Public Seminar Archives - Public Seminar

Event

Live at Public Seminar: John D’Emilio

Public Seminar celebrates the publication of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood

October 10, 2022 • by Public Seminar

John D’Emilio, a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQIA+ history, will join Public Seminar Co-Executive Editor Claire Potter in a discussion of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood....

Democracy

What Jeff Goldfarb Understood

July 7, 2021 • by Zeyno Ustun

_____ In the summer of 2013, I was about to start my graduate degree at The New School for Social Research. A month before I sat in Jeff Goldfarb’s contemporary sociology class, I was in Istanbul—protesting, resisting, and critically thinking with many others about our collective actions, media activism, and the ...

A Scholar for Our Times

Friendship and the substance of hope

July 7, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

_____ “’two going together’ are better able both to think and to act.” —Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter I, on friendship. I was just starting to wind down my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives on Politics when I had my first actual conversation with Jeff Goldfarb. I had just published a lead ...

Feature

Welcome to the New Public Seminar

Marking the New School’s centennial year with a refreshed platform and a renewed commitment to conversation

September 30, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, James Miller and Claire Potter

Everything you have always found at Public Seminar is still here. But we’ve redesigned the site to let you let you slow down, if you want to. Public Seminar’s commitment to discussing the pressing issues of our contemporary world also now includes a commitment to contemplation, to doing more with less, and at the ...

Democracy

Towards a World Wide Committee of Democratic Correspondence

Democracy Seminar 2.0

February 15, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Such a grand imagination informs the making of Democracy Seminar 2.0, the revival of an initially clandestine New School seminar of the 1980s and early 1990s that provided a place for Eastern European dissidents to reimagine their world. As was the case in the earlier seminar, we are now following ...

Feature

A Public Seminar Happy New Year?

Reflections between hope and despair, with musical accompaniment

January 4, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I wanted to declare, without hesitation: Happy New Year! But I couldn’t, as New Year’s celebrations passed. I fear a very unhappy one, with more of what we have been experiencing. Democracy, free speech, academic freedom, human rights, and the movements for class, gender, sexual, and racial justice are all ...

Blue Monday

Help! Being #AgainstTrump is Not Easy

Charting the future of democratic politics in light of Tuesday’s elections

November 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Even by the frenetic standards of our extremely high speed society, the past week has been an eventful one in U.S. politics. On Tuesday a historic election broke records for voter turnout in a midterm election, returned the Democrats to control of the House and to the governorships of seven important states, ...

Feature

Answering the Question: What is Socialism?

Gray reflections on a surprising turn in U.S. political culture.

August 10, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Last year, I quite critically raised the question: What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neo Liberalism? I was, and still am, concerned that the term too often explains too much with too little, and enervates progressive politics. I worry that all the problems of our times are too quickly ...

Answering the Question: What is Socialism?

Feature

New School Histories Vertical

Announcing a new vertical for Public Seminar

July 9, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore and Julia Foulkes

Editors: Mark Larrimore and Julia Foulkes A school for the present. In 1918, the New Republic-based creators of what would become the New School for Social Research* called for a re-thinking of what higher education could be. Universities were hamstrung by backward-looking legacies and structures, both institutional and intellectual. Education needed to ...

Feature

On the Etiquette of Opposing Donald Trump and His Enablers

An up close view of the problem of civility, at home, looking abroad

July 6, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am not in Wroclaw, Poland today, but back home in New York. This banal observation may not surprise you, but it is a notable event in my life. Over the past 27 years, in the summer, I have gone to Poland to teach in The New School’s Democracy and Diversity ...

On the Etiquette of Opposing Donald Trump and His Enablers

Feature

#AgainstTrump

A re-invitation to read Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Notes from Year One

June 8, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

With the Donald Trump now virtually declaring, “L'Etat, c'est moi,” in his attempts to avoid possible indictment, I can think of no better time than now to highlight Public Seminar’s second book, Jeffrey C. Isaac’s brilliant #AgainstTrump: Notes From Year One (for a free download click here). The book was officially published to coincide with Adam Michnik’s visit ...