At the height of the Cold War, Hannah Arendt mapped out America’s exceptionalism in a world of modern nation-states. She told a moving account of this country as a consent-based republic. But it drowned out the cognitive dissonance of fighting for political freedom without abolishing chattel slavery. Therefore, the aim of this lecture is to examine how Arendt promulgates the notion that America is held together by consent and compliance as opposed to coercion and conformism. Based on Kim’s latest book, Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2024), it offers a critical inquiry into her erasure of Native American citizenship.

David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Associate Vice Provost at the International Institute.
Professor Kim’s scholarly interests range from postcolonial, global and migration studies and community engagement to human rights, cosmopolitanism, solidarity and global literary histories. He is the author of Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2024), which tracks various manifestations of this concept in the political theorist’s archival documents, publications, and recordings. His other monograph is Cosmopolitan Parables (Northwestern University Press, 2017). It investigates how German writers represent memories of colonialism, Nazism, and communism in the post-Cold War world as cross-referential, cosmopolitan entanglements.

You can download the poster for the event here.

The project examines the popularist agitation for protectionist tariff policies in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the 1880s, a spectrum of interest groups and industrial organizations, mostly backed by wealthy industrialists, formed. These organizations were dedicated to defending the existing protectionist system of high import tariffs which Republican governments had established since the Civil War against free trade criticism and moderate reform attempts. To this end, political campaigns were routinely conducted, pamphlets and leaflets were distributed by the millions, speakers were trained, and a far-reaching set of protectionist press outlets was established. The American Protective Tariff League in New York, the Home Market Club in Boston, the Industrial League and the American Iron and Steel Association in Philadelphia were among the most important organizations. The project analyses how the establishment of these popularist protectionist organizations, the strong influence they wielded within the Republican-protectionist coalition, and their established infrastructure of political communication contributed to an entrenchment of ultra-protectionist positions within American political discourse. Ultimately, this protectionist entrenchment was a major factor in perpetuating the United States’ protectionist tariff policy far into the twentieth century and defending it against the increasingly urgent calls for tariff reform.

Fritz Kusch is a PhD candidate at the University of Bremen, where he joined the history department and the CRC 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” in 2022. He received a bachelor’s degree in modern history and political science from the University of Freiburg (2017) and a master’s degree in history as well as a bachelor’s degree in Turkish studies from Free University Berlin (2021). Besides his PhD work in Bremen, Fritz Kusch works as a seminar host for visiting groups at the Berlin Wall Memorial in Berlin.

You can download the poster for the event here.