W E L C O M E
The Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard combines the digitized Hannah Arendt Archive with Bard’s Hannah Arendt Library. It is on the foundation of Bard’s unique scholarly resources, its rich personal connection with Hannah Arendt (indeed, she is buried on campus), and Bard’s tradition of engaged interdisciplinary scholarship that the Center is building a unique space to pursue Arendt’s vision of returning thinking to politics.

Of course we all value thinking. And yet, Arendt’s work is built upon the basic insight that we court danger when we take thinking for granted.

Observing Adolf Eichmann, Arendt was “struck by his manifest shallowness.” His “deeds were monstrous, but the doer was quite ordinary.” He was, she concluded, neither stupid nor malicious, but thoughtless. And it was this “absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think”—that Arendt came to see as the dangerous wellspring of evil in modern times.

Arendt argues that the only reliable protection from the political horrors that have buffeted the last 100 years is found in the activity of thinking. And yet it is shocking how little thought is given to thinking today. “Think tanks” churn out policy papers; political analysts turn politics into a game of strategy; and political scientists increasingly model behavior on non-existent rational actors or engage in abstract debates about norms of justice. What is missing amidst all of this talk about politics is an institutional space for thinking itself.

Thinking is a difficult business. It requires a separation from the world; a passion for truth; and a willingness to let go of the affairs of the world in the name of and out of care for the world. As colleges and universities today turn ever more to the world around them—offering internships and seeking to prepare students for careers in either the public or the private sector—the Arendt Center reaffirms an old idea: that colleges, at their best, do not only teach history or politics or music. Nor do they only prepare students for their future. A liberal arts education must mold individuals who can and do stand apart from society even as they are part of it. Colleges must inspire people like Hannah Arendt herself—those who combine passionate engagement with justice and politics with a fierce feeling of difference that allows them the distance to think about and to judge what is happening around them.