Rawls (John) Archives - Public Seminar

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Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Notes on Volatility in Cultures of Finance

November 25, 2016 • by Ben Lee

One of the most remarkable contemporary developments has been the rise of what might be called a “politics of volatility” in which volatility is deliberately produced to take advantage of the uncertainty it creates. Its current embodiment is Donald Trump. Like the efficient market that he embraces, in the primaries, ...

Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

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The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I think it safe to say that 1971 was a watershed year for philosophy, in that it saw the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Prior to the publication of that work, political philosophy was in a kind of self-imposed exile. Still in thrall to the metaethical constraints of ...

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Sheldon Wolin

November 23, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

The political theorist Sheldon Wolin passed away on October 21 at the age of 93. Wolin was a significant figure in the Humanities and Social Sciences, for three key reasons: a challenge, a book, and a thesis. The challenge: the consensus, at the start of Wolin’s career in the 1950s, was ...

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Diagnosing American Politics

What the rise of Trump says about American democracy

September 8, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I have a morbid fascination with Carl Schmitt. Morbid, because he manages to condense, in his political theory and philosophy of law, pretty much everything I find repulsive about the radical right. His pessimism about “human nature” is raw and simplistic and, unlike Hobbes, whom he superficially resembles, ...

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How to Deal with Extremists? Post European Election Reflections

Considering the dilemmas of dealing with parties suspected of wanting to undermine core elements of liberal democracy

September 9, 2014 • by Jan-Werner Mueller

In the wake of this past spring’s European elections, in which far-right parties did very well, an old conundrum for liberal democrats is posed with renewed urgency: how to deal with extremists? Should one talk with them? Or should one only talk about them? Or not even that -- in ...