The Arendt Forum brings George Packer, Rowan Williams, Patrick Deneen, Carol Gilligan, and Zephyr Teachout, among others, to Annandale-on-Hudson to ask “What Are We Fighting For?”
October 15–17 | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College celebrates its 20th anniversary this week with the Arendt Forum, a three-day public gathering on the theme “Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?” The center’s annual fall conference, which Bard says it has renamed and redesigned this year, is built around a question Hannah Arendt posed: we know what we oppose, but what do we stand for? Programming runs Thursday and Friday in Olin Hall, with a new participatory session Saturday morning.
Roger Berkowitz, who founded the center and is its academic director, opens Thursday. He is also publishing A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World with Yale University Press this month. Thursday’s lineup includes psychologist Carol Gilligan, political theorist Patrick Deneen on whether liberalism is compatible with solidarity, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and Atlantic writer George Packer in conversation with Wyatt Mason. A late-afternoon session takes up the immigration debate with David Lapp of Braver Angels, Jim Robb of NumbersUSA, and Diego Sánchez of the Presidents’ Alliance.
Friday brings a roundtable on whether a shared American project is still possible, sociologist Eva Illouz in conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams, a session on labor with Damon Silvers and Gerry Hudson, and Yale political scientist Hélène Landemore on citizen rule. Artist Yazmany Arboleda leads a participatory artwork, “What We Carry: An Altar for Solidarity.” A concluding roundtable follows, with Donovan Hohn, Ann Lauterbach, Uday Mehta, Allison Stanger, Niobe Way, and Williams.
Saturday morning is a new third day, an informal debrief and networking session from 9 to 11am in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Student musicians from the Bard Conservatory and The Orchestra Now perform between sessions. A reserve-in-advance lunch sessions include a picnic walk to Arendt’s gravesite on Campus, and the Stevenson Library mounts an exhibition, “The Arendt Corner.”
Arendt has a long tie to Bard. Her husband, the philosopher Heinrich Blücher, taught at the college from 1952 to 1971, and they are buried in the Bard cemetery. After her death in 1975, the college acquired her personal library of about 4,000 volumes, many with her marginal notes. It is kept at the Stevenson Library, and the center works closely with it. The center itself is based at McCarthy House on Annandale Road.
Members of the center get free admission, and non-members pay $199 to register, which includes a link to the livestream. The livestream is free to watch on the center’s YouTube channel without registering.
Olin Hall, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Schedule, registration, and livestream at hac.bard.edu/solidarity-2026.
Things to check. Bard’s press release describes the anniversary as the 20th of the center’s annual fall gathering, while the forum page and the center’s logo say it’s the center’s 20th anniversary. I followed the center’s own wording, so confirm which you want to use. The release says the forum is free and open to the press, so press registration may be waived. The immigration session is at 5pm on the forum schedule and 5:30pm on Bard’s events calendar, and the forum’s own schedule is marked subject to change.
