Democracy Archives - Page 57 of 97

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Intellectuals—Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them, Part II

Are intellectuals really the enemies of democracy?

November 24, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

You threaten democracy. They hate you. They suspect that you despise them, as “they cling to their guns and bibles.” They know that you think you are better than they are. When they resent you and act upon their resentment, they too threaten democracy. We recognize that the anti-intellectualism of the less ...

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The Death of Homo Economicus

A review of Peter Fleming’s latest book

November 22, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Fleming takes up the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath. The tsunami metaphor has been invoked, particularly in the media, Fleming notes, as a way to frame discussions of the economic devastation and subsequent austerity that the crash has wrought on economies around the world. ...

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The Return of the “Forgotten Man”

Refurbishing symbols of the Gilded Age

November 20, 2017 • by Luke Philip Plotica

Yet there is another sense in which we, in America, have been treading upon well-worn ground. Though many called the campaign and outcome of the 2016 election unprecedented, its roots lie, at least partly, in economic and social conditions which are by no means new. In his 2014 book, Capital ...

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How to Stop the Bleeding at New York’s Public Hospitals

Caring for the neediest and most vulnerable should be more equitably distributed

November 20, 2017 • by Barbara Caress and James Parrott

Serving more than one million New Yorkers a year, the hospitals and clinics of the New York City Health + Hospitals (NYCH+H) system play a key role in combatting illness and injury across the city. But fiscally, they’re in dire health themselves; in fact, they’re hemorrhaging money. The system’s operating ...

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Intellectuals—Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them, Part I

Re-considering the democratic roles of the intellectual as revealed this week in Public Seminar

November 17, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Intellectuals have the knowledge and the experience required for people themselves to govern well. I am thinking of this today as I read the news and as I think about our work here at Public Seminar, drawing on my own long investigation of the sociology of intellectuals. My work on intellectuals ...

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What Happens Now?

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

November 16, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It’s a year after the American Election Day that shook the world, and a new book that seeks to explain the disaster of Donald Trump’s victory drops every few weeks. We political historians are scrambling to keep up. Last month, Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? hit the stands. How does it feel to ...

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The Antidote to “Too Much Niebuhr”?

A.J. Muste and the Anti-American Political Tradition

November 15, 2017 • by Ray Haberski

The conflict between radical pacifists and other Protestants went deeper than the question of the United States’ role in the world; it was also about national identity, race, and historical memory. To Muste, when policymakers posited the United States as the representative of democratic civilization, they effectively erased its history ...

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40th Anniversary of the International Women’s Year Conference

University of Houston celebrates feminism then and now

November 14, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

From November 18 to 21, 1977, over 20,000 people gathered in Houston, Texas to celebrate International Women's Year and identify goals for women for the next decade. This was the first and only national women's conference to be sponsored by the federal government. On November 6 and 7, 2017, a few hundred people ...

40th Anniversary of the International Women’s Year Conference

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An Unreasonable Standard

Reconsidering law, race and police violence

November 13, 2017 • by Jennifer M. Page

Wilcox escaped the Coburns, but 30 minutes later, was confronted by another police officer, Jesse Kidder. Wilcox left his vehicle and ran at Kidder. “Shoot me, shoot me,” Wilcox said again and again, still running forward. “I don’t want to shoot you, man,” yelled Kidder as he backed up. Wilcox ...

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Good News

On the American elections, Public Seminar and civility and subversion

November 10, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am feeling better this week. The election results were heartening, from top to bottom, from the high profile governor races in Virginia and New Jersey to the defeat of a most right wing county executive in Westchester, New York (close to home and very significant for me and my ...

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What We Really Learned in Charlottesville

Finding a Way Forward

November 9, 2017 • by Andrew Boyer

By the standards of today’s whiplash news cycles, the coverage was in-depth and lasting. The media did not move on from the issue so much as it overexerted itself and wearily stumbled on to the Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Trump’s DACA repeal. When the dust settled, nearly everyone agreed ...

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Did Hamilton Write Too Much For His Own Good?

The publication history of the Federalist

November 9, 2017 • by Joseph Adelman

You probably know that line about the Federalist from the Act One finale of Hamilton, “Non-Stop,” in which Aaron Burr repeatedly asks Hamilton, “how do you write like you’re running out of time?” In the musical, his indefatigable pen is treated as a virtue (and yes, I have at times listened to ...