Durkheim’s Enduring Relevance

Sociology offers a solution to the problems raised by Critical Theory

Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimian school also allow us to rethink the tension between the modern social sciences, and morality and politics. However, Durkheim’s analysis of this tension is, in some respects, divergent from the one put forward by Critical Theory. Sociology, according to Durkheim, is neither about supplementing the ...
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Today We Filled the Sidewalk

Marching Against Racism and Homophobia in Iowa

Perhaps in response to these concerns, in the last week, the leaders made an intentional decision to diversify the speakers. I got an invitation to speak, and so did four others I suggested. The four included two students, a Black Muslim American, and a perceived to be Black (though, as ...
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Paris Terror Events and the Dramaturgies of the Aftermath

Daniel Dayan is a fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute (School of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences) and a professor at the Levinas European Institute. Dayan has been Research director at CNRS-Paris, and a visiting professor at Sciences-Po and the universities of Stanford, Geneva, Tel Aviv, and Oslo. He has also been an Annenberg scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and for many years a ...
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The Armenian Violence Question

A Conversation on Means and Social Change

How do we make sense of a general population's acceptance of militarization? We see the following conversation as an attempt to entangle and disentangle some of the complexities of this particular historical juncture in post-Soviet Armenia. In reflecting on the Armenian experience and on the larger process of postsocialism and ...
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The Armenian Violence Question

How to Think through Cages

What I liked so much about these suggestions was the subtle call to think without fear and without expectations. The cages will always be there, but I came to understand how important it is to create a philosophical cage that allows you to leave it. When would leaving become necessary? ...
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How to Think through Cages

What Could History Have Been?

Imagining new approaches to the humanities

“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...

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What Could History Have Been?

Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

Theoretical Interventions

This panel discussion probes this crisis from a theoretical perspective and discusses its political implications by asking: What follows from this crisis for the European project, the paradoxes of international law, the role of the nation-state, and the resurgence of nationalism? And how does the emergence of new political practices and subjectivities ...
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Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...
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2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Claims to Populism, Danger to Democracy?

No US election campaign in living memory has seen as many invocations of “populism” as this one. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are labelled as “populists;” the term is regularly used as a synonym for “anti-establishment,” irrespective of any particular political ideas; it is also associated with particular moods ...

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Claims to Populism, Danger to Democracy?

How Not to Remember 9/11

There are two memorials for 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center ("Ground Zero"). The first, the Memorial proper, is a park of around eight acres, consisting of paved space, rows of trees (swamp oaks) and grass, and concrete benches. Within this space are two large square pits ...

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