The new book of Roland Benedikter, Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, and European Foundation Professor of Sociology, with the title Social Banking and Social Finance: Answers to the Economic Crisis will be published in print and online in February 2011 by Springer and will be available worldwide. Social Banking and Social Finance: Answers to the Economic Crisis will be available worldwide, with a foreword by Professor Stefano Zamagni of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, and an introduction by Professor Karen S. Cook, Chair of the Sociology Department and Director of its Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University.

The outcome of research carried out in the academic year 2009-10 at The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, in cooperation with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara, the book was given the honor to be the very first of the new Springer Series called “Springer Briefs,” dedicated to concise texts on innovative, future-oriented  topics for researchers, students, and the broader public.

The book presents an alternative analysis of the financial and economic crisis of 2007-10 from the viewpoint of social banking and social finance, and offers a complete introduction into contemporary social banking and social finance for readers with no previous knowledge. Written in a concise and accessible manner, it explains the history, the philosophy, the current state and the perspectives of social banking and social finance in the United States and Europe. It describes their place within the global economy, and the visions of their “global alliances” for the years to come. The book focuses on the basic mindset that gave birth to social banks about a century ago, and that still constitutes their main driving force in the age of globalization; and on the comparison of the current state of social banking in the United States and Europe. Since most social banks are found on both sides of the Atlantic, their interplay can be considered as crucial also for the world wide development of social banking and social finance.

The book aims to increase the financial literacy of students and of the average reader. Its 12 chapters can be used as 12 single lessons for college and university students and their teachers. Courses on social banking and social finance are being developed all over the world, especially in the United States and Europe, for example at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship of Oxford University and at the Center of Rethinking Capitalism of UC Santa Cruz. Civil society is also increasingly concerned with the topic, as more and more people begin to recognize the fundamental impact of the finance and banking sector on all aspects of contemporary life. This book is one of the first texts of its kind available in English.

Fall 2010 marks the launch of The Europe Center (formerly the Forum on Contemporary Europe/FCE), housed jointly within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA). The Europe Center will continue to serve as Stanford's main center for research on European affairs, trans-Atlantic relations, and the role of Europe and the United States in addressing today's most pressing global economic, political, and security issues.

The Europe Center is dedicated to new thinking about Europe and the global context of trans-Atlantic relations in the new millennium. The increasingly complex challenges facing Europe and its global relations—including labor migrations, strains on welfare economies, local identities, globalized cultures, expansion and integration, and threats of terrorism—coupled with Europe’s recent struggle to ratify a single constitution, underline the challenges that Europe and the United States share, and the need to bring Stanford’s finest multidisciplinary research into practical policy dialogue with an engaged public.

Europe Center Director Amir Eshel (German Studies, Comparative Literature), outlines the importance of the new center in FSI's forthcoming 2010 Annual Report: “As the United States and Europe face new challenges in the international arena, they share lasting economic and political interests as well as a set of values that is crucial for the future of a prosperous, free humanity. In the next decade, the peaceful ascendance of new powers will depend on the stability of the trans-Atlantic alliance and its commitment to solving conflicts such as those that destabilize the Middle East or impede efforts to combat hunger and poverty in Africa.”

Founded in 1997, first as the European Forum, and now as a full research center, The Europe Center gathers Stanford’s most distinguished Europeanists across all disciplines, encourages them to speak on our most pressing issues, and brings them into policy dialogue with public leaders.

The 20th century world of philosophy did not, as a rule, create superstars.

Hannah Arendt was an exception – almost from the time she coined the phrase that has become a cliché, "banality of evil," to describe the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in a series of articles for The New Yorker. She acquired a cult status that her mentors, philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, could hardly imagine.

Thirty-five years after her death, the German-Jewish political theorist, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Life of the Mind, among other works, is an international industry, with new letters, commentaries and biographies published every year. But perhaps her message has been obscured by celebrity.

A scholarly conference at Stanford attempted to redress the imbalance in its own way with a recent two-day workshop, "Hannah Arendt and the Humanities: On the Relevance of Her Work Beyond the Realm of Politics," sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Scholars from around the world discussed the life and thought of one of the most seminal and influential political philosophers of the last century.

A friend remembers

In a surprise appearance, Stanford University President Emeritus Gerhard Casper spoke of his friendship with Arendt, from their meeting in 1961 until her death in 1975.

"Why Arendt? Why Arendt now?" asked Professor Amir Eshel, director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe. He said that in the humanities, her "insights about the link between the past and the future" can "address the predicaments of our time, specifically such manmade disasters as genocide and mass expulsion."

Arendt fled Germany when Hitler rose to power in 1933, immigrating in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at a number of universities. Her works, particularly The Origins of Totalitarianism, a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, spurred a wide-ranging debate on the nature and history of totalitarianism. Her books analyzed freedom, power, evil, political action – and, always, thought.

Stanford professor Robert Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian, made the conference's most spirited address in a talk on "passionate thinking." He considered Arendt's notion of friendship and thought as rooted in solitude and the ability to commune with oneself – that "plurality begins with the individual."

The "overwhelming question" in the humanities, he said, is "How do we negotiate the necessity of solitude as a precondition for thought?"

"What do we do to foster the regeneration of thinking? Nothing. At least not institutionally," he said. "Not only in the university, but in society at large, everything conspires to invade the solitude of thought. It has as much to do with technology as it does with ideology. There is a not a place we go where we are not connected to the collective.

"Every place of silence is invaded by noise. Everywhere we see the ravages of this on our thinking. The ability for sustained, coherent, consistent thought is becoming rare" in the "thoughtlessness of the age."

Harrison decried the public fascination with Arendt's youthful affair with Heidegger, a Nazi sympathizer; the publication of Arendt's personal letters; and her biographers' invasive use of private material – although at least one biographer, Thomas Wild of Berlin, author of Hannah Arendt, attended the workshop.

Casper said that he had to be "cajoled into coming" as Arendt was "a very private person."

"She would not have approved of videos, being taped at all times and put out on the web," he said, indicating the camera that was filming the event.

He noted that "she liked to gossip – very much so." However, he said, "What she would have been appalled by is the industry. Cottage industry? This is hardly a cottage industry anymore."

Guarded her solitude

Casper reinforced the notion of Arendt as a guardian of her own solitude: attending conferences infrequently and "always thinking … always fiercely independent," protecting her "private time, time for study, time in her apartment on Riverside Drive."

"She was forceful, opinionated, never had any doubts about her views," he said. "In certain circumstances she was willing to listen carefully and be convinced she was wrong. Those were rare."

Casper said he considered her best book to be Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that concluded, famously, with a direct address to Eichmann:

Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

"She was incredibly good when she observed, when she told what she saw," Casper  said. "She was incredibly suggestive and artistic – she was not definitive, not scientific," he said. "That's why she's not popular among philosophers, nor among political scientists. She was putting forward a kind of truth, not definitive, about the human condition. That was her great strength."

Arendt is more than another talking head; Eshel said that she forms a formidable counterpoint German philosopher Walter Benjamin's view of the past "as one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage at the feet of the angel of history."

Arendt instead "wants us to acknowledge our ability to set off, to begin, to insert ourselves with word and deed into the world. Arendt seemed to have sensed that if we do not do so there may be indeed no future for us to share."