imitated in modern languages, either by authors who found it in Quintilian or Suetonius or by those who re-invented it from its root meaning of “citizen.”

Around 1384, John Wylciffe used “civility” when translating this Biblical passage (Acts 22:26-28):

²⁶ And when this thing was heard, the centurion went to the tribune, and told to him, and said, What art thou to doing? for this man is a citizen of Rome.

²⁷ And the tribune came nigh, and said to him [Paul], Say thou to me, whether thou art a Roman. And he said, Yea.

²⁸ And the tribune answered, I with much sum got this freedom. [Wycliffe's original version: "I with moche summe gat this ciuylite," Wycliffe's note: "cyuylitee, either fraunchise, either dignite of citeceyn."] And Paul said, And I was born a citizen of Rome.

Wycliffe first wrote “civility” for the New Testament Greek word politeian, and then revised it to “freedom,” meaning the rights enjoyed by a Roman citizen. The King James Version simply says: “And Paul said, But I was free born.”

In 1598, an English author helpfully explained, “Policy is derived from the Greek word politeia which in our tongue we may term civility; and that which the Grecians did name politic government, the Latins called the government of a civil commonwealth, or civil society.”

These meanings were political and related to republican government. However, Shakespeare used “civility” to mean something similar to “tameness” and “patience” and as the opposite of “distemper” (Merry Wives of Windsor iv. ii. 23).

In short, people have coined or re-invented the word “civility” several times to capture aspects of what they imagined Roman citizens to be like. Some of their associations involved politeness, and others involved equal rights. It is a shame to remember only the former.

Sources: My translation of Machiavelli. English references from the Oxford English Dictionary with my modernized spellings. See also learning from the Florentine republic; civility as equality; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?;

democracy’s crisis: a system map

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Peter

The graphic that accompanies this post shows 16 explanations for democracy’s current crisis for which I think there is persuasive evidence. The arrows indicate significant causal relationships among these factors.

The details are entirely debatable. The main point of this model is to suggest a mode of diagnosis and prescription that is different from the root-cause analysis that often drives movements for political reform.

Imagine, for example, that the root cause of democracy’s dysfunction were economic inequality, driven by a competitive global market. In that case, a political party with a credible plan to combat inequality might represent a solution. The best strategy would be to support that party in elections.

Or imagine that the root cause were partisan polarization. In that case, it would be better to support moderates in the existing parties and promote reforms that would favor centrist candidates.

Or imagine that the cause were the arrogance of progressive elites; then a right-populist movement might be the solution.

I believe that all of these factors (and more) are causes of democracy’s crisis, meaning that there is no “root” cause. Because they are heterogeneous, it is unlikely that any ideological party or movement could address them all. And because they are interlinked, solutions must address many points.

Fortunately, democracy is not a tool meant for a single problem, as a hammer is designed to pound objects that resemble nails. Democracy means “coordinated efforts to solve problems that emerge as we navigate the natural and social world” (Knight & Johnson 2014, p. 20). Democracy requires pluralism and fallibilism about all ideologies and causal theories. Further, democracy is polycentric. We can find it not only in legislative chambers but also on news websites and in community meetings, interactions between agencies and citizens, and in the streets.

We should not hope for any entity, movement, or leader to remove the underlying cause of democracy’s distress so that it can function better. Instead, many people, organizations, and institutions must address the many causes of democracy’s dysfunction.

This would seem an impossibly tall order, except that many are already at work on the various troubles. A map like fig. 1 is meant to orient and motivate diverse actors and activities.

More detail on these factors is here: 16 colliding forces that create our moment. See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement;

rule of law means more than obeying laws: a richer vision to guide post-Trump reconstruction

Posted on April 29, 2025 by Peter

The Trump Administration flouts the rule of law by denying its obligation to obey statutes and court rulings. On April 22, two TIME magazine reporters drew Trump’s attention to a portrait of John Adams that he had “put in” the White House. They quoted Adams to the effect that a republic is a government of laws, not men. Trump had never heard of this quote and said, “I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”

This is the present crisis. However, rule of law means more than obeying explicit laws, and it had been weakening for many decades. Here I will present Trump’s current administration as the most recent stage in a disintegrative process that began in the 1960s.

Law should take the form of rules that are general, durable, transparent, coherent, chosen in legitimate processes, consistently applied, and anchored to principles. The principles that motivate laws may be good or bad, which is why rule of law is insufficient for justice. (We also need good laws). However, rule of law permits people to plan, it provides important forms of fairness, it frustrates outright corruption, and it makes government accountable. When rule of law prevails, but the actual laws are unsatisfactory, we can work to change them. When there is no rule of law, we have little recourse.

