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One of my fondest memories from the New School for Social Research Liberal Studies MA program comes from a course titled “Representations of Race and Gender in American Culture.” It was the day, about halfway through the semester, when co-teachers Elizabeth Kendall (author of feminist studies of early modern dance and 1930s screwball …

This month, two conferences and one exhibition dedicated to Walter Benjamin’s legacy are descending on Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Because of an unhealthy mix of political considerations, security measures, and academic snobbery, I will partake in none of them, despite my deep roots in this troubled land and my recent book on Benjamin. …

In late August 2015 an article appeared in the New York Times with a loaded headline: Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says. The article reported on a recent publication in the journal Science, which raised …

The news has just been released: The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for its “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” This news is cause for rejoicing given the symbolic weight attributed to the role the Quartet played in 2013 in managing to force both a very unpopular government to step down …

This post, adapted from a lecture in the team-taught course “Rethinking Capitalism” at The New School for Social Research and first published last year, is being reposted today to provide critical insight into today’s headlines. Slavery was central to the development of the American political economy. Ott reviews the recent scholarship that shows how it came to be that Black lives haven’t mattered. -J.G.

Racialized chattel slaves were the …

At the opening of the Night of Philosophy in New York City on April 24, 2015, while Monique Canto-Sperber delivered a much-contested opening talk on freedom of speech, Chiara Bottici gave the following alternative opening talk addressing issues of philosophy, writing, and exclusion.

Giving an opening talk on Machiavelli at the “Night of Philosophy” is a double provocation. First, because few authors have generated as much turmoil in the history of philosophy as has Machiavelli. Excommunicated as the incarnation of the devil by some, celebrated as a saint by others, condemned for his “Machiavellism” or celebrated for his republicanism, the meaning of Machiavelli’s works seems to be destined to escape us. …

Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home.

When a crystal breaks, it breaks along lines of pre-existing weakness. Thus traumatic assaults, like the one in Paris, can serve as X-rays into the body politic that endures them. Certainly, the US invasion of Iraq, a response to 9/11, serves as a paradigm case of how a terroristic attack can provoke the blind aggressivity otherwise obscured and disguised in the self-professed guarantor of world peace. By examining the range of responses to the massacre at Hebdo, we can learn something more about ourselves, and perhaps correct our mistaken stance. In my view there are seven levels of response to these attacks, each a mixture of ideology and truth, progressing closer and closer to something comprehensive and just, albeit also elegiac and incomplete. …