The Center for Critical Democratic Studies is hosting a two-day conference on May 5-6 titled, Democracy and the Political: Raymond Aron Beyond the Hexagon. Aron – the sociologist and Cold War liberal – is most well known for being a critic of the post-War French Marxist intellectual scene of the 1950s, and the leading French intellectual to oppose the May 1968 student protest movements. Resisting the totalitarian temptations of his day, Aron has been memorialized as both a model of political moderation and one of the greatest French liberal thinkers of the Cold War Era.
Reducing Aron’s massive oeuvre to a story of French liberal triumphalism, however, led an older generation of scholarship to marginalize others aspects of his work that fell outside this narrative. Many of these subjects – neoliberal economics, democracy, modernization theory, military strategy and global order – are now of significant interest to a new generation of historians, political theorists and philosophers far removed from polemics that marked the Cold War.
Raymond Aron Beyond the Hexagon aims to showcase the cutting edge work of a younger generation of scholars. The event will consist of five panels discussions: Reconsidering Aron’s Thinking on IR Theory; Aron, Intellectual History and Political Context; Raymond Aron and the United States; Aron, Democracy and Post-War Germany; Aron, Liberalism and Democracy
Speakers include: Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer (IRSEM), Aline-Florence Manent (University College London), Danilo Scholz (EHESS), Grey Anderson (Sciences Po), Or Rosenboim (University of Cambridge), Hugo Drochon (University of Cambridge), Gwendal Châton (Université Angers), Giulio De Ligio (EHESS), Iain Stewart (UCL) and Joël Mouric (Lycée de l'Iroise Brest).
The Center for Critical Democracy Studies invites you to a talk by Professor George Shulman of New York University entitled "Impasse & Genre in American Politics and Literature".
In his talk, George Shulman proposes that the most fruitful resources for understanding the historical impasse, national division, and political rhetoric of this moment can be found, not in texts formally canonized as "American political thought," but rather in the fictions of literary artists from Hawthorne and Melville to Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison. To explore the assumptions, idioms, and narratives that structure American politics, the literature forgoes realist aesthetics; to dramatize instead the romances - of individual self-making, popular sovereignty, political freedom, and national exceptionality- that characterize American life. Using various genres of fabulation, literary fictions repeatedly show the grip of this romance and its consequences in tragedy, gothic horror, and absurdist farce.
Representing the return of what is repressed or disavowed by prevailing political languages, such fictions conjure what Phillip Roth once called "the American Berserk," while also dramatizing the meaning of the political. Shulman's talk proceeds by theorizing the genres characteristic of American politics, by linking the election of Donald Trump to structural and discursive forms of impasse, and then by suggesting the ways that literature can helps us of think beyond it.
George Shulman teaches Political Theory and American Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. His first book, Radicalism and Reverence, concerned religion and politics during the English Revolution, and focused on Gerrard Winstanley. His second book, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Politics (2008) was awarded the Eastman Prize for best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association. His current book project, Postmortem Effects: Theorizing (Beyond) Impasse, uses American literary art to conceive and address the impasse in American political life.
AUP welcomes British columnist, author, commentator, and political activist to speak to the AUP community. Columnist for The Guardian and author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, and The Establishment: And how they get away with it, Jones is a highly successful and celebrated figure in today's political world. Please join us in Combes 104 on Tuesday, February 28 at 18:30 to hear him talk about his new work on The Politics of Hope.
This event has been sponsored by the Center for Critical Democracy Studies and the Student Government Association.