Generality, durability, transparency, legitimacy of process, coherence, consistent application, and principle are relative terms. It is impossible, for example, for laws to be perfectly general. They should not be so durable that they persist when circumstances change. Instead of exemplifying any single principle, laws may balance conflicting principles along with practical constraints.

Nevertheless, rule of law is a guiding ideal for republican government. More importantly, a good political system creates incentives for the players to promote rule of law. In contrast, a corrupt system rewards biased enforcement, ad hoc exceptions, back-room deals, short-term arrangements, impunity, and other violations of rule of law.

You can tell that 21st century America neglects rule of law from our dependence on executive orders instead of laws, regulatory rulings instead of statutes, and budget deals instead of legislation. As I’ve noted before, the federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This is because Congress has been incapable of passing major statutes, liberal or conservative.

Trump lacks any compunction about governing by decree (often on the social media platform that he owns) and has signed fewer statutes than any modern predecessor in his first 100 days. His attitude is unprecedented, yet he represents the third of three stages of decline.

Theodore Lowi’s great book The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (first edition, 1969) already described the first two stages.

The first stage was exemplified by some of John F. Kennedy’s speeches. JFK was neither original nor very influential, but he expressed the prevailing midcentury modernist view of US politics. Kennedy declared that Americans had reached consensus on the grand questions. Both national parties were ostensibly committed to Keynesian economics, Social Security, desegregation, and the Cold War. However, said Kennedy, issues had become complex, and therefore governance should be delegated to non-ideological agencies with lots of expert staff who could manage all the particular issues that would arise.

As the New Frontier turned into the Great Society, the executive branch vastly expanded, but Congress stopped passing landmark statutes, and power shifted to appropriations committees and budget negotiators, rulemakers in the executive branch, Senate confirmation hearings that determined who could serve as regulators and judges, and courts, not only in the judiciary but also within the executive branch. Donohue & McCabe (2021) write, “as of March 2017, more than 1,900 administrative law judges (ALJs) were serving in at least 27 adjudicatory bodies, with their specific roles and responsibilities reflecting those of the agencies and departments in which they were located.”

Meanwhile, the 1960s had exploded the Kennedy-era consensus about basic issues. Social movements of left and right mobilized, competing to change society through the expanded federal government. From the 1960s through the Biden Administration, urgent debates roiled civil society, but the mechanisms of government remained negotiation and regulation rather than lawmaking.

For Lowi, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 exemplified this shift. Congress did write and pass OSHA, but “it did not attempt by law to identify a single specific evil that the regulatory agency was to seek to minimize or eliminate.” Instead, Congress vaguely endorsed the idea that, “so far as is possible every working man and woman in the nation [shall have] safe and healthful working conditions.” Congress gave the Department of Labor the power to issue actual regulations, subject to constant revision and negotiation, some of it before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which is a tribunal in the executive branch. This is not rule of law.

One result is that social movements have usually broken like waves on the shoals of the administrative state, leaving lots of small and inconsistent regulatory actions to reflect their ideals. The women’s movement, the gay liberation movement, and the Movement for Black Lives made discernible impressions on executive branch policies without enacting major laws. A side-effect is that social movements now benefit more from expertise inside the Beltway than from grassroots mobilization.

The third stage is Trump’s. Until he won office, a system that had neglected rule of law was nevertheless, in my opinion, usually used for benign purposes, at least for domestic policies outside of some aspects of criminal law. But this system was waiting to be hijacked by someone without principles. This is what we observe right now.

As Trump’s popularity plummets, the odds of a post-Trump reconstructive period are rising. We should not be thinking about how to restore the processes of 2022 (or 1990) but how to revive rule of law, properly understood.

For me, the three main strategies would be:

expand the capacity of Congress to legislate;
restrict the discretion of the president and executive branch; and
codify the procedures of the administrative agencies and the rights of the civil service so that these become appropriate and coherent.

These strategies must be accomplished together, because, for example, to restrict administrative agencies without enabling Congress to legislate will just hamper government.

More specifically, I would favor: substantially more funding and staffing for congressional offices and committees; state-level electoral reforms, such as ranked-choice voting, which may encourage members of Congress to legislate instead of grandstanding; court rulings or (if necessary) a constitutional amendment clarifying the president’s obligation to execute statutes and making that obligation enforceable; substantial reforms of administrative law and the civil service; a general shift to taxing-and-spending instead of regulation to accomplish progressive goals; and legal repercussions for the Trump appointees who are currently violating laws.

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