Conference Overview

Hannah Arendt would have celebrated her 100th birthday on October 14, 2006. To mark the occasion, Bard College will host an international conference entitled "Thinking in Dark Times: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt." The conference will take place on Friday, October 27 through Sunday, October 29. All lectures and panels are free and open to the public.

There will be more than one dozen conferences commemorating Hannah Arendt this year, a testament to her status as the most important political thinker of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the Bard College conference will be unique. Hannah Arendt had a longstanding personal relationship to Bard. Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, taught at Bard for 17 years, and both Blücher and Arendt are buried on the Bard campus. Arendt sealed her connection to the campus when she left her personal library to Bard College, where it is now housed in the Arendt Collection at the Stevenson Library.

What most distinguishes Bard's conference, however, is the extraordinary and wide-ranging group of speakers who will spend two days discussing Arendt and her legacy.

Hannah Arendt was a true scholar, but her writing reached far beyond the walls of the academy. She was a correspondent for the New Yorker and wrote widely in Jewish and emigré journals. To honor Arendt's unique combination of scholarship and relevance, the conference will bring together philosophers, political theorists, and public intellectuals to think together about specific questions that Arendt's work raises for our time.

Keynote speakers Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner will set the tone. Two of the country's leading intellectuals and journalists, Hitchens and Danner share Arendt's capacity to bridge the scholarly and the popular.

The roundtable panels that follow feature some of the leading political, philosophical, and literary scholars from around the world. The panels, however, will shun the traditional format for academic papers. Speakers have been asked to respond to specific questions, including: "Is evil banal?"; "Is totalitarianism a present danger?"; "What is the activity of democratic citizenship?"; "What is the importantce of Arendt's Jewish identity?"; "What does it mean to think about politics?"; and "How does one think in dark times?". Our hope is to foster dialogue and connections among thoughtful people from different intellectual backgrounds.

These questions go to the root of Arendt's thinking about the nature, possibility, and activity of freedom. Freedom, for Arendt, is not an abstract philosophical concept. Rather, freedom demands political action
in public, and politics, in turn, demands freedom. Arendt saw that the greatest threat to freedom today is thoughtlessness. It is precisely when citizens cease to think and thus abdicate their responsibility for self-creation that the potential for evil in modern society arises.

In spite of more than two centuries of social science research demonstrating that individuals are determined by their environment, Arendt reminds us that we retain some measure of freedom. Even as we are rooted in our world, she insists that we are free to resist the rationalized injustices of bureaucratic institutions. To do so, however, requires that we think. Thinking, the activity of freedom, is the quintessential political action. It is also, Arendt suggests, increasingly rare.

There may be no modern thinker who so challenges us to think about the difficulty of thought and the danger of its disappearance. So it is fitting to hold a conference on Arendt's legacy at a contemporary liberal arts college.

Support for this conference has been provided in part by the generous contributions of Wendy and Alex '71 Bazelow.