Announcing The School of Public Life: Thinking with Hannah Arendt
Thinking and politics/citizenship must be put back together.
Note: We plan to begin sometime in the week of Nov. 17. The final meeting schedule will be determined after a signup survey–see below. All sessions will be live on Zoom and recorded.
Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who died a half-century ago, has never been more in the news.
Her work on tyranny–which focused primarily on Nazism and Stalinism–offers powerful insights into our Age of Trumpism. Given her personal history as a refugee from Nazism, she became an expert witness testifying as to how the forces of nihilism quickly rose in service to raw power.
That’s why you’re seeing her quoted everywhere today.
But she was also brilliant at describing a phenomenon much harder for us to grasp: how a people-powered politics can emerge surprisingly in the worst of times. Recovering this understanding is the goal of our project.
The School of Public Life (name borrowed from this book by Fred Dewey) will be a public conversation in a public space we create together. We will use short readings from Arendt’s writings (to be supplied) to prompt us into thinking out loud together.
In the six sessions we’ll seek out the path back to the roots of public freedom and an authentic politics, from the Athenian agora to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring.
And we’ll use the last two sessions to review the legacy of one of the most successful Arendtian “activists”--the late Fred Dewey.
Note: The School of Public Life will not be an academic exercise focused on mastering texts. No background in philosophy or politics is required.
Nor will it be a forum for partisan debates over issues or ideology–there’s no shortage of those.
Instead, we want to clear a space to think, especially about power–our power–to understand where it comes from, how we have been talked out of it, and how we get it back.
In this exercise in proto-politics, we seek to be present to each other, to speak, and to hear each other speak. And to remember our embodiment, despite our virtual setting.
In addition to a Zoom link, participants will receive the readings in PDF form after registration for the school.
The School of Public Life is free, with a suggested donation to Solidarity Hall of $25.
Session 1: What Is Our Condition?
Session 2: What Is Power?
Session 3: What About the People?
Session 4: The Lost Treasure
Session 5: The Portable Polis
Session 6: Working Groups
Please use this link to register for the School: https://forms.gle/JFYUzc4Pdk5qcBAr7
Our first session will be your choice: either Nov. 18, 19, or 20, at 7 PM EST. Please use this Doodle poll to pick your preferred evening!
Excited!