Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College Celebrates 20th Anniversary with The Arendt Forum on “Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?” October 15–17, 2026

Participants include philosopher Carol Gilligan, political scientist Hélène Landemore, journalist George Packer, theologian Rowan Williams, and author Patrick Deneen in conversation with Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Chris Gibson and attorney Zephyr Teachout

October 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual fall gathering. To mark the occasion, a newly rebranded fall gathering, The Arendt Forum, will be held at Bard College on the topic of “Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?” As the Center’s most visible public expression of its mission to be a space for bold and risky thinking, the Arendt Forum explores difficult questions from many perspectives and in experimental and exciting ways. In the spirit of Hannah Arendt’s fearless style of thinking, the Arendt Forum affirms that honest speech and listening are foundational to building a shared world.

In a time when we know all too well what we oppose—war, injustice, authoritarianism, loneliness—we struggle to answer a deeper question: What are we fighting for? The 2026 Arendt Forum takes up that question directly by gathering thinkers, artists, scholars, and citizens for a three-day public encounter shaped by Arendt’s conviction that politics begins when people think and talk together. Through conversation, debate, music, art, and performance, participants in the forum will explore the possibilities of solidarity in our time.

The three-day forum takes place on Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16 in Olin Hall on Bard’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; on the morning of Saturday, October 17 participants will take part in an interactive debrief session in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. The Arendt Forum is free and open to the press, and will include a dedicated press room for interviews. Register here.

The conference is free for Arendt Center members, Bard College students, faculty, and staff. For non-members, the registration fee is $199.

Conference highlights include:

• New formats, including conversations, roundtable discussions, and deeper audience engagement.
• Yazmany Arboleda, a Colombian American artist, architect, civic designer, and New York City’s inaugural people’s artist at the Civic Engagement Commission, who will transform the forum into a participatory artwork.
• Music by Bard Conservatory students.
• A special community lunch with small group discussion opportunities.
• A special new feature of the Arendt Forum will be a Saturday morning debrief titled “Envisioning Solidarity Together: an intimate debrief and networking opportunity,” with attorney Zephyr Teachout, political scientist Hélène Landemore, David Lapp of Braver Angels, and Philip Lindsay, director of the Arendt Center’s Democracy Innovation Hub. This new, third day will give participants time and space to connect with other participants and interact on a more personal level with several of the speakers from the conference. The goal of the Democracy Innovation Hub is to catalyze citizens’ assemblies and other innovative approaches to democratic reform.

For a full conference schedule, click here.

Featured speakers include:
Carol Gilligan, whose most recent book In a Human Voice was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Times Literary Supplement; Hélène Landemore, who in her new book, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, asks and answers a radical question: “What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?”; George Packer, award-winning author of The Unwinding and The Emergency, and staff writer at The Atlantic; Rowan Williams, the former bishop of Monmouth in Wales in 1992, archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, and master of Magdalene College, 2013–20; and Patrick Deneen, who has argued that liberalism’s deepest failure lies in its inability to sustain the forms of solidarity on which freedom and shared life depend, in conversation with Chris Gibson, an author, academic, veteran, former congressman, and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, and Zephyr Teachout, an author and professor of law at Fordham Law School where she focuses on the intersection of corporate power and political power.

Read a full list of speakers with bios here.

The fall gatherings of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College are widely attended annually and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included Teju Cole, a novelist, essayist, and photographer; Bill T. Jones, artistic director of New York Live Arts and an award-winning choreographer and performer; New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Junger; Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge; maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil; whistleblower Edward Snowden; irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens; businessman Hunter Lewis; authors Zadie Smith, M. Gessen, and Claudia Rankine; Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead; and political activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored tribalism and cosmopolitanism, citizenship and disobedience, crises of democracy, the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology, the crisis in American education, American exceptionalism, democracy under the tyranny of social media, and friendship and politics.

Post Date: 09-02-2026