On Bureaucracy, Experts & Government
The Face of Bureaucratic Cruelty
in Amor Mundi (2025)
Ali Faqirzada fled Afghanistan seeking safety and freedom. He entered the United States through the lawful process of asylum in 2021 and built a new life rooted in study and community at Bard College. Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, calls him “a young man of kind spirit, hard work, and dedication to learning.” Friends describe him as a model of integrity and compassion — “someone who embodies the morals, values, and behaviors held by members in our society who are universally respected,” said Gary Jacobson, a close friend of Ali and his family. Yet today, Ali sits in an immigration detention center in Newark, N.J., torn from the community that has embraced him.
What Lurks Below the New Class War
in Salmagundi (2022)
David Brooks’ “How the Bobos Broke America” is a nuanced portrayal of our culture war as a class war. Brooks argues that a new ruling class — an “insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that that dominates culture, media, education, and tech”— has consolidated its power and upended American society. By beginning his story with the bobos’ disruption of the liberal order and arguing that the self-appointed supremacy of the bobos has provoked a resentment-laced backlash leading to a full-on battle for the soul of America, Brooks risks antagonizing progressives who blame the current culture war on conservatives. He takes no position on the rightness of the bobos’ cultural transformation, but Brooks is correct in his chronology. Where he goes wrong, in ways that conceal a more dangerous reality, is in calling this new agglomeration of professionals, creatives, managers, experts, problem solvers, and elites a “class.”
The Failing Technocratic Prejudice and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy
in The Emergence of Illiberalism (2020)
It is a prejudice that politics is best practiced by experts. After more than five decades of increasingly technocratic rule by elites, we are seeing a rebellion of the publics against elite governance. The prejudices of liberal-democratic politics—that democracy is liberal and individualist, and that democracy should privilege technocratic governance over populist politics—are being upended. We are reminded, as Hannah Arendt argues, that politics is not about truth, but a plurality of opinions. This chapter contends that the technocratic prejudice of elite politics is no longer meaningful or feasible. This means that we need to re-imagine a pluralist politics free from the prejudices that have, for decades, bridled democracy by liberal and individualist ideals.
Public Education: The challenge of educational authority in a world without authority
in Hannah Arendt on Educational Thinking and Practice in Dark Times: Education for a World in Crisis (2019)
In The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez imagines public education as a path from the privation of family life to the fullness of citizenship. This vision of education is at the center of Hannah Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Education." Arendt argues that education introduces a student into an already-existing public world. Education must, first, conserve and preserve (Arendt uses the German "erhalten") the world as it is. Second, teachers must "preserve" (Arendt uses the German "bewharen") the newness of young people. To balance this double need to preserve as "erhalten" and "bewahren", teachers need to cultivate authority "in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition." I argue for Arendt's vision of education as both conservative and revolutionary; education cultivates authority and "preserves" the old world. But it also "preserves" the revolutionary drive of the young.
WHY PRIVACY MATTERS? Surveillance and the Private Life
in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center (2016)
To ask the question of why privacy matters, it is important to recognize the ways in which we simply do not value privacy. Everyday we sign up for websites and offer up private information for free. We fret about government surveillance, but willfully subject ourselves to physical and virtual security checks. In short, while we say that privacy matters, our actions suggest otherwise. There are three reasons why we are willfully and willingly losing our privacy. First, privacy is inconvenient. Second, privacy is dangerous. And third, privacy is anti-democratic. Taken together, these reasons show that while we talk about the fact that we like our privacy and want to preserve our privacy, most of us are actually quite happy to give it up. I want to ask the question of what privacy is by looking at the last and perhaps only great political thinker who set privacy at the center of her thinking: Hannah Arendt. Arendt writes about privacy in nearly all her many books and essays. Privacy is part of the core of her thought. Despite this, it is largely overlooked in discussions of Arendt’s work. And so I want to try to articulate for you what is privacy for Hannah Arendt, why it matters. And what I’m going to suggest is that there is a reason that most Arendt scholars ignore her approach to privacy; this is because Arendt’s defense of privacy leads to some very uncomfortable and difficult conclusions.
Introduction: The Burden of Our Times
in The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012)
Commentary on the financial crisis has offered technical analysis, political finger pointing, and myriad economic and political solutions. But rarely do these investigations reach beyond the economic and political causes of the crisis to explore their underlying intellectual grounds. The essays in this volume delve deeper into the cultural and intellectual foundations, philosophical ideas, political traditions, and economic movements that underlie the greatest financial crisis in nearly a century. Moving beyond traditional economic and political science approaches, these essays engage thinkers from Hannah Arendt to Max Weber and Adam Smith to Michel Foucault. With Arendt as a catalyst, the authors probe the philosophical as well as the cultural origins of the great recession. Orienting the volume is Arendt's argument that past financial crises and also totalitarianism are rooted, at least in part, in the tendency for capital to expand its reach globally without regard to political and moral borders or limits. That politics is made subservient to economics names a cultural transformation that, in the spirit of Arendt, guides these essays in making sense of our present world. Including articles, interviews, and commentary from leading scholars and business executives, this volume offers views that are as diverse as they are timely. By reaching beyond "how" the crisis happened to "why" the crisis happened, the authors re-imagine the recent financial crisis and thus provide fresh thinking about how to respond.